Along with all of this other weird stuff that’s been happening to me over the past 6 or so months—losing weight being the most obvious and least significant—I stopped reading. That’s not exactly correct; I stopped reading novels. I still read the web obsessively (although I haven’t read most of my writing/agent blogs in a million years, and since the election I’ve cut way back on the political ones too), but of the last 20 times Darin and I went into a Borders or Barnes and Noble, I walked out empty-handed 19 times. I picked up books and said, I’ve read this already. Or, What’s interesting here? Nothing interested me.

I did keep hearing about this book Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, though. I can’t remember why or where. But I kept running across references to this book here and there, and I thought, Well, I’ll get it from the library.

Holy God, I wish I’d bought it; this book was that entertaining.

Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan Catholic, the worst hospital in New York. He is also a former hitman for the Mob, currently in the witness protection program. This works because he spends all of his time at the hospital, and no one with any options (like mob guys) would go near ManCat on a dare, so he never runs into his former associates. Until, of course, he does.

This book is hilarious, violent, vulgar, moving, and one of the most fabulous reads I’ve run across in a long time. Peter Brown is actually a doctor, despite his past, and despite the snark and exhaustion you can see he’s actually getting something out of his new chosen profession. He also explains in detail what he got out of his last job too—how he got into it, why he got out of it. It’s filled with footnotes of information about medical processes and random asides that are interesting and hilarious unto their own right and all of which are…let’s just say, read the damn footnotes, okay? Details you think are just random bits of color keep coming back in strange and unexpected ways.

The book opens with Brown getting mugged on his way to work. It doesn’t stop until the last page. Along the way, you get interchanges like this:

I sit back down. Wipe my nose with my left hand to cover the slow movement of my right hand toward my beeper. “Guy’s got some right buttock and subclavicular pain OUO despite PCA*,” I say. “Looks like a fever, too.”

* Like you care what this means.

This novel also has one of the more, uh, memorable climaxes I’ve ever run across. In fact, I had to skim that part because it was so graphic and deeply disturbing. What’s more disturbing: that’s not even the violent part. The violent part of the climax gets skimmed over in the text, because it’s completely beside the point by the time it actually happens.

Seriously. This book is a total ride.

I read a book last night—it’s either marketed paranormal romance or urban fantasy; those seem to be the same categories these days—that was okay. I think it suffered a lot from sophomore-itis, and that’s a problem a lot of authors run across. Three years for first book, eight months for next one. So, I can live with that.

However, one of the scenes in the book featured one of the most disturbing sex scenes I’ve ever read. I myself don’t find vampires at all sexy— hello, they’re DEAD—but this scene was, I think, supposed to be uber-sexy and I was simply appalled. You know how drinking blood is supposed to be the equivalent of sex to a vampire? Take that to the nth degree. I’m wondering if I’m going to pick up book 3 because not only was the scene icky (it’s a technical term) but it made me dislike the characters.

I don’t think all sex scenes have to be sexy. All they have to do is move the plot along (which, come to think of it, this scene didn’t do either). But I wondered if there was a serious disconnect between me and most readers of paranormal romance/urban fantasy, because none of the reviews on Amazon mention this particular scene in the book, and it’s all I remember.

I am one of those readers who is very, very happy about the boom in erotica in books. I don’t always want explicitness in my sex scenes, but when I do I prefer graphic. The problem has been, however, that erotica seems to mean, “As many combinations as possible, with a minimum of one per chapter.” (E.g. anything by Black Lace, which doesn’t publish novels so much as Twister games set in print.) I don’t want to see every character banging everyone and anyone; I want there to be some plot-worthy purpose to all this sex going on. It’s like black comedy: it still has to be comedy. Erotic novels still have to be novels.

Colette Gale (a pseudonym for an author who is known for her historicals…or rather, her paranormal historicals) has begun a series of erotic retellings of famous stories. Her first one was Unmasqued, which was a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, a story that clearly lends itself to somewhat more sensual goings-on. I read Unmasqued and I have to admit it did nothing for me: I was annoyed as hell by Christine, who was weak and passive, and by the emphasis on bondage.

However, see above: still interested in finding erotica that satisfies (ooo) as a story as well as sex. So I was interested in reading Gale’s retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, Master.

Right off the bat, I could tell Gale had done something interesting (and smart, in my opinion): this isn’t Edmond Dantes’s book. The focal character is Mercedes, the woman Edmond loved and then lost when he was imprisoned. So we see all of the events of the book from her perspective — which means that while we lose lots of The Count, we’re also not tied to following that book faithfully. This works wonderfully in Master’s favor.

The other excellent thing about Master is Mercedes herself. She isn’t a shrinking violet, at everyone’s mercy: the book spans 20 years, so she has a knowingness and a personal strength about her that is so goddamn refreshing. When she realizes who the Count is, and what he’s put her through, she doesn’t weep and throw herself on his mercy — instead, she basically says, “Get over yourself; you’re not the only one who suffered around here.” She gives as good as she gets, which made me very happy indeed reading this book.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a slightly spicier read (with a heroine who has a spine, to boot!).