Customer Reviews

Never Love a Libra (Zodiac Chillers)

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this was a really good book.I HATE books but this series is my favorite.i read it in ONE DAY!! this book is full of suspense...only one problem wen billy's gone that part dragggs on and on but over all it was greeat!

***possible spoilers***

The Zebra Chillers were created to exploit the Zodiac and all of the ways that it be interpreted. The first four books were written by Carol Ellis and Ellen Steiber, and all were pretty good, and both authors were experienced as authors of young adult suspense writing. Vicki Kamida's writings seem to be limited to children's picture books, and it shows.

Kamida starts out this novel with a boy stowing away on a cruise ship and he has an obsession with a long haired redhead. Kamida tries to make this mysterious, but within twenty pages she spills the beans. The boy is Billy Jackson, and the girl is Linda Sellers who is going on a cruise with her cousin Carol. Also on the ship are the young adults Justine Kellog, who is dating Tommy, who works on the ship, there is also the dating couple Marla Robertson and Kevin Malmstrom, and they all will end up hanging out together.

Billy comes to date Linda, but as the novel progresses we see that Billy is a possessive and obsessive young man who can't see the end to to his affair with Linda. Unfortunately, Linda does, especially since she begins to see that Billy has a dark side with some really bad habits. Two of which is that Billy has anger control issues, he may have beaten up his last girlfriend, and he is a stalker, and so Linda eventually breaks up with him. Something that he doesn't take well.

The trouble is, except for some eccentric behavior from Billy, he gets angry a few times, and he seriously wants to lead a mutiny and take over the ship (?), nothing really happens until about the hundredth page. Then things start to get interesting, but again, Kamida lets us down. This is a suspense novel and not a mystery, as we she tells us continuously what is happening with Billy and Linda all of the time. The trouble is that no matter what kind of violence that Billy does, or what kind of violence happens to him, by the novel's end he's just unstoppable. He's like Jason Vorheeves or something. No matter how many times he's killed, he keeps coming back, including one big "Oh come on" moment that deals with a shark, and none of these have anything to do with the supernatural. Then there is a twist at the end that has to do with Billy's ex-girlfriend that is just dumb. All the books in this series up to this one have been great novels of suspense, but it's clear here that Kamida just doesn't know what she's doing, and that she's out of her depth.

There is a lot of Zodiac mythology bandied about, and I don't know as much about this stuff as I should, so I don't know how accurate any of it is.

Still, it did the job, I guess. It didn't get in the way, and it gave Linda a reason to do this or that on the ship. Linda is a smart girl, but the story here never rose above the blandly ordinary.

Since none of the Zodiac Chillers books have anything other than the Zodiac to do with each other, you can read them in any order. They have no continuing characters, no continuing setting or theme. So if you have some of them, you can read them in any order with no problem, and you can miss this one and not miss anything. Nice cover though.

The next book in this series is Pisces Drowning (Zodiac Chillers) by Ellen Steiber.

I have reviewed these other books in this series for this site:

In Leo's Lair (Zodiac Chillers)
Pisces Drowning (Zodiac Chillers)
Rage of Aquarius (Zodiac Chillers)
The Scorpio Society (Zodiac Chillers)
Twisted Taurus (Zodiac Chillers)