Customer Reviews

A Stroke of Midnight (Meredith Gentry, Book 4)

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(52)
3 star:		(56)
2 star:		(42)
1 star:		(49)

 

 

I must have really liked Hamilton to just keep on reading. I think I might actually be insane. Yet, here I am, still buying the books. I had a huge problem with the last one because it was all sex and no plot. Well, in Stroke of Midnight, she attempts to add somewhat of a plot: A double homicide. The reader practically becomes giddy with anticipation. You think to yourself: "Is the old Hamilton back? Could it be? Please, please let it be!" Then you read the other 300 pages and realize, no, just the same old-same old.

Some of the problems I had with this book included the endless stretch of a day and night. For two books now I have been waiting to find out what will happen at the Seelie Court and the gnomes. I'm beginning to feel I'll have to wait five more books to ever find out. How utterly depressing and an efficient way to loose readers.

I was also hoping that the solving of the crime (murders) would envolve Merry. Instead she delegates and moves off to have more sex.

Then there was the sex. Sure it was steamy, but there were sex scenes that would last through four to five long chapters. They would play then talk, kiss, then talk, fondle, then talk. AUGH! What made it worst was the talk was mostly self-pity, woe-is-me, I'm not worthy. Booooorrring. Most sex scenes were Merry with two to three guys and EVERY sex scene was with a host of other guards watching. Even the one with Adair, who is supposedly sooooooo shy. Merry, who is totted as being the prefect lover, basically tells him, either put out or she'll take another to bed.

The wrap up at the end was the worst of all. Your not even sure if the murder is solved. The queen believes it, but who wouldn't admit to murder after being led around by their intestines?

So, why am I giving it three stars? Because the men sound sooo sexy. God, I'm gullible! I'll probably even read the next one.

The problem with A Stroke of Midnight, the fourth book in Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, is too much sex. Hard for me to believe I just typed that. "Too much" and "sex" are concepts that don't normally go together in my mind. But in this case it's true.

The book starts well. Merry and entourage are inside a fairy mound when a fey and a human reporter are found murdered. It's the human offed in Faerie who's the real problem. Police and news crews are waiting outside the mound to swoop in. Merry and her aunt Andais, the Queen of Air and Darkness and the mound's ruler, need to solve this crime themselves - fast - before they have the fairy/human equivalent of a major international incident.

Great set-up, huh? I was wiggling my toes inside my little fuzzy bunny slippers, settling in for a thoroughly enjoyable murder mystery, fairy style. Then the sex started. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. I like a good sex scene as well as the next person - maybe more. But the problem here is that after the sex started, it never stopped. The entirety of the rest of the book has Merry bonking one guy after another. Even I got a bit bored after awhile. Where was the murder mystery? Where was the investigation? What about the major international incident - y'know, the one it's vitally important Merry stave off?

I kept waiting for the sex to stop, for the book to remember it had a plot. And the number of remaining pages kept getting thinner and thinner. Finally, flipping ahead (which will give you some idea of how little what I was reading grabbed me), I saw there were only five chapters and about 50 pages left. I thought, "Okay, NOW we get to the murder mystery. Man, those last 50 pages must really rock." At which point we embark on a five chapter sex scene. Not even a particularly good one, at that. The murder mystery? Solved by peripheral characters "off-camera" and presented to Merry as a fait accompli at the end of the book. Jesus wept. Lots of sex in addition to a well-developed plot, fine, lovely. Lots of sex INSTEAD of a plot is an entirely different matter.

The sad thing is that while Laurell's plotting skills have gone to hell, her prose has gotten very good. There are passages in A Stroke of Midnight that are absolutely beautiful. They just need to be embedded in an actual story.

I was a fan of Laurell K. Hamilton since I first picked up Lunatic Cafe. I have bought every book of hers since then. However I feel she has begun an alarming trend of writing soft-core porn rather than fantasy fiction with great stories with the occasional hot, steamy sex scene. I find myself with great difficulty writing this review to tell you not to bother buying this book. It's such a waste, I feel like I was mugged. The last book ended with Merry at a press conference inside the Sithen, well get this, the entire 366 page book takes place that same night and ends before dawn! (Hence the title Stroke of Midnight, I'm sure.)

The "story" is that Merry has lots of sex, the goddess manifests, lots of magic happens, people get new powers, she cries, some of the guards cry, the Queen acts psycho...in other words exactly the same as the last book and the last and the... There is no movement in the plotline whatsoever.

With the exception of a show like 24 hours, this kind of writing that stretches a storyline's action over a one day time period just doesn't work. Especially not in a book! I don't believe this is anything more than an excuse to turn a storyline that should be limited to a trilogy into something that takes 13 or more lucrative books to "tell".

In all fairness, I must say the sex scenes are very well written and riveting. (Hence the 2 stars instead of the one I'm tempted to give this book.) I actually enjoyed reading them; however once I realized that's all that was there I was extremely pissed! This book is like a bad porno movie, all extremely unlikely sex scenes and no plot! Now the main character is even going to have sex with girl guards "to protect them from her evil cousin". All I can say is this seems a blatant attempt at expanding her marketbase to make sure and capture those with lesbian tendencies and the potential guy market with some hot girl on girl action.

I have no problem with a book with awesome sex scenes but when you have the main character doing nothing but "doing it" for over 300 hundred pages, almost no emotional context, and no actual storyline development, then even raunchy sex gets old.

First of all, I loved the first 2 books of this series and I consider myself a fan of LKH. Once that said I have to admit I was disappointed with this book. When I started this series I knew there would be a lot of sex involved in it but not that it will be the main point of the story. It's ironic that Merry is a fertility deity that can't get pregnant. If the author wants to use sex as the conduit to healing the sidhe, that's fine with me but, couldn't we just learn about some of it after the fact? At this point I have no idea who Merry sleeps with and for what real reason. I'm afraid LKH is taking this series in the same direction of the Anita Blake one. Too much sex, no real action. And after the "bestialism" scene in the Anita series I expect anything from this author. Don't get me wrong; I like sex and spice in my books but also like action in the story line. If the next book for both series doesn't get some of the old good action/plot I don't think LKH will continue to be one of my favorites authors.

Sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover. Judging by the swooning, cleavagey woman who seems to be in the initial stages of ecstacy, with a bit of soft purply lighting, "A Stroke of Midnight" looks like a fantastical romance novel. And that... is what it is.

The cover aside, Laurell K. Hamilton's latest Merry Gentry novel is, like many of her latest novels, a minor disaster. "Stroke of Midnight" is actually better than most of them, with the complex political machinations that Hamilton is so good at. But smothering those machinations are sex and a glacial plotline.

After the events of the third book, the human media has been called into the sithen for a press conference centering on Princess Meredith. But no sooner has the conference ended than a pair of corpses -- one human, one fey -- are found. Merry convinces the Queen to let her investigate the human way, and begins delving into whodunnit.

To make things even more complex, the Goddess has been doing wonky things with Merry's powers -- now when she has sex with fey, their powers are reawakened, and then become godlike once more. Needless to say, this is doing lovely things for her obedient harem. But Merry also has to focus on the mysterious murders -- and the plot that may be forming against her aunt.

Sounds intriguing? Well, in theory it is. Unfortunately, the entire plot is not only inundated in softcore porn, but it also takes place in about twenty-four hours. As a result, the plot is so drawn-out and glacially slow that I kept wanting to bang the book against my head.

And, of course, the sex. Hamilton's writing has gotten downright nymphomaniacal in recent years, and "Stroke of Midnight" is no exception. There's virtually nobody Merry doesn't have elaborate and varied sex with, or hasn't had sex with in the past, except for close relatives. Really, she must have supernatural powers if she isn't walking funny by now.

On a more serious note, though the sex has a part in the plot, it's so frequent and detailed that it all blurs together into one throbbing, ecstatic, orgasmic blur. These things are not Hamilton's strong point, and it sabotages the book to have so much of it made up by Merry's sexual gymnastics with men, women, fey, demi-fey, and anything else that walks and talks. (If she has sex to get pregnant, why women?)

And the writing is much in the vein of the sex scenes -- boring, filleresque and rather uninvolving. This is probably because Hamilton is setting it in one day, no more, and so she has to flesh it out with a lot of repetitive dialogue and endless internal pondering. The more supernatural scenes are interesting, but they are also nothing new to readers of this series. And at the end, it merely feels like a teaser for book number five.

What "Stroke of Midnight" does to redeem itself is revive some of those Machievellian power tangles. Sure, Cel is in his cell, but there is plenty of hostility and plotting. This is where Hamilton shines, and if there had been less sex and more plotting, this book might well have blosssomed.

"A Stroke of Midnight" has a few steps in the right direction, but they are baby steps. In the end, it feels deeply unsatisfying, more suited for a drinking game (if Merry has sex with a weirdly-appendaged fey, take half a sip) than for serious fantasy reading.

Where do I start? Well, I think I'll start with the biggest problems and work my way down.

1. Merry Sue.

Granted, I knew when I started this series that Merry was, obviously, the author's stand-in but even the most attention-starved teeny-bopper wouldn't have the balls to write a character as blatantly shameless as Meredith NicEssus.

Make no mistake, Merry is wonderful. She has the Hands of Flesh and Blood, she is the vessel of the Goddess. C'mon, Hamilton. Just go ahead and make her THE Goddess, she's more than halfway there anyway. She is bestowed the Kiss of Birds by Consort himself. She is the rightful ruler of the Sidhe, chosen by the powers that be to overthrow the wicked Queen and Prince. All the while having back-cracking orgasms with the hottest 2D elven men in literature.

But at least Hamilton had the grace to downplay her Greatness in the beginning by building a decent plot to distract the readers. Now, I'm afraid, `A Stroke of Midnight' is nothing but one excuse after the other for Merry to, modestly of course, flaunt her overall perfection. There was no plot to distract from the self-flattery. The murders inside the sithen were pushed to the back burners, and in the end, haphazardly solved.


2. The new characters.

OK, new blood in a series is usually a good thing, but Hamilton takes this to an extreme. I could barely keep track of who was who or what color hair does which guard have when `Seduced by Moonlight' came out. Now StroM adds another handful of characters, (mostly gorgeous men Merry is expected, make that ordered, to sleep with). Fortunately, these characters are just for eye candy and nothing else. Unfortunately, most of the book's pages are filled with random bits of description about so and so's long multicolored tresses or petalled eyes.

In fact, I'd wager that if you happen to find this book in a store and opened it to any random page, you'd find a description of some Raven's hair/armor/ or eyes. That or the phrase, "the Sidhe don't lie, not quite."

Which brings me to the next issue.


3. Repeat repetitiveness.

Do you have a hard time remembering things you read? If so, this is the book for you! Anything stated in one chapter will be restated, (in a subtly revised way), in the next.

Now, I know Hamilton tries to keep her fans caught up with what has happened books before, but really! You could start a drinking game with this book. All you need is one bottle, (or two) of liquor, a copy of the book, and a shot glass. Whenever you read "my body/his body", "the Sidhe don't lie", "it was as if", or "swallowed the moon/garnet waves/emerald and gold fire" down a shot. You'll be plastered by chapter ten.


Even with all that, I could have stomached the book if Hamilton at least tried to create something besides pages and pages of nothing special. But, based on the way things are going in her other series, she's given up on her work as much as I have. I'll stick around for one more book in the Merry series, but that's it. And I'd only recommend this book if you're looking for some, albeit grim, porn.

If you don't feel like actually buying the book but you want to keep up with the story line, here's my suggestion: just read Book 3 again. Because the plot is literally at a stand-still and doesn't advance even one step in this installment. Example:
- situation with Cel = nothing happens
- situation with Sholto = nothing happens
- situation with the goblin twins = nothing happens
- situation with the Seelie Court = nothing happens
- situation with Merry getting a king = nothing happens
etc. etc. etc.

Am I pissed off about waiting a year with baited breath for what amounts to an issue of Penthouse Forum? Yes. I'm all for sex scenes, but how about we break some of those scenes up with some actual plot once in awhile. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, it is.

Well, Stroke of Midnight was better than Incubus, but it was still a disappointment.

That said -- I've read all the books in both the Anita Blake series and the Merry Gentry series and they now seem to be morphing together. Just substitute the name Anita for Merry, Richard for Frost, Jean-Claude for Doyle and Nathaniel for Galen/Nicca and you've got it! Only difference is whether they are Sidhe/demi-fey/other or Wereanimal/Vampire.

This book started out well, but then started sliding into the unfortunate trap that LKH has been falling into recently -- too little plot, too many characters and too much pointless soft-porn.

Character development was almost nonexistent in this novel. The only exception to that is Galen. His character actually had some very cool stuff going on. Unfortunately other characters suffered. What made Andais interesting in earlier novels was her unpredictability and her cruelty which usually had a motive either political or for her own entertainment. Andais now is portrayed as very one-dimensional -- she's just cruel and insane.

I felt like several of the characters became more one dimensional, perhaps because there were just too many characters. Somewhere in one of Stephen King's writings, he tells about writing The Stand and that the book became difficult to write because there were too many characters, so a bomb killed off several characters and the story moved forward. Maybe LKH needs the equivalent of a bomb to back off on all these characters. There's so many of them it's hard to keep track of them, let alone care about them. With so many new characters, you don't have any development of characters you've grown to know.

I do enjoy these books, but earlier books I read in one evening. I read this one over five days because it just didn't hold my interest. Then to add insult to injury the story just stops. No conclusion, no feeling of finishing the novel. The characters start running down the hall and it's over. Now I get to wait another year to find out what's at the end of the hall!

I'm still hopeful for the next in both series, but if the next is the same as the last two -- I'm waiting for the used paperback from then on, no more buying the hardcover as soon as it comes out.

One more note -- LKH needs a better editor, mistakes in a novel are very annoying. (Example -- 'an jury' instead of 'an injury' among other errors.)

This book starts out with Merry and her guards at a press conference in the Sithen, since the last press conference in the human world was interrupted by an assignation attempt. Unfortunately, this press conference is following by a double homicide, and one of the victims is a human reporter. Merry decides that the only was to track down the killer is to make use of the human police and their forensic capabilities. But there are those that do not want the police to enter the Sithen, and others who plot to kill or harm Merry and her people. To complicate matters, Merry must deal with her growing powers, emotional issues with her guards, and the incessant interference of the Goddess...

What I liked about this book: (1) Merry's (and some of her guards') powers grew - a necessary development so she isn't killed by the various entities that want her dead (2) Some history about, and interaction with the Sithen itself (3) Interesting details about Merry's father's sword (4) More Demi-fey (5) We meet other female characters.

What I disliked about this book: (1) The story was incomplete. In the previous books, there was at least a sense of closure for each installment. This book was more like half an installment and ends abruptly. If you read the LKH blog, you'll know that she ran over her deadline - I guess she didn't have time to finish her book. (2) There is something very wrong with the timeline (you'll have to read it to see what I mean) and pacing - not much happens as far as actual plot advancement, and it happens at a very slow pace. (3) The sex scenes are not on par with previous books. The most boring scene in the entire book is the sex scene that spans several chapters and keeps starting and stopping because the characters stop to have full conversations in the middle of things. (4) Merry, who is supposed to be a PI, doesn't actually do much "investigation" with the double homicide - mostly it's other people reporting back to her. (5) All those other annoying plot/character inconsistencies and editing mishaps (though admittedly far fewer than the Anita series - Ballantine must have better copy editors than Berkeley) that are typical of an LKH book.

Nevertheless, I do intend to keep reading this series, as I would like to see what happens in the end. I can only hope the next book will have something resembling a complete story arc.

I would like to say that I can give an unbiased review of Stroke of Midnight without crossing over into the Anita Blake series, but in order to achieve this, some help from the author would be helpful.

To those of you who don't read both it won't be an issue, but I cannot help but feel déjà vu. An author with more than one series of work should have different voices for her characters. Unfortunately, the lines are getting blurrier with each release. While the Merry series has potential in the form of political intrigue, even that concept is being tossed aside by the author, who's sole goal it would seem is to educate the general public how to give oral sex while including three partners. Apparently it is more difficult than our "mundane" minds can grasp, because it took Ms. Hamilton nearly four chapters to give a particular lesson.

This isn't just about the sex. I won't get into how I feel about the author's sex scenes, because standards differ when it comes to what we expect from one, and our opinion on an author's ability to convey it to her audience. But when a particular scene has me wishing someone would just draw a diagram in order to come to an agreement and get on with the story, it tends to be distracting. Paragraph after paragraph of talking about who's limbs are going where is not foreplay, it's tedious.

The story is another matter altogether. Ms. Hamilton has a tendency to draw out scenes more than necessary, so with her promises of Merry et al visiting the Seelie and Goblin Courts in this book, I was skeptical, but expected her heroine to make it to at least one arrangement. It turns out that the only thing arranged, was the position Merry or her men were in. The `mystery' of the book was rushed, and the ending came to an abrupt stop. The entire series of events happened in just over a day, and at this rate, I'll be a Seelie before they visit the court.

My decision to give this book 2 stars instead of 1, is mainly in the relief that it was at least grammatically legible compared to her last offering. Otherwise the mere fact that absolutely nothing happened except more men were added to her harem and new powers to her repertoire, would have earned it a lower rating.
Many of Ms. Hamilton's fans are currently sitting on an extremely shaky fence, in hopes that she will not throw away another promising series due to time restraints, poor plotting or lazy writing. I'm fairly convinced that Anita Blake cannot be salvaged, but she still has an opportunity with Merry to produce a well thought out series. I hope she takes it.