The Madness Underneath

The Madness Underneath is the second in Maureen Johnson's Shades of London series, and continues the story of Rory Deveaux, who helps a secret police unit track and eliminate homicidal ghosts in London.

The first in the series very definitely set things up for future stories with the same characters, but was also pretty much a stand-alone book.  The second was a lot more scattershot, bringing in various different strands of plot but without much cohesion and with no resolution at the end of the book - in fact, it ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger, which was annoying as the next in the series isn't due out until March 2015.

Still, I like the characters, and the set-up is interesting, so I'll probably continue with the next one when it's available.  I much prefer this series to the other books I've read by Johnson - the supernatural premise brings additional intrigue to proceedings, thus pushing the teen romance aspects to the background a bit more.  And, when the teen romance does appear, it's dealt with in a more interesting (and amusing) way, so it's less of a bore.
 

The Expendables 3

Didn't take long, did it?

I think Empire has been very uncharitable about the Expendables series, which I would describe as bloody brilliant overall.

And number three is the best of the lot.

The new versus old formula brings some freshness to the premise, along with a lot of great humour and some fun action set pieces.  The ridiculous cast gets even better with Harrison Ford taking over for Bruce Willis, and Antonio Banderas being generally hilarious (and by far the best preserved of the "oldies").  Mel Gibson is suitably batshit as the big baddie, bringing more chaos and moustache-twirling to the role than we had from Eric Roberts in 1 or Jean-Claude Van Damme in 2.

But, as with the other two films, the best thing about it is the beautiful bromance between Sly and The Stath (never thought I would describe either of them this way, but they're just so *cute* together!).

Say what you like about this kind of thing - but I call anyone who puts Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jet Li in a helicopter and gets them to take on an enemy army together, an absolute genius.

Here's to The Expendables 4!