What do You think about Kiss Of The Bees (2001)?
Kiss of the Bees is the second in J.A. Jance's Walker-Ladd family series. Because the book is so plot driven, this is a spoiler-free review so as not to spoil the book for anyone. It's therefore brief.This story jumps ahead 20 years from the first book, Hour of the Hunter. The first part of the book is used to catch the reader up on the happenings of the family but then the story from the first book continues, against expectations, into this one. Like the first installment, this book is slow to start then becomes a page-turned about mid-way.Jance continues to introduce each chapter with a bit of Papago Indian folklore. This helps cement a sense of place within the desert of Southern Arizona amongst the Tohono O'Odham people. I'm a fan of Jance's writing but I'm becoming particularly fond of this series. The plots in her other works are always interesting and have plenty of twists, but the characters are a bit shallow. In this series, she's taking the time to thoroughly develop her characters. Quite a bit of this story is internal dialogue and you get to experience the growth of characters and better understand their viewpoint as a Native Americans. There are quite a few interesting heroes being developed for future works in this series and I'm looking forward to diving into the next book, Day of the Dead.
—Paul
I had a hard time deciding between one and two stars; I decided on two for the thread of the book that I enjoyed. This book was a big disappointment for me, a big J.A. Jance fan. Perhaps it would have made more sense if I'd read the first book of this series first, but reading books out of sequence doesn't usually hinder my enjoyment of a novel. I finally learned to just skip the gobbeldy-gook in italics, and the most of the rest of the novel made sense and even became pretty interesting. The constant switching between time frames and settings without cluing in the reader was very disconcerting. If I'd tried reading this on my Kindle, I would have given up -- I was constantly having to flip back to previous pages to find out who was speaking or when the time jumped back or forward (or in or out or beside or inside or outside - or...). That is hard to do on an electronic reader. Overall, the major plotline of Kiss of the Bees was a good one, but it just took too much work and effort to ferret it out of all the Indian lore and sideplots.
—Joan
This was my first Jance book and it was okay. I'm sure I'll check out some of her other stuff in time, but I'm not racing to get to another one. The beginning of this book dragged on. There were so many characters I had a hard time keeping them straight. On top of that, all the Indian characters had 2 or 3 names that she would interchange throughout the book, which was very confusing at times. By the end I had them all straight, but it took a while. I found all the use of Indian words distracting, and at the beginning of every chapter there is italic writing about Indians that completely confused me. I would've liked this book a lot better if it stuck to more English. The last couple hundred pages were pretty good, and they went by quick. If I could give 3.5 I probably would.
—Brett Tompkins
