Clayton Books

What intrigued me was the thought of a man losing his mistress - three at that.

Did not bother to pick the plot apart - just read for enjoyment and a change from the boring bed hoping of the contemporaries.

Did like the misguided loyality of Livinia Peyton to her sister but couldn't believe she was that dumb. Comes with the age of the person I guess.

Ranson Baldwin for all of his investigations of Lord Hayley should have been a more dangerous character. I think everyone loved to hate Lord Hayley and Thomas Carter and the truth behind this small fact. Women disappearing into slavery.

Jessica and Lavinia got off a lot better than they should -- the danger was present but didn't quite catch them in the plot -- still I did enjoy the general story.

Loved Drew's sense of humour --

Do recommend for a light, easy read and a change of pace.

Alana Clayton doesn't know much about the regency, she thinks the Prince Regent was involved in politics, that the home office investigated crimes, that prostitutes required job training to find jobs (more likely they required references.) She also seems to think that her characters have read the last chapter, how else explain why everyone involved expects that a romance between a married woman and a man not her husband will work out, except by assuming that the characters know in advance that the husband will be killed. Then there are the two main characters. He falls in love with her immediately, Lord knows why, probably because she is rude, suspicious, and churlish in her every dealing with him. And, oh yes, a plot that relies on the principal protagonists deliberately witholding information from one another for no reason simply will not fadge.

Although I usually enjoy any Regency romance, I did not like this book. The characters were not stereotyped; unfortunately, they were also supremely uninteresting. I felt that the major personality trait of the heroine was pettiness, while the hero was defined by his obliviousness. Within the first 15 pages, I was fairly certain I knew the plot, but stuck with it until page 73, where I stopped and skipped to the last 10 pages. As it turned out, I was right -- I did know the plot. Since I couldn't even bring myself to read the whole book, I recommend that you choose another one to buy. Just for the record, I have well over 300 Regency romances in my personal collection and I have never felt strongly enough about one to write a negative review.

Alisha

"The Mistress Thief" possesses one big plot with two very closely intertwining subplots, so much so that at times I felt almost overwhelmed by how much was going on, and at the breakneck speed at which the events were all unfolding. However, the novel did make for absorbing reading, so that even though the urge to break something on the "hero's" -- Ranson Baldwin, the Earl of Weston -- head, grew with each succeeding chapter, I did enjoy this novel immensely.

Here's the outline of the novel: Lavinia Peyton is devoted to rescuing women who, because of circumstances beyond their control, have been forced to become prostitutes. However, she's really ardent about liberating the Earl of Weston's mistresses in particular from under his nose. Lavinia believes that the earl's casual and careless treatment of her beloved elder sister, Barbara, is the reason why Barbara has fled England, and is currently living in Europe. So, mostly out of revenge, Lavinia has whisked the earl's mistresses out of London, into hiding. What Lavinia doesn't know is that the earl is currently working with the Home Office in trying put a stop to a white slavery ring. For quite a while now, up-market courtesans having been disappearing from the London scene, and no one can find a trace of them anywhere. The earl has a suspect in mind; but in order to inveigle his way into this man's confidence, the earl needs to have a mistress. What to do when his mistresses, one by one, start disappearing?

In the meantime, Lavinia and the earl meet during one of the fashionable London dos, and both are at once attracted to and taken with each other. However, Lavinia cannot rid her mind of the earl's treacherous behaviour to her sister; while the earl is intrigued by Lavinia's beauty and wit. She also seems to alternately blow hot and cold with him -- one minute being really friendly and open, and the next being cold and cutting. Sensing that Lavinia is the ONE, he wishes that he could tell everything, esp since he suspects that it is his reputation for cutting a swathe amongst the courtesans that has made Lavinia so cold towards him. And then a crisis develops and Lavinia turns to the earl for help. Unfortunately he is unable to help her because doing so would jeopardize his investigations. He thinks that once everything is over, he can placate Lavinia with the truth. But will Lavinia be able to forgive him everything, esp not trusting her with the truth?

The plot of this Regency is a rather engrossing and intriguing one. And Alana Clayton did a wonderful job in developing the subplots and tying them all together, so that the novel was a lot 'meatier' that Regencies from Zebra usually are. My only problem with "The Mistress Thief" lay more with the character of the earl. I just couldn't stomach the his supreme confidence that he could win back Lavinia's approval and esteem by waiting to explain all only after his job with the Home Office was over. It never seemed to occur to him that a young woman who is as intelligent and as capable as Lavinia would prefer to be trusted with the truth before the fact, and may actually resent not being fully trusted. As for Lavinia, while her scheme to pay the earl back for his wrongs seems a little harebrained and demented, the courage, determination and intelligence she displays throughout the book (especially in the later half when the plot picks up), more than compensates for her early dementia.

Reservations about the earl aside, however, "The Mistress Thief" is an incredibly absorbing plot-driven novel, that many are bound to enjoy.

This author use to own a trucking company that paralized a man. He lost a lawsuit in court filed banrupcy and never paid. Then he started a new company as if nothing ever happened.Now he plays golf and tennis in Palm springs without a care in the world. The man he paralized is forever imprisoned in a wheel chair with numerous medical bills. This author is a horrible man do not buy his book.

As a future law-enforcement officer, I found this book immensely enlightening and enormously inspiring. Police officers are truly a unique breed, but not in the way most people think. The sensitivity, strength and fortitude evident in this book's character, as well as his struggles, really rings true to what I see will be expected of me when I get a badge pinned on me. All police officers must strive to live at a higher ethical standard than the common "joe", and with that awesome responsability comes enormous emotional challenges most folks rarely face. This book beautifully illustrates this proud-burden that our police must carry. This book is a must read for anyone comtemplating a career in law enforcement!

Is This author the Same Dewey Clayton Mayes that ran Clayton Mayes Trucking while on the L.A. PD whose driver ran over a family in Texas and crippled them for life, lost a law suit, and did not pay off? Did not make the monthly payments he signed he would make? I do not believe that is the honest or ethical conduct this author professes to have.

The author has captivated many years of personal experience in law enforcement to produce this brilliant, fictional novel that will leave you eagerly anticipating each new chapter. You, the reader, join Brad Phillips, as he experiences daily life as a police officer for the Los Angeles Police Department. You will feel the emotional intensity he endures to successfully get his job done with the utmost of courage, integrity and honesty. But would facing a challenging, criminal world on a daily basis give him reason to compromise all this? This book will keep you riveted to the last word!

I bought this book because of scanning through chapter 1. This is my usual method for deciding if a particular book might likely be something I would enjoy. This time, however, my method failed me. Chapter 1 was superb. The subsequent chapters were just *okay.*

Chapter 1 introduces Cymel, an 8-year old who lives on a farm with her dad. Her experience of the sights, smells, & activities on that farm are so vivid that I felt like I was there. I immediately liked Cymel and her dad, & was eager to follow the fascinating plot threads that were introduced in her chapter.

Sadly, however, the chapter ended & the book started introducing new characters, new locales, & new plot lines, etc etc, in rapid fire fashion. I soon got rather confused. Worse yet, Cymel seemed to have been relegated to a minor role, & I neither liked nor disliked any of the several new characters sufficiently to get me past the sixth chapter.

This confused, unwieldy fantasy novel is one of the last written by Ms. Clayton, and unfortunately is far from her best work. It's the story of two worlds drawing closer and closer together until the boundary between them dissipates and characters can talk, or even travel, between one and the next. This is an original conception. Drum Warning also uses ritual magic in fresh, well-described ways. However, it is a severely flawed novel. There are too many characters and too many ill-defined subplots -- and most of the characters are young adults, a common fantasy novel device that I'm thoroughly sick of. Also, Clayton does something annoying to me, which is to use Welsh language and poetic forms for some of the names and poetry of one of her worlds -- without basing the culture on medieval (or any other period) Welsh culture in any way, and in many cases with the names and words being meaningless. I would have preferred her to have invented her own culture and language rather than "borrowing" something from Earth. I also disliked the pointlessly cruel death of the young girl's pets, which is depressing without advancing the plot. This book isn't unreadable -- there's certainly worse fantasy out there -- but I don't really recommend it.

In "Drum Warning," Book One of "The Drums of Chaos," an apprentice wizard doesn't earn his diploma until he kills his teacher, tans the old mage's hide and fashions a drum out of it. One would expect this custom to lead to a dearth of wizards on the two magically merging planets of Glandair and Iomard, but just the opposite is true. There are wizards who walk between worlds, wizards who cast death spells, wizards who do nothing but scribe, and yet more wizards who exercise what fantasy readers might consider the whole magical repertoire. Adding to the confusion, "Drum Warning" is told from multiple points-of-view---not just wizards, but the occasional swamp witch and minor bureaucrat. I finally had to sort the characters out by function:

There are three bad wizards who are murdering all would-be students on their way to a school of magery (in which the teachers don't end up as drum-heads). There are two teen-agers, a boy and a girl, who refuse to admit to their magical potential until the bad wizards attempt to kidnap the girl, sink a couple of ships out from under the boy, then try to drop a mountain on him when he refuses to drown. There is a bandit-wizard, on the run from a troop of female warriors who want to geld him. He seduces an alcoholic wizard, who--

A plot does somehow stay afloat in this confusion of magic. One of the young mages is destined to become the Hero who saves the merging planets of Glandair and Iomard (I don't quite understand the astronomy here) from chaos. There had been a collision seven hundred years past, when everything went to chaos. Libraries burned. Empires crumbled. Network T.V. ratings declined.

Can a young Hero save Glandair and Iomard from another time of chaos and bad programming? We're not even positive who will assume the role of Hero, although my money is on the twice-drowned boy. Nevertheless lots of interesting stuff takes place in "Drum Warning" while we wait for the Hero to appear. Little Gods torment cats, sour milk, and trash vegetable gardens. Big Gods make an occasional appearance and precipitate weird happenings (rather in the style of British royalty). An emperor is seduced by the Dark Side. An army marches into the realm of the swamp witch. Ships sink. A wizard is turned into a drum.

All of this makes good reading for a rainy day, if you can keep track of who is telling the story.

While the book contains a good view of British History, it is a very dry read. I used this book in a class on early British history and found it an excellent background source book, but not for the casual reader. One stunning aspect that the book contains that many do not is a section on pre-roman Britain. Most books start British History at the arivals of the Romans in Britain, yet this one gives a good account of the Beaker folk, those who built Stonehenge, and the rest of early England. I've tried to use this as a refrence book and have found it somewhat difficult to easily flip to sections that contained focused and collected information, but I do reconment it to those who need a better background to English history and events.

I had to use this book for my History of England class, and while I did not expect it to be an entertaining read, I at least expected it to be properly edited. Sometimes the writing is so bad that I have to get out my red pen just to get through it. The author(s) jump around in time which can be confusing. The authors definitely know their material, but just because someone knows a lot about a subject does not make him a writer. Plus, if you are going to charge this much for a book, invest in a decent editing and critiquing service.

I am giving this text 4 starts because it can tend to be a little dry. But it is a textbook, and not really pleasure reading, (unless you like that sort of thing.) I felt that it left out some pertinent information, but overall, it is pretty easy reading. It is great to read after a lecture to help congeal the things the instructor talked about. I will not sell back this book, because I am a history major- and it has a really good index, so it is easy to look things up quickly.

I don't normally write Amazon reviews, but I felt I had a service to perform, given that this novel has the distinction of being the absolute worst piece of published fiction I have ever read. And I have read quite a few bad fantasy novels.

It has actually been quite some time since I read "Jedit," but it was so poorly written that it made a very lasting impression on me. The pacing of the book is terrible; the author (or authors, no matter that the book claims to be written by a man named Clayton Emery, I suspect it was written by either a committee of terrible ghost writers or a single impressive mad-lib program) jumps from event to event suddenly and without any kind of overarching narrative structure. There is little to no explanation for what is happening, why it is happening, where it is happening, or even when it is happening at any given time. Points of view shift randomly and without warning, and week-long journeys are resolved in half a sentence, or ignored entirely, while a poorly-choreographed action sequence might drag on for pages. The "plot" reads as if the author merely thought up a series of unconnected action sequences and attempted to tie them together with the barest strands of storytelling. I hesitate to call the characterization even two dimensional, as the characters have little dimension at all; the characters act without any apparent motivation, and aside from the main character (who displays a cookie-cutter, utterly bland demeanor of reticence) also exhibit no discernible personalities. Every character might as well be a nameless extra, existing only as a stand in for the banal action sequences.

The technical quality of the writing itself is also terrible. I mentioned that, didn't I? This book made such a strong and lasting impression on me because I didn't think it was actually possible that something this bad could be really be published, even for a mere trading card franchise. The author exhibits the vocabulary of a middle-schooler, though that might be a bit harsh towards middle-schoolers, as I fairly certain they command more verbs than "said", "went", "growled", and "flicked" in their writing. The dialogue is wooden and and banal. If there is an antonym for the phrase "wordsmith", it would accurately describe the author.

The only positive thing I can think to say about Jedit is that it is mercifully short. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to finish it--as it stands, I was only finished the book for the same reason that you would be unable to look away from a terrible train wreck, your jaw slowly descending as car after car derails and hurtles into a growing pile of twisted steel and shattered glass.

Though other books set in the universe might well be literary masterpieces, the fact that the WotC saw fit to publish "Jedit" with their brand has ensured that I've stayed very far away from any other Magic: the Gathering books. Even if you are merely looking for simple, fun, mindless sword-and-sorcery, there are far better books out there.

I read "Johan" and couldn't wait for Book 2 of the Legends cycle to come out. Now, I've read "Jedit" and can't wait for Book 3.

Although Jedit is one of the better Magic: the Gathering books, it does not carry off it's goal of telling an entertaining tale about the MTG universe. The connection between the book and the Legends cycle current at the time was even weaker than usual in these books, but the story itself was somewhat better. All told, an engaging tale that does not requite intimate knowledge of the game world it portrays, but neither does it fully exploit the possibilities of that world.

The book arrived on time and in good shape.
However, I don't like the book. I thought it was recipes, but it is mostly narrative, and the recipes are not would I would make.

This book is a delight!! It combines wonderful recipes from home cooks all across the country with stories about each one. I collect cookbooks, and this is by far one of my favorites! I have read it over and over again. Mr. Clayton makes you feel like you are there with him in different kitchens as he gets the recipes. I highly recommend this book!!

I am very dissapointed in the service of Amazon. I put in the name of the book and was guided to the 5th edition instead of the latest version(6th). There was no way to verify the edition on line at the time of purchase. This appears to me to be a scam by Amazon to divest themselves of the old inventory. When I found the error and did additional research to obtain the ISBN number I found the 6th edition. Since then, the search in Amazon has been updated and both editions appear. Still no reference to editions but surprizingly the 5th edition is priced higher. Another part of the scam to trick buyers to buy the 5th edition because logic thinking would put the newer/latest edition at a higher price then the older obsolete 5th edition. When Amazon management was presented with the issue; my error, no can help you. Guess what, for basicly shipping charges of the two books, Amazon has lost my future business and the bad PR to all I talk to in the future. Sure hope the balance sheet improved due to the shipping charges.

Greatly Dissatisfied Customer

Excellent resource for those wanting to get a deeper grasp of everday economic statistics. Thoroughly explains these statistics and why they are influential in our economy.

Highly recommended read!

This is the third "Let's Go" guide I've used in my travels. I never take a vacation without one of these books in my ruck!

While I thought that Let's Go Europe was great, this guide really wasn't as good as I expected. I found myself constantly asking to borrow other traveler's Lonely Planets. While I like the style in which they write, there just wasn't enough information provided. They would only list 2 hostels in a town which had 6, which would really annoy me when trying to book rooms during the peak season. Additionally, I didn't feel that the Let's Go researchers even attempted to go off the beaten path. While I am not the kind of person who needs a travel guide to tell them everything, I think the Let's Go New Zealand has a long way to go. Perhaps once it has a few more years under its belt it will be a more worthwhile read.

A book for the true christian to contemplate where/when the lost 10 tribes will return.

If you are looking for some paid clergy man speak, prolly go else where.

But if you are open minded, and willing to learn, and have an understanding of Jesus Christ, this is interesting.

Keep up the good work!

This author presents the major four theories on the whereabouts of the "Lost" ten tribes of Israel based on the beliefs and writings of the Mormon Church leaders. The Church's foundumental belief on the need to convert the whole world created these farfetched and absurd theories. Religious doctrine and hollow speculations become, by this author, academic truths. There is no attempt to refute or discuss these outrageous beliefs except for occasional remark on the possible speculative value of the quoted material. However, immediately he returns to the seriousness and authoritative nature of these same hypotheses.

One of the joys of Doctor Who is that you never quite know what you are going to get. In this radio episode the Doctor and Mel answer a distress call and discover they are too late. The Crisis is already averted and the party is on. The whole planet is grateful to their savior...The Doctor and his lovely companion.

Who is this other Doctor? Is it a future self or is this an elaborate hoax? The answer will entertain you to no end. It is one of the most amusing episodes reminding me of City of Death in the Tom Baker days.

It is a bit of a switch from the regular heavy lifting of most episodes but you will find it a real hoot, very much worth buying.

I love the classic Doctor Who television series. I was interested in trying out the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays. This is the first one I've purchased. In my opinion, this story does not capture the "feel" of the classic Doctor Who. There is too much comedy that I don't find funny. This story's plot feels more like "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". I have listened to some of the webcasts on the BBC Doctor Who website (like Shada and Real Time) and I enjoyed those more.