5 New Action & Adventure Books for this Easter Weekend

One of the least frequently used built-in app in iPad/iPhone is iBooks. Contrary to what people may believe, the iBookStore has plenty of good books, including the hot new release ones. In this post, I will try to highlight 5 books which are newly released in the category of Action and Adventure. Hopefully, these books would accompany your long weekend.

This might also be a good change of pace after absorbing various apps and games. Enjoying quality books on the iPad/iPhone is a comparable experience in enjoying quality apps and games too.

Mobbed 
By Carol Higgins Clark
272 pages
Release Date: Apr 5, 2011
$11.99

New York Times bestselling author Carol Higgins Clark is a native of New Jersey. So is her sleuth Regan Reilly. In Mobbed, Clark sends Regan “down the shore” where they have both vacationed since childhood. But this trip turns out to be no vacation for Regan! 


PI Regan Reilly and her husband, Jack, head of the NYPD Major Case Squad, plan to spend the weekend at the Jersey shore with her parents. Regan’s mother, suspense writer Nora Regan Reilly, will be celebrating her birthday on Saturday. But Regan’s weekend gets off to an early start when she receives a phone call from her mother asking if she’d hop on a train right away.

The Sacred Vault 
By Andy McDermott
528 pages 
Release Date: Mar 22, 2011
$7.99

When Michelangelo’s David is stolen from its museum in Florence, it’s only the latest in a series of audacious raids on the world’s greatest treasures. But American archaeologist Nina Wilde and her husband, ex-mercenary Eddie Chase, discover the raiders’ ultimate target when the Talonor Codex—a cryptic travel journal that Nina found in Atlantis—is snatched from a well-guarded exhibition right in front of their eyes. 


The codex holds clues to the location of the Vault of Shiva and its mythical contents: the chronicles of the ancient Hindu god of destruction himself. From a deadly shootout in San Francisco to a hidden valley in the snowbound Himalayas, Nina and Eddie must run a labyrinthine gauntlet of ruthless killers, corrupted faiths, and twisted ambitions to reach the sacred vault ahead of a cunning billionaire with a plot to remake the world—after he brings this one crashing down.

Pacific Glory 
By Peter T. Deutermann
336 pages
Release Date: Mar 15, 2011
$12.99

Savo Island, Midway, and the Battle of Samar, three of the defining naval battles of WWII in the Pacific, will draw history buffs to this riveting novel. It’s largely the story of Annapolis friends Marsh Vincent, who barely survives the Savo debacle, and Mick McCarty, whose dive bombing at Midway sinks a Japanese aircraft carrier that helped devastate Pearl Harbor, and Glory Hawthorne, a woman both love who has become a navy nurse.


Filled with wide-screen action, romance, and heroism tinged with the brutal reality of war, Pacific Glory is a dynamic new direction for an acclaimed thriller writer.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Indistinguishable from Magic 
By David A. McIntee
496 pages
Release Date: Mar 29, 2011
$7.99

The most talented Starfleet engineers of two generations unite to solve a two-hundred-year-old technological mystery that turns out to be only the beginning of a wider quest. 


With the support of Guinan and Nog, as well as the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger, Geordi La Forge and Montgomery Scott soon find themselves drawn into a larger, deadlier, and far more personal adventure.

Hungry as the Sea
By Wilbur Smith
416 pages
Release Date: Mar 29, 2011
$2.99

Wilbur Smith sets his vividly realistic novels on the razor's edge between human courage and nature's wrath. In Hungry as the Sea, this master storyteller takes us to the frigid South Atlantic, where one man fights for his life-- and for redemption. 


Nicholas Berg is steaming out of Cape Town aboard the salvage tug Warlock. Once Berg ruled an ocean-going empire. Now, his future has come down to a powerful boat and a daring rescue mission. One of his former ships is being lashed against the cliffs of Cape Alarm, surrounded by deadly icebergs and survivors clinging to their boats. Berg has gambled everything on reaching the Golden Adventurer before a competitor and a violent storm-- to win a fortune in salvage fees. But if Nick Berg succeeds, and climbs back into the international shipping game, that's when the real danger will begin...

iPhone Game Review: Repulse-O

Repulse-O

$.99

iPhone/iPod Touch

Version: 1.0

Tested on: iPod Touch 4G (iOS 4.3.1)

Rating: 2 of 5

Repulse-O is a casual action puzzle game, which requires you to match 3 bubbles of the same color to pop them away. The twist to this game is it requires you to tilt your iPhone/iPod to rotate the center core (and all the glued bubbles). And, there are some bubbles which have an electric charge on them (i.e. positive and negative), thus making it more difficult to tilt your device because bubbles with the same electric charge tend to reject each other. The game also has 3 different backgrounds to choose.

I play the challenge mode until the first 6 levels. At first, it seems fun and engaging with the bubbles flying in from both sides of the screen, but the higher level you're in, the more time you are required to play and survive (e.g. 4 minutes). For me, it seems too long to play around tilting my iPod. I didn't finish the 15 challenge levels (which requires me to survive for about 8 minutes) nor try the endless mode. 

The game crashes a lot of times. I had to restart for up to 7 times within the first 6 levels. I think it's quite troublesome just to play the game. The game has Game Center and OpenFeint integration, which is nice for most players. The developer is also registered into the PlayHaven, which allows you to browse through other games within the PlayHaven network and purchase the ones you like to play.  


Check out my other iPhone app/game reviews here.