Still slowly stumbling along

and really, enjoying the summer by not going out in this gawdawful heat very much. I have been looking at the grass in my yard, and it does not look like it has grown 1/4" in the past week, so I don't think I'll mow the front today (Tuesdays are designated Front Yard Mowing days) because I am not into Recreational Mowing. The back yard, done last Friday, or was it Thursday, is also not showing many signs of growing (I don't water my grass unless we've had weeks of no rain). So I may be off the hook Thursday/Friday (my two options for Back Yard Mowing) too. That would be nice ('cause I'm lazy).

There are plenty of other yard jobs to do, though, but until the heat lets up they'll wait. When I push and exert myself in the heat and humidity, I'm subsequently flattened for at least 24 and sometimes 48 hours. What a wuss, I know. But it's true.

I read a good book last week: Quiet Neighbors, by Catriona McPherson.

I thought it would be spooky, but it's more of a three-pronged mystery with a kinda unreliable narrator, which I don't usually like. But this one - it really pulled me along, trying to figure out what she's hiding, and what he's hiding, and what the other she is hiding ... all the secondary characters were interesting and of course the premise - when you live in the middle of the cemetery, you have quiet neighbors OR YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO - is a real grabber. And then, somewhere towards the end, it does a kind of gentle double flip and reveals its true nature and I'm glad I read it.  Is that spoiler-free enough?

Revisionary, by Jim. C. Hines

It has taken me SO long to work down through my towering To Be Read pile before I could get to this one, and it has acted as a spur to keeping me reading those ones before it. Finally, I got to read Revisionary, the fourth and last book in Jim C. Hines's Magic Ex Libris series.

Look at the gorgeousness of that cover! Just LOOK AT IT!!!! All four covers are just glorious and prove that it IS possible for a publisher to take enough care so that the cover artist knows what the book is about! 

All I can say is, after the first three books I had no idea how Jim could possibly do justice to them in the last of the series, and NO idea how he could wrap it up - but he hit home runs on both counts. This one is fast-paced and surprising and fun and harrowing, and the end is satisfying on several levels. And there's lots of Smudge in this one, too! Smudge! I adore Smudge. Wondering who Smudge is? Read the books! (Jim's original Goblin Jig series is Smudge's actual starting place and you won't be sorry for reading those, as well. I promise!)

More Griffiths

As promised, here's my report on yet another Elly Griffths novel, A Dying Fall. This is again a Dr. Ruth Galloway and Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson mystery. She's the prickly, independent archaeologist who chooses to live on a desolate stretch of Norfolk's coastline, facing the barren shingle and the tumultuous sea beyond. He's the guilt-ridden, married, father of her baby Kate (they have lots of history and between her independent nature and his genuine devotion to his wife, it doesn't look like they're ever going to have a simple relationship).

The story opens thusly: "At first he isn't even scared." And you're right, whoever "he" is, he's in deep trouble. In fact, he's about to die in a raging house fire. He was an old college friend of Ruth's, and shortly after she hears of his death, like, the next day, she gets a letter from him. He's been a professor of archaeology at a regional college in Lancashire, and he wrote to tell her he's made a tremendous discovery, but it's put his life in danger. Well, of course she hies herself and Kate up there to find out what happened. Unbeknownst to her, Nelson is wending that way, too, with his wife, for their annual visit at his mother-in-law's. Naturally - since they talk occasionally on the phone about Kate, and because Ruth calls him with her suspicions about her friend's "accidental" death, they end up investigating the situation together.

Several more of Ruth's old college gang appear in the story, and none of them are exactly what they seem. Nor are any of the college academics and students. Happily, for me anyway, she's brought her Druid friend Cathbad along to take care of Kate while she sleuths. Every story's better with Cathbad. (IMO)

The setting, around  Blackpool, Preston and Fleetwood, are flavorfully rendered in shades of scuzziness, industrial bleak, and just for variety, glorious rural landscapes. The title of the book refers to the climax, when an amusement park roller-coaster provides some of the most suspenseful and dismaying moments in this series yet. I actually cried at the denouement - but won't explain, as that would be a spoiler.

Once again, Griffiths hits it out of the park and I again highly recommend this series!

Two more book reviews!

I've neglected posting the past couple of weeks because there's been pretty much nothing going on. Nice and quiet and placid, yay.

But, I have been reading! Two books to report on today:

The Yarn Woman by Brooks Mencher was a title and author I found out about where else? Ravlery forums, of course. I have read my share of craft-related mysteries, and I have to say, for the most part, they haven't been all that well-written. Most have been fun and at least engaging enough for me to finish them, some are more fun than others. There have been, sad to say, a small number I couldn't finish, or even get past the first chapter. It's not the craftiness that's at fault; I suspect it's true of any mystery genre/niche-market mashup category (sailing, gardening, steeplechasing...). Even worse, I am absolutely allergic to any supernatural woo-woo in my mysteries, and the book blurb flatly states, "There are always the ghosts." So, because of this history, I approached The Yarn Woman with reservations, perhaps I should say: low expectations.

To my delight, I was completely disarmed and delighted by these three novellas!

Now, they are not without flaws. After reading it, I went back to Ravelry and found a book club there who read it several years ago. I was taken aback that most of the readers took great exception to Mencher's writing skills, particularly the "big words" he uses and especially how many adverbs he uses. (I am not blind to the two adverbs I used in that sentence.) First, my feelings about big words is that they are either used well, or poorly. If they stand out, it's poorly. But with this surprise came additional insight into my own attitude: I have a larger vocabulary than most people I know, and not one time in these stories did a "big word" stand out to me! Not one! So maybe my definition of "used well" or "used poorly" needs to change. I did mull this over. I decided that the author has no control over the working vocabularies of their readers, so there's no way, aside from deliberately dumbing down their text, they can make sure that any "big word" doesn't put readers off. I myself found Mencher's writing delightful, and I don't use that term for just any old book. I loved the characters, the settings, and the plots. I loved the descriptions. I even appreciated the handling of the supernatural elements.

Second, the adverbs. When I was writing fiction a lot (I don't any more), I did a LOT of reading and studying to improve my writing. The Adverb gets TONS of criticism. Some critics and authors go so far as to say you should never, ever use an adverb. And sure enough, when I would go through a manuscript I'd written, I'd find a lot of them I could cut and/or replace with some other way to get the same idea across that made my writing better. So if anything, I'm over-sensitive to the use of adverbs. Again, to my mind, you can use adverbs well (they don't stand up and yell at the reader) or poorly (they do exactly that, call attention to themselves and away from the story). And again, not ONCE in these novellas did I even NOTICE an adverb.

So I was charmed by the writing, and found it entirely professional and effective. What about the stories? Here's where a sensitive reader, one whom certain subjects upset, might be careful. There is child abuse here, wife abuse, and violence. None of it is on-screen nor are its effects treated gratuitously or in detail. And some of it turns out to not be what it seems. That said, I'll only give a little comment without spoilers for each. You can read fuller synopses and critiques on the usual web pages: amazon's comments, Goodreads reviews, mystery lovers' blogs.

Nat P.M. Fisher is a hard-working reporter in modern-day San Francisco, who starts out narrating the tale "Ghosts of the Albert Townsend" - I should mention the point of view does skip around some in the stories and occasionally I had to backtrack to figure out who was talking/doing, but not enough to ruin the reading for me - which involved a little girl whose nocturnal ramblings around town have brought her, wrapped in a hand-knitted shawl that's definitely the worse for wear, bloody and limp to the emergency room in her mother's arms. Fisher happens to observe their arrival, and then the very prompt arrival of quite a few policemen pique his curiosity about the case. Fortunately, an old childhood chum, Detective William Chu, is in charge of the case and he allows Fisher to tag along with the investigation. Because the shawl is unknown to the girl's mother, and it's hand-knitted, Chu calls in Ruth M, a textile forensics consultant (The Yarn Woman), to help them find out where the child had been because she's not talking. Fisher soon finds himself enthralled by the woman and her milieu: she's got a devoted - assistant? servant? chauffeur? protector? - in Mr. Kasparov, an elderly Ukranian ex-pat, and they dwell in a splendid old abandoned theatre in a tiny, hidden pocket of old San Francisco. Ruth M is indeed a yarn woman - a knitter with a stash that is no doubt the envy of half of Ravelry's members. And her knowledge of fibers and human psychology is wide and deep. Somehow connected, though how Fisher struggles to determine, the girl's story is tied in with the reappearance in the harbor of an old sailing ship that sank long ago. As I said, I am not usually at all interested in supernatural goings-on in my mysteries but this one kept me reading way past my bed-time until I could finally read the last page.

The second and third novellas, The Fisherman's Wife,  and The Boy in the Mist were just as compelling and rich-reading as the first. The characters are all colorful and interesting and the stories have heart. The Boy in the Mist has just a slight whiff of Martha Grimes's Richard Jury stories about it; that's all I'll say about that except I don't mean that in any kind of negative way at all. (I love her Jury series). This third one is also - to me - the most unsettling of the three in that it suggests goings-on that I never expected in this country, in this age, and which if true, are appalling. They remind me how very, very lucky I have been and how sheltered I still am. Unfortunately they are entirely believable. At least The Yarn Woman and Nat P.M. Fisher and Mr. Kasparov have helped a little bit, by the end.

I recommend this book to mystery lovers and yarn enthusiasts.

The other book I read last week is The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths.

My mystery book club read her The Janus Stone last year and I really liked it; I'm just now getting around to reading the rest in the Ruth Galloway series. The Crossing Places is the first in the series. Ruth Galloway is an archaeologist who becomes involved with a mystery in the wetlands she bought a small house beside. Her own personal and academic history and the history of ancient England, and the history of a disappearance the other main character, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, failed to solve ten years earlier, all entwine in a horrible and frightening situation literally in her own front yard.  I like both of these main characters and the archaeology is always fascinating. Highly recommended!

As promised...

First, the belated book reviews.

For the March library mystery book club, we're reading Mrs. Jefferies and The One Who Got Away by Emily Brightwell:

I have to say, I am anything BUT impressed with that cover art. If I had seen this on a shelf I'd never have picked it to read, on the basis of that cover. Also, there appear to be about 30 of these Mrs. Jeffries books, but I had never heard anything about Emily Brightwell at all, in my long mystery-reading career. It caused me to wonder how well-written they would be (okay, I'll be blunt: the cover and that huge long list of novels I'd never heard of set my expectations extremely LOW).

However, I was pleasantly surprised! Ms. Brightwell is a completely capable writer, and knows her English grammar, spelling and punctuation just fine. The editing, therefore, must be pretty good, too. I mean, I was expecting something ghastly along these lines but was very pleased to be proved wrong.

The story was good, with lots of characters full of verve and color, it moved right along and kept me guessing (though I don't try to figure mysteries out while I'm reading them, at all - so this is probably not a reliable recommendation for people who do try to beat the protags at solving the mystery) until the reveal.

I'll be reading more of these, but honestly, it will be to satisfy my curiosity about this series. It seems to me to be aimed at a particular reader, which is not a bad thing, let me be clear about that. The main characters are the serving staff in the house of the main detective. They appear to have organized themselves into a highly effective detecting team - without the actual detective's knowledge! The housekeeper Mrs. Jeffries is the ring-leader, and the information her subfusc team comes up with, she conveys to her boss for the benefit of his investigations - with the chief aim being he doesn't know how he comes by it! So he thinks he thought of it himself? I guess? It seems a bit weird, to me.

But a large part of the intention of this set-up, I *think*, is to portray a created family - the "downstairs" staff - which also includes a couple of people who are most definitely not servants, or even employed by the main guy - who have learned to trust and depend on one another and always have each other's backs in all sorts of ways. There is a lot of ink devoted to the descriptions of these relationships and how they treat each other.  To the extent that I believe the books are meant to appeal, perhaps, to lonely people, to kind of create a literature family for them to feel good with. I may be wrong - that's why I want to read some more of them.  There's nothing wrong with this intention, if that's what it is. It's just emphasized more than in any other mystery I've ever read.

So I can recommend this one pretty confidently.

The second book is another of Fred Varga's Commissaire Adamsberg mysteries, An Uncertain Place:

After the first Vargas I read, for the mystery book club, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, I bought four titles I found at the used book store. I read This Night's Foul Work, then this one. Which are the three latest in the series, and I even read them out of order within the three. So I need to go back and start at the beginning - not because you can't read them out of order, but because I think I'll enjoy them even more that way.

Anyhow, this is another excellent book. The crimes in these books tend to be gruesome, but committed off-screen, so to speak; the aftermaths are described but not in such a manner as to be sickening or worse, titillating. If you want sickening details you're going to have to supply them out of your own imagination. The "good guys'" reactions will tell you all you need to know. The story here starts with a collection of severed feet, vintage spanning several decades, still in their shoes, turning up at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery in London, and ends up taking Adamsberg all the way to a tiny village in Serbia. In between he receives a horrible shock halfway through, which confronts him by surprise in his own kitchen, and has another, particularly horrifying, experience in Serbia.

When the story pointed to Serbia, I naturally thought of the terrible war there in the '80's, so was expecting much bad stuff from that - but even worse things happened far far earlier than that in Eastern Europe, and not all of them have rational explanations. We in America can't fathom the kind of clan hatreds that are nurtured for centuries and break out in unspeakable violence every few generations. Some roots defy logic.

Again, there are plenty of lively and distinctive characters in this tale and I enjoyed it immensely.

So I give it a most definite Thumbs Up!

And for the Announcement: I've signed up to walk in the MS Walk in Omaha April 9th, so I'm hoping folks will donate to the cause.

Bought new walking shoes today!

I'm going to start training right away - I've let it go too long. I'm hoping to start, April 1st, walking the actual route of the MS Walk. They haven't posted the map yet but I've been on one of them that started in the same area so I'm guessing it'll be the same: from AkSarBen Village up along Elmwood Park, then across the Dodge Street overpass and up and around Memorial Park and back to AkSarBen Village to  the end. I don't know how long it is.

If you want to donate to Team Jensen (my nephew's wife's team), here is the URL:

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR?fr_id=27651&pg=team&team_id=468854

or here's a live link.

If you don't want to donate on the web site, let me know, and you can give or send me a check or the cash (I'll be happy to provide a receipt) and I'll make sure it gets to Team Jensen. The advantage of using the web site is that they'll send you an email for the tax-deductible donation.

So as the weeks go by, I'll probably be posting photos of my walks and complaints about my blisters LOL. Oh boy, can't wait, eh?

Book, er, report: Through a Glass, Darkly, by Donna Leon

Through a Glass, Darkly is a Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery from prolific author Donna Leon. I've read and heard about this series often through the years, but for some reason never picked one up to read it.  It's our February book for the library mystery book club, so here's my chance.

(The cover on the library copy I had, only without the intensely 

annoyingly poorly-placed library stickers! Grrrrrrr....)

Commissarrio Brunetti is a very likeable detective, a contented family man, seemingly easy-going, thoughtful and honorable, but not naïve in the convoluted politics of Venetian power. This case starts out as a sort of off-the-books look-see on his part, having been requested by a friend of a friend to find out if there is really any danger of the 2nd friend's decidedly awful father actually trying to kill 2nd friend's husband, as he's threatened to do (before witnesses). It's all involved with Venetian politics, environmental malfeasance, and a couple of the famous Murano glassworks factories still operating in the city.

I'm not going to try to get into it any farther than that - for one thing, it's too complicated for me to try, but mostly to avoid spoilers. It does become a murder mystery, sadly, and as is apparently frequent in Brunetti's life, Powers-That-Be do kind of swirl around him and threaten his career but he never lets that take precedence over hunting down the killer.

After reading this, and enjoying it very much, it did occur to me that it doesn't have the nail-biting, heart-pounding dénouement we perhaps expect these days in murder mysteries. Again, I'll stop with that statement to avoid spoilers. It isn't that the stakes are not high, they are frighteningly high, but it's not resolved with car crashes and shootouts and high-wire theatricals. And that is just fine with me. Along with a great hero and a good mystery, it's fun reading about everyday life in Venice, a city I'll never get to. I'm really glad there are like, dozens of Brunetti books that I still have to look forward to!

Book Review: Remains of Innocence by J.A. Jance

I think this is the first Jance mystery I've read. It's our book for the mystery book club at the library tomorrow evening, so I thought I'd give myself a couple of days to get it read - but I read it straight through, took me about 7 hours yesterday afternoon through evening. So that should tell you I liked it! It's a real page-turner.

It starts with a young woman, Liza,  steeling herself to enter her dying mother's house. Her mother was a lifelong abusive alcoholic and hoarder, and Liza left home the minute she graduated from high school, and though she lived in the nearby small town she hadn't seen her mother for many years. What she finds in the house turns her life upside down in very short order: Over a hundred thousand dollars in cash, hidden in the thousands of books and magazines mixed among the filth and debris in that nightmarish house.  She doesn't realize it's tied to her father who abandoned the family when she was an infant; she knows almost nothing about him.

She uses some of the money to hire locals to empty and clean out, and refurbish the house for sale, while her mother is in hospice. A stranger approaches her with a dire, one-sentence, obscure warning at her mother's funeral, and before that day is over the house is burned to the ground, and her innocent, elderly landlady is brutally murdered. Within 24 hours Liza is on the run from whoever is looking for her - heading for her long-estranged brother in Bisbee, Arizona who is the only person on earth she has left.

In the meantime (as the old movies liked to say), Arizona’s Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady has a brutal murder of a locally-loved developmentally disabled man to deal with, and she has to call the ME back from his scheduled getaway weekend. He agrees, resentfully, but then he never shows up for the autopsy. The first murder involved disturbing evidence of a potential Beginner Serial Killer's work, but the second murder is out-and-out torture and murder. Short-handed, Brady juggles all the inter-jurisdictional and budgetary burdens her office is plagued with as well as trying to do her own family justice.

I had only one complaint about this book and it was about an increasingly annoying habit of Liza constantly - I mean CONSTANTLY - identifying the local people she knew with their regular order at the diner she worked at. It was fresh and kind of cute the first two times, but I have to say, eventually I almost gave up on the book because of it. For awhile I was thinking, well, Jance must have had a reason to do this - maybe what someone eats will turn out important to the story. After that though I realized nothing she could do with it could make it worth the aggravation. I was never so glad for anything as when Liza finally left town and got away from all those diner regulars. JEEZ it was annoying!

HOWEVER, that said, I really like the characters and the story and the descriptions, and that she sprinkled real surprises throughout the plot. I will definitely recommend this to mystery readers, and I'll be reading more Jance in the future!

2015's reading tally, and a new book review

and on the day I'm "supposed" to post a book review. Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

OK I added up all the books I read in 2015, and it amounted to 73. That's 3 more than in 2014. I started quite a few more than I finished; as I get older, my patience is thinner and I'm more ready to put a book aside if it doesn't grab me in the first 50 pages. Time's running out, you see, and there are a lot of good books out there for me to find!

One of the books I read last year in 2013 was London Falling, by Paul Cornell. It's the first in a series about a special office in the Metropolitan Police Division (if that is the right name) that deals with supernatural crime in London. Cornell writes a compelling book, with interesting and (sometimes) likeable characters. I am not always good at following supernatural phenomena as written in books, and I have to say there were times here when I didn't really know what was going on, but that didn't mean I didn't want to find out how it ended up! It's a police procedural, in many ways, with the focus being on bad guys of some other dimension that have always shaped and influenced human societies in the London area, from even before there were people there. The odds are always stacked well against our heroes, and they don't help matters sometimes with their own weaknesses and doubts, but they're very smart, talented people and while all is not set right in the end - far from it - they manage to win through enough to make me hope for a long series to enjoy.

This week I read the next one in the series, The Severed Streets. Someone - or some thing - is murdering rich white men in highly public circumstances, yet no witnesses seem able to say what happened. Our DI James Quill and his now Sighted (able to see much from the other plane, wherever that is) squad, are on the case - which soon seems to be an extension and variation from the old familiar Jack the Ripper. I won't say much about this book except that it's even better than the first one, there's a scene about a third of the way in where I found myself thinking "Hang on, that character sounds a lot like - NO WAY! It IS [famous author]!  Well that's interesting. [Famous author] and Cornell must be buddies, for him to be kind of a featured minor character."  And about 2/3 of the way through, something really awful happens - something doubly awful, had me going NO NO NO NO but it was Yes. And so of course I had to keep reading until 3 this morning to get to the end to see what happened next. I can't imagine what the next one's going to be like. With some truly shattering changes happening to some of the squad members, and relationships within the squad even more fraught and precarious than ever, I feel sure it'll be a doozy. This is one (as is the first novel) I'll be re-reading through the years.

Book Review: Grave Passage

Grave Passage, a Henry Grave Mystery by William Doonan. I got this book from a very nice mystery book club member, and I'll take it back to pass it on to someone else next meeting.

Henry Grave is an 84-year-old special investigator - special in that he's had no particular training for investigating crimes, but he still seems to solve them anyway. He has a deep background which is gradually and smoothly revealed during the course of this investigation into the murder of a true crime author strangled and hung up high on a Caribbean-cruise ship climbing wall. The author had been bragging in his well-attended ship lectures about a famous unsolved murder case from six years previously which he had solved and would reveal the killer the next day in his next lecture. Gee, guess what guy, that wasn't a good idea. The investigation, therefore, takes place on the luxury liner as it wends its way amongst the islands. Its oceanic location makes it important to solve the murder before the ship enters any country's jurisdictional waters, thus putting it into the hands of local law enforcement that may or may not be up to the job.

The donor of this book said it's funny and that Henry Grave is a hilarious old guy and he was right. William Doonan, the book's author, is not elderly but he seems to get the balance of making humor from ageing's inconveniences and pains without resorting to stereotypes or insults against old people. Henry tends to fall asleep at the wrong moments, sometimes awakening to be horrified that he'd let himself become so vulnerable to attack (which is a very appropriate fear, here).  He gets busy with investigating and tends to forget to eat, then suddenly has to eat lest his "mild" diabetes bring him down. (This is one point that bothered me - Henry drinks quite a bit and I thought such quantities of alcohol were a real no-no for diabetics. I worry about him.) He's actually very tough and able to be ruthless when circumstances require it - that personal history serves him well in dangerous moments. And he uses the doddering old geezer stereotype quite effectively while actually being ready for pretty much anything. He's not afraid to confront possible murderers, mobsters, and deposed genocidal dictators with blunt questions and a skeptical attitude.

Henry considers himself still very much in the running in the romance department. He is often telling himself the equivalent of "I've still got it!" but on him, it's charming, not chauvinistically dude-bro-ish. The cruise ship atmosphere with many older (not to mention, rich) women available to practice his flirting skills on is right up his alley. And he's proud of his dancing skills - he teaches a class on the tango at one point in the book. He loves food. And he doesn't make "old peoples'" nasty comments about younger generations' music and fashion and manners like so many aggravating older characters in books. (I hate that.) I really like Henry Grave and I hope to read further exploits about him.

The mystery itself turns out to be much more far-ranging and interesting than I'd expected it to be. Henry's able to perceive when modern cyber skills will be useful, though I don't think he's much of a skilled cyber guy himself, beyond using Google and watching videos on his laptop - he knows who can ferret out information for him and doesn't hesitate to draft their assistance.

The description of life on board a luxury cruise liner was interesting - Doonan has been guest lecturer on quite a few cruises himself, the Author's Bio says - but it still wouldn't appeal to me. I'm quite happy to read about it. Not interested in doing it.

All in all this is a very enjoyable book and I hope to read more of Henry's adventures!

Book info:

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: The Glencannon Press (September 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1889901490
ISBN-13: 978-1889901497

Amazon.com offers this for free for Kindle if you're a KindleUnlimited subscriber, otherwise it's $2.99. The paperback version is listed at $22.95 new. There are several other Henry Grave novels listed there, too.

Monday night book review

I read Sunfail by Steve Savile over the weekend, and posted this review on Amazon.com afterwards:

I've never read any of Steven Savile's work before and the blurb intrigued me. I'm all for skilled and determined heroes and brainy and resourceful heroines (I call it "competence porn" for inept unexpert people like me), apocalyptic scenarios and secret bad guys with a dash of possibly metaphysical underpinnings so it had points for it before I even opened the book.

What I liked: I liked Jake Carter and Finn, the ancient language expert in the university. I liked Sophia, Jake's long-ago love interest. The action was non-stop and the dangers and blockades thrown up against our stalwarts just kept piling up, great. I even liked not really knowing what was going on for most of the book - because Jake didn't either. About 7/8ths of the way through I started wondering if it was first in a series because I couldn't see how it was all going to be resolved, even though nothing on the cover suggested a series. My intuition was confirmed in the last chapter.

What wasn't so great: I'm a raging liberal, myself, but even I got a little tired of the polemics (I mean "a little" literally - it didn't ruin anything for me). There seemed to be a lack of connecting the apocalyptic events like the dogs all running wild and the birds falling out of the sky, with anything else - aside from crowds gawking at the poor birds, society didn't seem to have any interest in the phenomena. And the secret goings-on once revealed, didn't even explain the title of the book. I think they could have picked a better title. However, This book kept me up until 3 a.m. because I couldn't stop before the end. It is a compelling read, I would put on a level with JK Rowling's writing talents (better than Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, which I did find myself reminded of at one point), one I really enjoyed and would recommend to anyone who likes this genre of novel.

All that said, I will definitely read the rest of the series, if there is one!

Yesterdays' book "review"

OK, sorry, I had to finish the thing last night before I felt I could really comment. And it's not much of a comment, because it's really not much of a book. Years ago I discovered the 1940's "madcap mysteries" lady, Craig Rice, and started collecting her books as I could find them. I don't have all of them yet and probably won't. Thing is, the poor lady was a raging alcoholic and single mom and her life was not that great, and cut short by the drinking when she was only like, 47. She wrote "comic" mysteries, most featuring a hard-drinking (surprise) Chicago lawyer named John Malone. His cohorts were likewise more or less hard-drinking (a LOT of drinking goes on in these books - I mean a LOT) musicians, guys, dolls, PR flaks, grainy and more-or-less competent or incompetent cops... Anyway, the one I read this time is 8 Faces at 3.  An old lady is murdered in a house where every clock (8 of them) has stopped at 3:00 a.m. It was no surprise to me when I read on a mystery reviewer's blog that she started with that premise with no idea at all why it happened that way, and just pantsed it all the way through. The explanation for the clocks is, frankly, a dud. But she probably owed her publisher the manuscript so she wrapped it up in dud-wrap and sent it in, and her books were apparently popular enough that nobody cared that the very premise of the title was stupid.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't in the mood to read Craig Rice this week.

Catching up, again

Sort of hit the nadir of my give-a-shit-itis cycle last night, stayed up until 3 a.m. reading Robert Galbraith's newest Cormorant Strike novel, Career of Evil; went to bed *dying* for sleep - and got exactly none. Oh, I finally dropped off around 5, and something outside woke me at 7 or so. I did get back to sleep and didn't wake again until almost 10, so that was some, anyway. (Grabbed a half-hour nap this afternoon, too.) But I've been putzing around tidying things up, checking things off the list.

So, to catch up with my self-imposed reportage, Monday I did not do a book review, but now I've got one to review: Career of Evil. If anything, it's better even than the first two. I really like her two main characters, Cormorant and Robin, and this story gives us a lot more of each of their life stories and for me, anyway, it was welcome. I struggle to feel empathy with characters who insist on making bad choices, and Robin has seemed in the previous books to cling to that dud of a fiancé for no visible reason. In this book the reason is made visible, and more understandable, and I was able to like her for her positive qualities unhindered by what had seemed like sheer mule-headedness.

This book involves child molesters and partner abuse, and while there is not a lot of cringe-inducing gore (from my POV), it may not be to some readers' tastes. Ol' Cormorant has quite a collection of vile enemies in his past, it was probably inevitable that Robin would end up having to deal with one (or more) of them on her own. Pleasingly, she doesn't collapse and weep and allow evil plans to follow their planned courses entirely.

Descriptions of the landscape, villages, London's gritty alleys and fancy neighborhoods, and characters main and minor continue to delight me. I can't wait now for the next one!

Tuesdays are supposed to bring you knitting yarns hahaha - not much to report this week because yesterday's YMCA workout was hard on my left hand and left it aching to the point I didn't think I should push it harder by knitting. I did get some old knitting magazines sorted out to give away, so that's always good. I think I'll take the Mineshaft sock to Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, to keep my hands busy post-feast. Chances are I'll just doze, but I may as well have it just in case. I made a couple of little "yarn babies" - just tightly-wound balls of yarn with a short "tail" - for the two new kittens at the home where I'm going.

ETA: 10:30 pm - I did pick up the Sphinx Hat and knit another set of three rounds on it. One more set and I'll have the first repeat of the pattern done; two more repeats and then the solid-color top of the hat, and it'll be done. For some reason my knitting is really tight on this one. I'm hoping blocking will get it to relax a bit. We shall see!

And, Wednesday, nothing to relate about writing. Haven't done any except letters.  And this.

Monday, no book review

I'm having a hard time finishing books lately. Right now I'm in the middle of re-reading Louise Penny's Still Life, her first Inspector Gamache book. I'm doing that because I recently signed up for Acorn's free 30-day free trial period, and discovered that they carry the one & only TV miniseries(or is it a single TV movie; can't remember) anyone's made of her series, made in Canada (appropriately as the books are set there and Penny's a Canadian). Other Gamache fans have said they really didn't like the movie at all; I thought I'd give it a chance. I'm a fan of Nathaniel Parker, who was cast as Gamache, so that was at least one + in its favor.

Well, I liked it. I even watched it twice, and I may just watch it again before I decide whether to fork out the money for an Acorn subscription (they don't have a lot of material and most of it I've already seen, so right now I'm thinking No). I can see where some things were changed from the books - but I can also see a LOT of things they kept in - down to details of clothing, quotes, personalities, events - I was really surprised.

So I thought I'd go back and read the book again and see if I'm remembering right. So far, so good. Yes, there were some changes I could have done without - like making Peter and Clara LL Bean catalogue models-gorgeous, and about 15 years younger than in the books.  But I thought they did a cracking job with the rotten apple in Gamache's team, can't remember her name right now - I can see where they even were planting little hints about things, concerning her as well as other things, to come in future Gamache mysteries.  I liked the portrayal of Ruth (I missed her duck, but that might not appear until a later book, again, I can't remember). Myrna, the bookstore owner, barely had two lines in the whole movie, and they missed a chance to cast a woman of imperial size (that phrase always comes to me when she's featured in the books - a large lady who I would definitely like a lot) but at least they did cast a black actress to play the black character. The plot and clues, etc. seemed to follow the book well.  Penny has said she doesn't see them doing any more of her books. I think that's kind of too bad.

But I have all her books and I will be re-reading them many times in years to come.

Book review - another WRBC book!

This one was published in 1967, technically later than the Weekly Reader Book Club books I usually collect as mementos of my late 50s - early 60s childhood, but a quick scan at the bookstore suggested it was in a similar spirit as the earlier ones. Also, it's got black & white ink drawings throughout and I love me some black & white line drawings. It's not at all bad, and it's set in an Adirondacks lakeside resort so that hits one of my bells right away. The protagonist is a 12-year-old boy, Mark, whose father died two years before the book opens, and his mom has married the owner of said resort and they've all moved there so his stepfather can better manage the business. Mark's favorite college student summer worker is Ben, who treats Mark the best of all the summer help. But Ben seems to keep getting in trouble with the adults who work there, and when an extremely valuable part of an elderly regular's stamp collection goes missing, Ben gets blamed - and fired. Mark and two daughters of the resort's engineer, whose family lives on site, stick by their friend and go sleuthing to try to find the real thief.

It's an enjoyable story with nice descriptions of the natural beauty of the setting, the lodge and the characters. There's a hair-raising near-drowning incident with Mark and his friend Kristy paddling for their lives in a dark cold lake when their boat inexplicably sinks. As far as "fair play" mystery standards, I think it probably passes, but it was meant more as a kids' adventure than a Golden Age mystery so that doesn't bother me.

It did strike me as a bit odd that in 1967, when anti-war riots and hippie rebellion was spreading fast across the US and were in the news daily, none of that appears here, even in passing. But it's a fantasy of sorts, and there's no law that says they have to address real-world issues.

I'd recommend this one to anybody who likes a lively kids' adventure with mystery, derring-do, loyalty and friendship foremost.

A bit more about The Searcher

So I just finished it, and immediately started hunting around for any sequels Simon Toyne may have come up with, and was immensely disappointed to discover that it's just come out this year, and there aren't any sequels yet. But it is obviously set up as a series. So there's that to look forward to.

Toyne is going to be one of my Must Read writers.

The Solomon Creed series: watch for it, read it! It's compelling!

About last night's post

Er, there wasn't one. It was to be about knitting, and there wasn't any of that, so, no blog post.

Kind of low karma around here this week.

Came back later to add:

But I did finish a book last night: A Study in Terror, by Ellery Queen. Now, I'm a fairly uncritical reader. I *will* quit a book if it hasn't caught me by page 50 or so, and if something truly egregious is foisted upon me, the reader at any point, I'll toss it. But otherwise, particularly with my favorites, I'll overlook any number of faults.

I love the Ellery Queen books. For the most part. If you want to learn more about Ellery Queen,  go here -  there are tons of reviews and discussions about Queen all over the Golden Age mystery blogs, but that link is a good place to dip your toe in first.

As I was saying, I am prejudiced in favor of Queen. (I suppose I should mention that the books are set up rather oddly; "Ellery Queen" the author of the books was actually a partnership of two cousins, one who made up the plots and the other who wrote the books. The books were about a mystery author and genius at detecting, named Ellery Queen. When I say "Queen," I'll be talking about the fictional detective. If I say "Ellery Queen," I'll be talking about the two guys who wrote the books.)  Granted, I have read a couple that were disappointing.

This isn't one of them, exactly. What it is, is Queen getting dragged into the eternal question of "who was Jack the Ripper?" via an old manuscript written by Dr. John Watson. Yes, in this book, Holmes and Watson were actual people, and the manuscript was actually written by Watson.

The situation about this book is that one of the two Ellery Queen authors (I can't remember which) had died, leaving his partner kind of flailing. I believe the publishers brought in a third writer to write Watson's manuscript parts, which make up I'd say at least 3/4ths of the novel. The other 1/4th is Queen dithering between reading the ms. and finishing a novel of his own under a looming deadline - and manipulating a persistent, effete "friend" to stay away and let him keep working.

It's enjoyable enough - I finished it, anyway. The parts with Queen are pure Queen, so I liked those. The Watson manuscript, to my eyes, read enough like Conan Doyle's writing to "pass."

But you know when your favorite TV series star goes off on holiday and they have to fill in the episode without her? Oftentimes they'll use clips from past shows to pad out the episode? That's kind of how I felt about this book. I wanted more Queen!

So I'll put this book in the Donate bag. The cover is one of those cheesy 1970s things, too, the publisher couldn't be bothered to have a real artist do it so they used some stock photo of a model looking fake-terrified. In modern eye makeup and nail polish. Nothing to do with The Ripper.

It's Monday, so: book review. Except, not.

I was hoping to get finished with my current read, The Searcher, by Simon Toyne. Unfortunately, I'm only about 3/4 of the way through. Life stuff keeps getting in the way. But this is a really gripping book! "Suspense" is right! I'm going to be reading like a house afire the minute I can set aside an hour or so to gallop to the end.

The set up is great: You're in the head of a guy who finds himself running barefoot, in a suit, down an empty road in the middle of a desert. He doesn't know who he is or why he is here, but he knows he'd better not look back because something horrible is behind him. You soon find out what's behind him, but that only complicates things. What's ahead of him is, if anything, even worse. Egads, I HAVE TO FINISH THIS BOOK!

This week's book review

I've read a bunch of books this month, so rather than trying to pick a favorite, I'm going with the last adult book I read*, Lord of the Wings, by Donna Andrews.

It's one of a long series of madcap village mysteries featuring Meg Langslow, whose family well needs a series to keep track of all their adventures. I enjoyed it very much. It takes place during a long (long!) Hallowe'en weekend which is celebrated in her beloved town of Caerphilly, VA by competing views of the holiday: the wealthier inhabitants, and many upscale or prudish business owners would prefer it to be marked by "tasteful" autumn decorations and good behavior by all. They're a minority.

Everyone else goes full-scale nutso for Hallowe'en and really, this is one of those fictional "villages" that surprisingly support a lot of stuff that attracts tourists from all over the region: a haunted mansion, a giant farmer's market, a fair complete with games of skill, crazy rides, scary clowns, and a year-round, professional-level ZOO, for crying out loud. Families host kids's Hallowe'en parties. The village also boasts a retired world-class rock'n'roll heavy metal drummer who's looking to benefit the community, and a local-history museum that includes (unbeknownst to anyone) one item worth a quarter of a million dollars, and other things that may or may not have triggered a murder spree. Or, that may be due to the nefarious unknown person behind a scavenger hunt that seems bent on ruining the fun in the most grotesque ways.

Ms. Andrews does a very good job of keeping her heroine's life realistic: she's got a college prof husband and three (I think; maybe two) lively sons, and the sons' grandparents who lend color and excitement all of their very own. Her brother is the CEO of an extremely successful computer games company that figures largely in the sleuthing. All of these people each have their own interests and schedules and Meg is shown to have to do the kind of time-juggling that any busy working mom has to do. (Though her role here is as a volunteer working with the group who coordinate all the festivities.)

If the police procedures and the criminals' goings-on aren't, maybe, the most realistic, this is definitely a good romp for when you're in the mood for a "zany" mystery. I'm going to go back to the beginning of the series and read them all. I gave it a 4 in my reading log, meaning it's very good even though I may not read it again.

*(I'm re-reading a couple of my favorites from grade school, from The Weekly Reader Book Club now)

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec: A Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery is by Fred Vargas.  As the amazon.com blurb says, "As the chief of police in Paris’s seventh arrondissement, Commissaire Adamsberg has no jurisdiction in Ordebec. Yet, he cannot ignore a widow’s plea."

With that apparently simple set-up, we are then carried along a puzzling and entertaining, and twisting path to the solution of several horrible murders whose perpetrators had hoped would be taken as supernatural results of the judgement of a thousand-year-old troop of ghosts who periodically have swept through the tiny village of Ordebec foretelling the deaths of local evil-doers.

Being a Francophile myself, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It is entwined with a seemingly smaller one about a Paris pigeon, tortured by an unknown sadistic kid, that Adamsberg rescues and takes as much care of as he does his detecting procedures - which are sometimes hilariously NOT according to accepted practices. 

The descriptions of the region surrounding Ordebec are magical. The people seem not to have changed much since the year 1000 A.D. I doubt if anyone who *did* follow prescribed procedure could ever have penetrated the thicket of fears, lies, hatreds, ancient rivalries, superstitions, and hurts, that Ordebec presents Commissaire Adamsberg. 

This one kept me up until the wee hours to finish it. I gave it a 5 in my "Books Read" notebook - an excellent read that I will no doubt re-read sometime in the future. In the meantime I intend to find all the other Adamsberg mysteries available in English. And if some haven't yet been translated, I might just hunt them down in their original French.

Here's Publisher's Weekly comment: “Exquisite… only Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit can compare with the Paris policeman's eccentric colleagues in the Serious Crime Squad, who include a narcoleptic, a walking encyclopedia, and a naturalist…Vargas's combination of humor and fair-play plotting, reminiscent of John Dickson Carr, has never been better.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)