Waterfall by Lisa T. Bergren

Very teen angsty, but not bad. It kept me reading - if only to see what crisis was going to be so compelling that our heroine would give up her medieval sweetie and return to her proper century. So, that should have telegraphed the basic plot. Teenage sisters trapped for the summer on an archaeological site in Italy accidentally discover a "portal" which transports them back to the 14th century.

In the manner of stories of this type, main character sister falls for a local princeling, who also falls for her and all the subsequent implausibilities are quite readable and fun.

There was one major problem with it - an issue which I have addressed at length on other books in this list. Where do these people get their titles? The title of this book has absolutely nothing to do with the story, nothing! It is clearly intended to be the first in a potentially endless series which is titled River of Time (nothing like telegraphing the plot of the entire series), but there is no allusion to time as a river or a current, and even then one might expect some connection between the plot and the title. It is as if the writer had this "concept" and then couldn't quite make the story fit the concept, but was so enamored of it that she couldn't turn loose of it and chose a more appropriate title.

Oh, well.

Strong as Death by Sharan Newman

Catharine and Edgar have undertaken a pilgrimage to Compostela to pray for a child. Catharine lost one child at birth and has miscarried several times. Edgar fears that she is in danger of lapsing into a religious mania of the sort that has her mother locked up in a convent. Apparently convents were the 12th century equivalent of mental institutions for the wealthier end of the economic spectrum. Poor people just got to go crazy where they stood.

Of course, the murders occur on the road among their group of pilgrims. That is quite logical, what is somewhat less logical is that every important cast member finds reason to come along - Catharine's father, his brother Eliazar, and their nephew Solomon. And in the course of the action, all of them get accused of murder.

The murders themselves are gruesome and creative and the murderer remains hidden until the last chapters, but that is part of Newman's trademark. More of Hubert's family turns up - in quite an unexpected manner. And everyone in their group on the pilgrimage has something to hide.

This book sees the death of Peter Abelard, who had been a mentor to both Catharine and Edgar. They did go visit him shortly before they left, in fact, he is the one that recommended the pilgrimage by interpreting a dream of Catharine's.

Dark Tort by Diane Mott Davidson

I think I have read this before in the period of this blog. For one thing, it was already on my kindle. Definitely a clue. This one is set in and around a law firm. Goldy is on the scene because she has been catering breakfasts for the firm and meeting a young intern and neighbor of hers at the law office's kitchen for cooking lessons while she preps for the breakfasts. The intern is the victim and the plot is all the usual intrigue and jealousy. A good read.

I am enjoying the fact that they have started tacking the recipes on the end of the book instead of imbedding them in the story. I'm sure they are excellent recipes, and the food talk makes it all very tempting, but I have finally faced the fact that the likelihood that I will ever prepare any of those concoctions is vanishingly small.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

What fun! Ivan has definitely gotten short shrift in the whole saga. Maybe his apparent ineptitude is only a result of being a pretty normal kind of hero placed in the midst of a clan of truly extraordinary heroes. Maybe Bujold was feeling guilty - or perhaps she had really run out of options with Miles. He is now married with children, and has rather aged out of the system. Are we now going to have to wait for the next generation of Vor offspring?

Typically, for Ivan, he walks into a situation to help out a friend - well, maybe Byerly isn't a friend, but Ivan has that British sort of guilt complex about holding up the side (in a Russian sort of way). In the course of which help, he meets a beautiful girl, and marries her (quite by accident, sort of).

For followers of the Vor of Barrayar, Bujold gives us background on the colonization of Barrayar which has not been addressed so explicitly before. After all, Ivan has to explain his homeland to his lady-love. And typically for Ivan, once he has married Tej, with the understanding that they will divorce as soon as possible, he actually falls in love with her. And, since Tej is his counterpart in terms of ranking in her family (somewhere on the level of the adored family dog, much loved, but of whom little is expected), she does the same. Throw in a couple of rather dominating mothers-in-law and you have fuel for any quantity of confusion.

The Centaur's Daughter by Ellen Jensen Abbott

Rather a nice YA fantasy. I believe it is the second book in the series, but from the backstory filled in in this one, I am not certain how the first one played. It sounds like it was the girl's father's story, but that wouldn't exactly be true to the genre.

Abisina's father was a shape-shifter, his other form, a centaur. She thinks she is a normal human, but under the stress of trying to rescue a friend, she changes also. For some reason which is never entirely clear, she tries to hide this fact from the community which owes its existence to her father, the shapeshifter.

Most of the YA themes are present, and fairly well done. I think it is often easier for writers to deal with that sort of thing in a fantasy context.

Hell to Heaven by Kylie Chan

I wish I could find something to say about this besides "more of same." The adorable child is now a contrary teenager - thank goodness! She was such a perfect child that she was about to become a bit annoying. She is fairly annoying as a teenager, but in a rather different way.

I really think I had written more about this one, but apparently I closed the file without saving. I do that a lot with notepad. Oh well, I think I remember basically what I wrote. Emma is aging. John is still missing - although he hangs around a lot for someone who is missing. Nobody dies permanently. Some of the characters died several times in this book. Emma has been dedemonized; the demon king pulled that off, but I don't remember what his price was.

The third in the second series should be out in the States in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I think I remember that Chan made this a triple triple instead of just a double triple, so nothing is likely to be resolved in the next book either. I'm not sure if I keep reading because at some level the writing is good enough to keep me reading - or just in the hope that something different will actually happen.

Uniform Justice by Donna Leon

This is one of her creepier ones. Italian political corruption at its worst. There is a murder at a military academy disguised a suicide. The victim is about the same age as Brunetti's son, Rafi, and Brunetti is tormented by the thought that something might happen to his own son.

Actually, I like reading about a cop who becomes emotionally involved with his cases. Very Italian. The political corruption is also very Italian. In most of Leon's books it is a background element, and treated almost with humor on the writer's part and resignation on the part of Brunetti. That element in this one is much darker.

I really enjoy reading her books, probably partly because I know I am never going to win the big lottery and go live in Venice (I hear you actually have to buy a ticket). Leon clearly loves the city because she makes that love a large part of Brunetti's character.

I do wish Brunetti would win one every now and then, though. He always solves them, but he seldom gets to put them away. Maybe they have blown them away a couple of times, but most often there are reasons why the killer is not put away. It's a little frustrating if you love American police procedurals.

Milk and Honey by Faye Kellerman

If I'm going to get caught up during this holiday - I had better get with the program.

I remembered about the bees, of course, given the title, it would be hard not to. The blood covered baby, though, that I had forgotten. And this time it was a truly twisted family. A twisted family of beekeepers. California - what can you say?

Rina, in self-imposed exile in New York, has run into some fairly twisted family situations herself and has decided to return to California and Decker.

Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs

First - I have been reading since the end of October. I finished this one over two weeks ago. For some reason, this semester suddenly seemed to crash around my ears and I was (and am) behind and have an absolute deadline for catching up of - well, in one instance, the final paper for one of the classes I am taking, next Monday. At least we have most of this week off for Thanksgiving. So, with any kind of luck (and a little persistence) I can finish the paper, get everything graded for the classes I am teaching, get the final paper written for the other class I am taking, get the last six assignments finished for the first class, get the den cleared out, AND post comments on the seven books which I have read since I last updated this blog. Yeah, right. These may be very, very brief updates.

I don't believe I had read this one before. I like the way Reichs often makes the story personal for Tempe. This opens with Tempe returning to her childhood and an exotic playmate from Canada who came down to the Outer Banks to spend summers with relatives who lived near the Brennan's summer place, a playmate who was abruptly carried away back to Acadia and was never heard from again. Although the body that is Tempe's first connection to the story turns out not to be that of her friend, there is a connection and the mystery from her own childhood is resolved.

Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes by Marcia Muller

I started a fairly heavy duty piece of historical fiction, but there was too much going on this week to immerse myself in historical fiction, so I dug out a good murder mystery for the required hours of reconnecting with my sanity. Of course, inevitably, this one turned out to be a bit of historical fiction as well, in a way. A crime in the fifties is at the heart of a series of murders in the 90s. I'm still way behind the present in this series.

Sharon's off-again, on-again boyfriend, Hy Ripinski, is conspicuous by his absence in this one. This could be the beginning of the end - or not. Having taken the pledge not to look into his mysterious past, she opens a new file on him before the book ends. It also appears that her assistant, Rae, is leaving behind her relationship of several volumes standing and moving on.

But - the case in hand - a woman convicted of the gruesome murder of her husband's girlfriend back in the fifties has been released after 36 years in prison. Their daughter is determined to clear her name, but the only court interested is a historical tribunal which hears historical cases without the actual force of law. Lots of publicity, though, which is good enough for the daughter.

The mother refuses to plead her innocence, but Sharon becomes convinced that she is not the murderer. Of course, the real murderer is still out there and a string of new murders is the proof.

There is even an old mansion that, if not actually haunted, should be. And the autumn fogs of San Francisco alternately hide and reveal - no, not really - but it was starting to sound like a good line. The usual good time had by all, I don't think Sharon even got beat up or anything in this one. She did get graffiti splashed on her house, though.

Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson

I am also about halfway into a fairly heavy piece of historical fiction and just had to have a break. Then, too, the semester is wearing on - and the big assignments are coming up in the classes I am taking. I may not finish that one until the holidays.

I knew it was coming. At some point they had to get rid of the Jerk, Goldy's abusive ex-husband. I'm pretty sure I read this before, but I really didn't remember much, besides the fact that someone finally killed him - and that one of his many flings left a brother for Arch.

Naturally, since the first victim is the Jerk, Goldy is in the frame. In fact, the murderer has deliberately put her in the frame. But as this one proceeds, the list of his crimes becomes so long and their nature so varied and perverse that the initially hostile cops become her partisans in the investigation before it is all over.

Davidson must have nearly exhausted the available citizens of Aspen Meadows both for victims and suspects, because quite a crew of people from out of town (and from the past) populate this one. It isn't really a major issue with the integrity of the story, after all, the town is really practically a suburb of Denver, and they are running down there all the time anyway. A whole big city full of potential murder victims.

Riding Lessons by Sara Gruen

Not the spectacular work that Water for Elephants is, but not bad for a first effort. It's a bit predictable. The story begins with a classic triple whammy: Annemarie loses her job, her husband leaves her for a sweet young thing, and she learns that her father has Lou Gehrig's disease - all within the space of a day or so. So she packs up herself and her obnoxious teenage daughter and heads back home to "help."

Everything goes from bad to worse. She takes over the management of her father's stables and proceeds to run it into the ground. She alienates both her mother and daughter, and can't bring herself to have anything to do with her dying father. To top it all off, she runs off her old boyfriend whose wife has died and wants to reconnect.

Then there is the horse. It seems that the only being that she has every loved unreservedly was the remarkable horse she had when her father had been grooming her for the Olympics. In an accident in competition, she was nearly killed and the horse was injured badly enough that he was put down. Now she encounters his near double - and thereby hangs the tale.

Gruen goes a bit beyond the "and they all lived happily ever after" and brings Annemarie to the realization that she has to take responsibility for the disasters that she has caused through her own failure to grow up. So the happy ending feels quite satisfying, if a little pat.

It certainly kept me reading - if only to find out what she would screw up next. In fact, I probably will look for more of Gruen's earlier work.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

What a great read! A little heavy on the "history and moral philosophy" (apologies to R. Heinlein), but still a really great story. I think I read it when the original novella came out back in 1991, probably at my father's suggestion. I suppose it could have been in '93 when the novel came out, but he was pretty sick by then. I think I recognized the cover of the first edition in the wiki.

The technology is plausible - if a little previous. Leisha Camden, the genetically engineered heroine of the piece, was born in 2008. So, push it back another fifty years. With the mapping of the human genome, genetic engineering is reaching the point where the scifi becomes a possibility. I found the political and social extremes less plausible than the scientific miracles.

At the beginning of the story, people are beginning to custom order their children. The specific modification that triggers the incidents of the story is one which makes sleep unnecessary. Supposedly, the "Sleepless" are so much more productive because of the extra time they have that they have enormous advantages over "Sleepers." This does seem a little far-fetched - and Kress does ignore the fact that she herself has indicated that those who have their fetuses modified for sleeplessness also have them modified for high intelligence. After twenty or so years, they discover that modification for sleeplessness also virtually eliminates aging, making the Sleepless not quite immortal, but certainly very, very long lived.

The jewel of the writing though is in the description of how the third generation of genetically modified children, the Superbrights, think. She describes their thinking as chains of ideas which link and cross and spin. A marvelously creative bit. I wonder if the Star Trek people had read it when they came up with Darmok - in which they encountered the people who communicated by analogy. Although, that was original Trek, so I guess it would have had to be the other way around.

I had been thinking about this book, and trying to remenber the author's name recently. I wanted to hunt it up and reread it. Then there it was, on Kindle's 100 under $3.99 list for this month. And she has written a whole pack of other stuff, including two sequels to this one. I may have to hunt some of them down - which may be why this was on the list in the first place.

Variant by Robison Wells

This is a creepy little number. Vaguely reminiscent of something my daughter handed me some time ago called Idlewild by Nick Sagan. In all fairness, I suppose the similarity lies primarily in the boarding school setting, and, of course, the teenage hero - which is pretty much a given in YA stuff. In that one, wealthy families sent their troublesome teenagers off to school where they were kept wired into a virtual reality system a la The Matrix. Here young loners from the foster care system are lured into the school where there are no teachers, the students handle everything from janitorial work to teaching, being sent to detention is a death sentence, and no one gets to leave - ever.

Part of it is degeneration and recreation of a social system under these circumstances with these subjects. They don't sink quite as far as the boys in Lord of the Flies, but they do have many of the conveniences of modern life, including Big Brother who is watching and listening constantly. The rest is the ferreting out of the techno-conspiracy by our determined hero, and his efforts to convince his apparent peers that there really is a problem.

There is a good bit of unnecessary implausibility, but this is a first effort, and he certainly has the potential to improve.

Earth to Hell: Journey to Wudang: Book One by Kylie Chan

I finished this a couple of days ago, but had to do homework and get my midterm grades posted. All that takes a lot of fun out of things.

I'm not sure whether is too much plot in these or not enough. I think the main idea here was to retrieve Leo from hell, but it was a little hard to tell most of the time. They did get him back, but the recovery was fairly anti-climactic, and the destruction of the new bad was definitely so.

Part of the problem, I think, is that no one ever actually dies, no one that counts, anyway. They just go away for a while and come back again - and in this one the period of absence has been reduced to minutes rather than the months that it was in the first series. This certainly reduces the dramatic force of the narrative.

Another problem, I fear, is that I am really tired and never feel like I am completely caught up with everything. It is clear from the reduced "completion rate" that I have much less time to read - and I guess I resent something that just isn't quite up to par.

Dark Heavens Trilogy by Kylie Chan

White Tiger

Red Phoenix

Blue Dragon

The next batch are coming out, so it seemed like a good idea to reread the original three.

It may have been too soon for a complete reread. Although I did not remember large chunks of it, I found it all a little tiresome and had to keep reminding myself that it is YA - or is it? Emma's age argues against, but the school setting and the lack of depth definitely put it in the category. It isn't that I find it a little difficult to categorize, I find a lot of stuff that crosses that particular boundary quite satisfying - maybe it is a little repetitive. I also found some of her language mannerisms more annoying this time than the first time through. Maybe it is just Aussie English, and I should just accept it.

Not much to say about a reread. It did seem to me that when they finally took out 122, the nemesis that had hounded them for the entire series, it was a little anticlimactic. He got away from them time and time and time again, then at the end, she just blows him away. Also, leaving unresolved for three fairly long books the fundamental nature of the main character was rather annoying. It started to read like one of the "nya, nya, nya - you're going to have to buy the next book" things. First read, I kept thinking it would be resolved in book three, no such luck.

I guess I had vaguely thought that this might be something to add to the "reread frequently" list. Oh well. Maybe this semester is just being more tiring than I thought it would be. I hope so - because at this point, I am prepared to be really nasty about the second series.

Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs

And there they were, Tempe, Ryan, and Tempe's ex-husband, Pete, all sharing a house in Charleston. Not to mention that Bird the cat and Boyd the chow were there, too. There was a murdered cat in this one, too - rather odd and fairly gruesome. All that proximity led to some oddness, but it was quite entertaining, if decidedly improbable. Surely we are getting to the point where she actually goes ahead and dumps the ex. Or maybe he forces the issue, because I seem to remember that in a later story he remarries.

I particularly liked the fact that the conclusive connection of the murders in this one hangs on Tempe's knowledge and expertise rather than on having her stumble on something or someone and making an intuitive leap. Very nicely done. I don't want to be a scientist, I certainly don't covet Brennan's job, but I'm enough of a science geek to really enjoy that aspect of these books.

It's late, the discussion board I'm on will close in fifteen minutes, and I think everyone has called it quits. I think I will, too. I'm sure I could write several more paragraphs about this book - but I will let it go with the fact that I really enjoyed it.

Willful Behavior by Donna Leon

This one was more of a "grabber" than Leon usually presents. Brunetti is not anything like an American hard-core police detective. I have just been reading some Faye Kellerman, and Decker is stands somewhere way down the line from Brunetti, although even Decker is not the trigger-happy denizen of the small screen, he is a member of LAPD and all that implies to us TV addicts. Decker and Brunetti both gave up careers as attorneys to work in law enforcement, in part because both found the practice of law a singularly inappropriate description of what it entailed.

Brunetti is much more a thinker than an action cop. Not to mention his fascination with the ancient philosophers and historians. This, of course, to contrast with Paola's obsession with 19th century American writers, specifically Henry James. Brunetti suffers pangs of guilt whenever circumstances require him to evade the truth with suspects; it doesn't stop him, but he does think about it. He even occasionally considers the ethics of allowing Signorina Elettra to exploit her vast network of associates whose skill at persuading reluctant security systems to give up their secrets is unparalleled.

Naturally, being Venetian and Italian (in that order) Brunetti's attitude toward the political establishment is anomalous at best. You will never find him uttering or even thinking, "But it is the law!" For him truth and justice trump law every time.

This time the victim is one of Paola's students from the university, and the investigation takes us back to the dark days of World War II and Il Duce. The usual motives apply: greed, lust, and acquisitiveness. And again all Venetian society seems a very small stage. And again we have one of Leon's inconclusive endings. The murderer is not prosecuted and the treasure falls into the hands of the state. But this time Brunetti exacts a personal and most fitting punishment on both the perpetrator and the one who set up the murder.

Sacred and Profane by Faye Kellerman

I'm not sure I remembered much about the first book, except that I learned about the mikvah. I didn't remember this one at all. The fact that I knew that Decker's teen hooker informant was wearing a red shirt can't count, because it was inevitable. Did that expression really enter the vernacular from Star Trek? I'll have to look that up. (Yep, it did - the sports usage is apparently completely unconnected.)

The crime here is significantly gruesome, I am tempted to compare it to Elizabeth George for the convoluted horror of it all. In this one, though, the horror is compounded by the fact that Rina's son discovers the first bodies while on an outing with Decker. Their relationship spirals out of control, although not directly as a result of the boys' trauma, and the book ends with Rina leaving LA and going to New York, not so much to be near her dead husband's family as to get some actual distance between the two of them. At least Kellerman doesn't leave us completely hanging - it is quite clear that they will get it together eventually.

The venue of the crime is the lowest and most horrifying level of the pornography business. And the part that I could almost rubber stamp into my discussions of mystery stories - greed and arrogance.

And the title. The text arises from Decker's study of the Torah, and is tied to his struggle with the idea of becoming what these books refer to as a "Torah Jew." Apparently, this is not connected with the super-orthodox, but more with what might be called "fundamentalism" - although I am sure that the oblique association with self-styled "fundamentalist" Christians is sure to offend everyone. It is not the same, at all - but the word in direct interpretation seems to apply. As I understand the tenets of the system to which Rina and the venerable Rav Shulman subscribe, they strive to live as directed by the Torah - completely. On the other side of the wall, so-called fundamentalist Christians (I seem to be incapable of writing that phrase without a qualifier), rather than studying and striving to live by scripture, have interpreted scripture to suit their own prejudices and want to dictate belief and behavior to everyone else. To finish offending everyone, it seems that Torah Jews, according to Kellerman, try to actually do what the "Christian Right" claims to do.

If someone burns a cross in my yard, I suppose I will know that someone actually reads this.

Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene

Someone handed me a copy of this book several years ago, but somehow I never got around to reading it. But this month's hostess for our book club made it her selection. Now, I wish I could find the original paperback copy because I am sure there are pictures and the Kindle version doesn't include them.

It is a thoroughly nice book about an amazing event. The women of the little town of North Platte, Nebraska, gathered at the train station on Christmas day in 1941, to meet the troop train that was carrying the battalion of Nebraska recruits from boot camp to the coast to be shipped out. When the train pulled in, the boys on the train were not the Nebraska troops, but the ladies and girls stepped up and distributed the food and smiles anyway. The connection was made - it didn't have to be local boys - all those boys were their own boys.

Those ladies and a battalion of others met and fed the boys on every troop train that stopped in North Platte (and they all stopped for water) until most of the troops had returned home. War Department estimates put the number at over six million men in uniform who were greeted and fed at the North Platte Canteen. Fed by small town and farm people who used their own ration coupons for sugar to bake cakes and cookies and fried up entire flocks of chickens from their hen houses, who boiled and peeled thousands of eggs and baked endless loaves of bread for sandwiches. Fed by women who had lost their own sons to the war. Fed by people who drove in fifty or sixty miles to take a turn at staffing the Canteen - again using their limited personal rations of gas and knowing that tires could not be replaced. Every bit of the time and effort volunteered and every bite of food donated or paid for by cash donations.

In combat, chewing on tasteless field rations, soldiers from all over the country would remember those sandwiches and fried chicken and maybe get a small sense of who and what they were fighting for.

Greene interviews the girls and women who greeted the soldiers and danced with them during their 10 to 20 minutes in North Platte and, all over the country, the men who at the time of writing were in their seventies and eighties and remembered with tears the kindness they met there.

The story almost seems to be about the essence of what we in the United States like to think we are - and maybe for "one brief shining moment" were.

The Heralds of Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey

Yes, all three volumes, but this time on my Kindle - now they should be handy the next time I want to reread them.

Now, having reread something that I know I can depend on, I can get back out there and try something new - or something that I haven't read in a very long time. I also have the next book club book to read.

I'm not going to bother to review these, after all, I think I have read them twice since I have been keeping this blog. I will pick up the first one sometimes and promise myself that I only want to read the first part - and then running through the whole series. I think I can put off a reread of the Liaden stories for a while - until I really need a comfort treatment again.

Chopping Spree by Diane Mott Davidson

Somehow this one just wasn't quite as much fun as these usually are. It could just be that I am tired and feeling grumpier than usual, or it could have been the background line of Goldy's son as a greedy, obnoxious, generally hateful teenager. I think it is about time for the rotten spoiled brat to shape up and start turning into a human being.

It is also about time for the little stinker to wise up about his abusive father, but that is another issue. Goldy's ex did not figure in this one significantly, for which I am grateful. Of course, there were several other abusive spouses to take up the slack. (I really am grumpy today!)

This one really is all about greed and its twin, acquisitiveness. We even have a scene at a Shopper's Anonymous twelve step meeting. All round depressing subject. And it didn't feel to me like an "honest" mystery with enough clues to make the ending feel plausible.

This is three in a row that I didn't really care for - I may have to go back and read something that I know I like.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

How depressing. I finished this days ago and found it such a downer that I haven't even been able to bring myself to write it up.

The premise is great, high school age kids with "talent" are screened for admission to what is basically Brakebill's College of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Okay, so it's derivative - complete with a crazy magic sport called welters to fill the slot occupied by quidditch in the original. Still, I liked the way that students were recruited and tested; it definitely had potential.

Grossman goes on, though, apparently not having an original thought to his name, to create a full clone of Narnia, a Narnia which has fallen on evil times and must be rescued. Sound familiar?

Everything is much less pleasant than either of the originals, and has far less significance when compared to the subtext of Narnia. Our hero(?) returns to the mundane world and takes up a job in the tradition of graduates of Brakebill - that is, sitting in an office doing nothing and receiving a large salary for it. In the end, the other adventurers who survived the trip to Fillory (the Narnia clone) come back and beg him to join them in sitting on the four thrones of Fillory (again, sound familiar?). And to cap it all, to my mind, it ends ambiguously. Did he join them or did he step out of his umpteenth floor window to commit suicide? And, you know what? I don't really care.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Well, I think this is one of those "if you like that sort of thing" books. I don't have any deep objection to them, but this one dragged on a bit. We have parallel stories, one in the twelfth century and the other with the reincarnations of all the characters in the 21st century except one who had actually been alive for 900 years.

It is also a holy grail story with echoes from Indiana Jones and The DaVinci Code. And what is it with the twelfth century? I guess it is simply coincidence that I have been running into so many of them lately. There are the Sharan Newman stories, of course, and the Kathy Reichs book - although that one was first century, not twelfth - and none of the story was set there. Something else I've read recently took me into that century - but I can't think what it was - and I can't find it in this log - oh, well.

I have another one of hers on my shelf, but I don't think I'm going to be in any hurry to get to it. I didn't actively dislike it, but I have too much to do this year to spend the time I steal from school work on stuff that is just ok.

Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs

This one is something of a departure for Reichs. In these e-editions of her books there is generally a statement from her at the end mentioning how her own work and the cases that cross her autopsy table have suggested the plot of the preceding story. This one, while there are a couple of murders and a lot of general mayhem, not to mention a high speed chase through the streets of Jerusalem, is really an archaeological mystery with questions which address the fundamental assumptions of Christianity.

What if the bones of a crucified man found in the tomb really were those of the man Jesus of Nazareth? We can all relax, the bones which begged that particular question were destroyed in an accident, and the motivations all round were the usual greed, betrayal, and revenge rather than the speculative conspiracies involving members of any one of the world's three great religions, all of which claim their origins in that same contested piece of desert.

I don't know if I've mentioned how much I enjoy Reichs' throw-aways of lines from classic rock and roll songs. Most of them are completely apropos. As Tempe and her friend, archaeologist Jake, are huddled in a tomb on a rocky hillside, trapped by radical conservatives, who violently oppose the disturbance of Israel's sacred dead, stoning them when they show themselves and a starving jackal in the lower cavern, one of them says to the other, "We've got to get out of this place" and the other responds "If it's the last thing we ever do." Gotta love it. I can almost visualize them breaking into a musical comedy-style song and dance number.

By the way, in case you were wondering, Ryan does go to Israel, too. In fact, he persuades Tempe to go. And a good time is had by all - in between stonings, and shootings, and trashing of hotel rooms, and aforementioned high speed chases.

Sticks and Scones by Diane Mott Davidson

I actually finished this one last night while I waited for my dilatory classmates to post to the message board that closed at midnight. The last time, I gave up and went to bed at 11:30 and in the morning there had been eleven additional messages. Some of them were initial posts, not responses - I know because this time there were a few names that I had never seen before. And this instructor not only closes, but takes down the message board so that we can no longer read it. At any rate, by the time I was ready to pack it in, I was too cranky to write the book up.

As always, a good time, someone shoots out their window while Tom is out of town and Goldy and Arch relocate to the medieval castle belonging to her current client, a serious Anglophile - hence scones. The "sticks and" part shows up in a serious mother/son chat between Goldy and Arch about some recent events. Tom barely makes it back into the neighborhood before someone gets in a near-fatal shot at him and he spends the rest of the time recuperating at the castle as well.

The Jerk is out on parole after serving only a small fraction of his sentence for beating his previous girlfriend, and this time the user is used as he is set up by the criminals. A truly delightful turn of events which is gleefully reported by Marla, who actually scarcely appears in this story. In each book, I keep thinking that Davidson will finally kill him off, but I suppose I would prefer that before she does that, Arch sees the light.

I am beginning to wish that I had looked at time frame in these. I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to go back an review that part of them - and for the other series that I am rereading. At present reading, it seems like it is always winter in Colorado. Granted, a medieval castle is a lot creepier in the cold of winter than on a bright sunny summer day.

This one is loaded with investigative dead ends and motivational twists. The usual pattern for many series mysteries is two investigations which turn out to be the same one. Here we have two lines which appear to be related but turn out not to be. An interesting change.

On the family front, Arch is being an irritating teenager and maintains his fanatic loyalty to his violent, abusive father. Julian has transferred to a college in Colorado and his professors never seem to mind when he runs down to Aspen Meadows for weeks at a time to help out. And, Tom's high school sweetheart returns from the dead.

The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman

I remembered that these books were really good, but somewhere several years ago I stopped picking them up. I guess I lost track of several series that I like because we really don't have a proper bookstore - and I don't much like paying the standard shipping and handling fee for a paperback. Anyway, I am going to enjoy rereading - and reading for the first time the ones that I have missed.

This one, naturally enough, sets up the general background. Decker and Rina meet. It is established that she is a widow with two small children. The attraction between them is immediate. She resists him and makes it clear that she will only consider dating a Jew and preferably one who is observant.

Decker and his partner are part of the LA version of what we all now know as the SVU (well, all good L&O fans do). I didn't remember that, it could be that he does go back to homicide in a later story. A serial rapist is working their part of town, and they drew the case. Then there is a rape at the yeshiva where Rina lives and works. Her husband had been part of the school, and they found work for her after his death. She teaches math at the school and she is the custodian for the mikvah, the ritual bath.

Rina discovers the victim at the yeshiva and becomes the unofficial liaison between the yeshiva and the police as the community closes ranks. The victim is unable to set aside her religious issues and talk to the police, and the community is unwilling to consider that the rapist might be a part of the yeshiva - after all, there is a serial rapist out there, and by rights it ought to be him!

Although the two series of crimes are completely separate, the similarities and differences make the story a coherent whole. I'm already looking forward to rereading the next one.

So Sure of Death by Dana Stabenow

Three in a row. It is definitely time to read something else (like a couple of textbooks that happen to be lying on my desk). These definitely lack a measure of the focus and character of the Shugak series. It is tempting to say that she really ought to stick to female leads, because it almost seems in this one that the female supporting cast is better rounded and more convincing than her hero. Maybe it was this book and the fact that a man in his middle to late thirties is fully engaged in a pissing contest with his father.

Frost is filling the role of iconic poet for this series. He is certainly better known that Theodore Roethke, the muse of the Shugak books. Stabenow seems to be trying harder to incorporate the poetic themes in the story here with fairly direct references to the poems, but they still don't seem to address the content of the story particularly.

There are three separate and unrelated crimes in this one. While that is probably more realistic than having everything come together neatly in one package at the end, it is far more difficult to manage in the fictional setting. It has been done, Dell Shannon comes to mind, but those are very decidedly police procedurals, big city police procedurals. It almost seemed that Stabenow simply didn't want to develop any one of the stories completely so she just piled several underdeveloped stories on top of each other. None of the mysteries in this book are "honest mysteries" - there is simply not enough information given on any of them. For all three, the mass murder on the boat, the killing at the dig site, and the appearance of Campbell's father at the local AF base, the answers are presented like gift-wrapped packages in the last chapter.

There is even more than her usual "beating up on the hero" - even his sweetie and her bff and the new (female) trooper assigned to the station come in for multiple beatings up and shootings. There is also quite a lot of getting naked which doesn't do much to advance the plot. By the way, his wife died without regaining consciousness.

I probably wouldn't have all these complaints about these stories if someone I had never heard of before had written them. They are just disappointing when compared to Stabenow's other series. And if you want to know what I thought of her SF series, you can go back and find my comments on the first one. Note: I have not bothered to read the second, although my sister tells me I should.

Fire and Ice by Dana Stabenow

We (my sister and I) have been enjoying Stabenow's Kate Shugak books so much that we were disappointed to arrive at the end of the series. OK, there is this year's book, which is out both in hardcover and for Kindle - but the Kindle version costs more than a paperback will when those are released. Our guess is that the price will go down when the paper version comes out - and we aren't hooked enough to pay $13 for an electronic book which costs virtually nothing to produce. I understand the bookseller and the author trying to maximize their profits, but they can maximize them on someone else's credit card. I can always get it at the library if I really can't wait ---

After all that digression, so - I decided to try her other series of Alaska mystery stories - about an Alaska State Trooper named Liam Campbell. The price of this book, the first in the series, was more in line with my available funds - $0.00. The motives are pretty transparent here, too. This series never caught on like the Kate Shugak series and this pricing on the first book is an attempt to get readers to try it - and maybe they'll like it.

I liked it well enough at the price, and I was willing to go $5 for the second. I'm not sure they are worth much more than that, though.

In a foreword to the electronic edition, Stabenow explains that her editor at whatever publishing moved to another company. She had been suggesting for some time that Stabenow write a book with Chopper Jim central and after settling in at her new job, called to remind Stabenow of the idea. Stabenow's agent stomped all over that notion for issues of contract violation and little details such as that. So, we have a new Alaska State Trooper - Liam Campbell. He works a different part of the state and will never run into Sgt. Chopin or Kate.

As we open, Campbell has been demoted and apparently sent to this new assignment on a punishment tour. It seems that troopers under his command couldn't be bothered to answer calls about a family missing in bad weather and the family of five with three small children freezes to death in their vehicle on the Denali highway. I have been wondering if this is a "ripped from the headlines" story or what. It seems so completely unlike the Troopers as we have seen them in the persona of Jim Chopin. In addition to these career issues, Liam was cheating on his wife with his pilot. Then his wife and adored young son were hit by a drunk driver. The child was killed and his wife has been in an irreversible coma for the last three years. Very depressing all round.

Stabenow is back on the mystical thing. When Campbell arrives at his new assignment, he is adopted by a raven who hangs out and fusses at him all the time. This, of course, is of great interest to the Native Alaskans since the raven is a mystical creature in their mythology. We also have the local shaman who forces him to start learning tai chi.

I'm not quite sure why he is sleeping in his office since there is a perfectly respectable hotel in town.

We open with a fairly gruesome murder. A man is essentially decapitated by the propeller of a small plane. Later on we have a more conventional knifing and both crimes do eventually connect.

Though Not Dead by Dana Stabenow

This one picks up almost literally the day after the end of the previous book in the series. That one ended with Old Sam quietly dead on his dock at his annual moose roast blow-out. This one begins as Kate, his principal heir and executor, is going through his belongings at his house. We learn that he picked up the nickname during the war because - in the manner of nicknames - he was so painfully young.

We actually have two stories running parallel here. Kate is tracking the mysteries of Old Sam's life without Jim by her side. Jim is back in California because his father died and left a mystery for him to track down as well.

So, they each pursue their own family issues; Jim with fewer contusions, it wouldn't do to mess up all that gorgeousness. I believe from the point in chapter one where someone enters Old Sam's cabin, knocks Kate in the head with a chunk of firewood, and steals the book she was reading she has black eyes for the entire duration of the story.

Mutt only gets a small piece of one of the bads, but she does get to do quite a lot of sanctioned intimidating. At least one major bad guy resurfaces in this one and several formerly merely minor annoyances aspire to badness, with varying degrees of success.

Here again, Stabenow runs a historical yarn alongside Kate's adventure, this time the saga of Old Sam. We also get considerable back story on the Aunties - and about time.

Her Majesty's Wizard by Christopher Stasheff

Somehow this came up in conversation, so I thought I would reread at least this one. I think I was talking to a student who reads mostly YA fantasy and thought these might be a transitional step.

This is basically a variation on the Incompleat Enchanter stories by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague DeCamp. Maybe I will go back and reread them next. It has been even longer since I read those. Of course, I will have to check the shelves - they aren't available for Kindle. Or I could buy used paper for under two bucks - six by the time they have handled and shipped - maybe it is on the shelves.

Whatever. The premise is fun. It being widely acknowledged that a degree in English is possibly one of the most useless degrees going, a depressed English grad student - probably having recognized that fact - has essentially abandoned his dissertation to study an antique parchment which he found in an old book. When he finally gets around to reading it aloud, he activates the spell which transports him to a universe where magic works and its medium is the spoken word, preferably rhyming. Given his extensive study of the poetry of the Western World, he discovers that he is an extremely powerful wizard in his new world.

I like very much the message of the power of words. Even in our rational world they have great power when used well. Unfortunately, in our world many of those who use words well frequently do not use them in a manner that would be sanctioned by the forces of good which keep an eye on such things in Wizard Matthew's new universe. Stasheff makes a good job of the conversion of a rational man into a man who must survive in a world where an oath is an actual binding and good and evil literally exist.

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold

I pulled this off the shelf to loan it to a former student - and started reading. Such fun! Miles is one of the most entertaining characters I've ever encountered. I hope the student likes it. Anyway I had to borrow someone else's copy to keep reading - and the ended up putting it on my Kindle anyway.

At the end of the book, Bujold has an article putting the Vorkosigan books into their internal chronology - which has little to do with publication order. Going back to the beginning would mean rereading the double book Cordelia's Honor which consists of Shards of Honor and Barrayar. It looks like quite a bit of her stuff is available for Kindle now - the catch (and I guess it isn't a huge catch) is that Cordelia's Honor is only available for Kindle as the two separate short books. A sort of one for the price of two deal.

In The Vor Game, Miles really grows up, I think, and the contrast between his fragile body and his unflinching character becomes more than a matter of childish "I'll show them." He (and Emperor Gregor) face the facts of their inherited responsibilities and the responsibilities that they take on themselves. Each finds his own way of dealing with the knowledge that people live and die because of them - because of who they were born and what they have become and the decisions they make.

Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs

Reichs did a nice job with her title here. There is the obvious word play, of course, and the chapter headers of lines and phrases from the Mamas and the Papas's well-known "Monday, Monday," but the critical events hit on a series of Mondays as well.

The crimes here are truly appalling, and Tempe the scientist fights the system to ferret out the killer while Tempe the mother mourns the young women who are the victims. She thinks of them as "her" lost girls. Long dead and buried - and unknown. She is compelled not only to put names to them, but faces.

And school has begun - so these posts are inevitably going to be shorter and less frequent.

Tough Cookie by Diane Mott Davidson

I had to go ahead and read the next one because the health inspector walked in on the last page of the book and although Tom had finished the basic remodel of Goldy's commercial kitchen which began when her ex (AKA the Jerk) broke windows, then was further damaged by the unscrupulous contractor - but since it was a remodel they had to meet new plumbing codes and ---

So, Goldy is shut down until the required plumbing can be ordered, delivered, and installed. So she is giving the Personal Chef racket a whirl - and the TV chef game on a semilocal PBS station. And the bodies keep piling up.

Here the title reference is to a news article about Goldy's involvement in all these murder cases, but she does make a lot of cookies (not tough) in the story.

Usual fun time. The main center of action is a resort up across the Divide from Aspen Meadows. It is winter - actually working up to Christmas - and Goldy is spending lots of time driving across the mountains in the snow.

I guess I understand something about the appeal of living in Colorado - but I am unable to perceive the charm of driving in snow. Snow is lovely seen through a picture window from the side of a roaring fire with a glass or cup of some warm beverage in hand, but it loses all its appeal the moment I have to open the door and set foot outside. Even reading about such things is sufficient to remind me of why I refer to all such places as "frozen northern wastelands."

Prime Cut by Diane Mott Davidson

Am I obsessing over titles? I do think they are important, and I suppose that is what irritates me when the title seems quite unrelated to the story. And perhaps that is one of the things I enjoy about Davidson. Her titles are puns and they always have a foodie connection which generally is well tied to the cooking which takes place in the story as well as a line on the actually motive, manner, or setting of the murder(s).

In this case, the setting is a photo shoot for an upscale catalog, and in addition to the photo allusion of film cutting, we could also consider the treatment of models as meat -- lean meat, but . . .

I do have a complaint, though. It appears that the entire population of Aspen Meadow has been victimized by a contractor who consistently defaults on jobs and deliberate damages things to create more work for himself - which he again defaults on. Has this community no Better Business Bureau? And does no one ever consult it? And who hires a contractor without asking around about the quality and timeliness of his work? And what kind of friends lie to their friends about things like that. Come on, Diane, in a town that size, a guy like the one in the story would never have gotten a second shot - however gratifying it was to make him the first victim.

Davidson also did a very neat bit of foreshadowing in this one. Early in the story, Goldy recounts the tales of local buried treasure which her then much younger son, Arch, insisted of digging for in their free time. And a buried treasure is the focus of the greed which precipitates the murders. Of course, Arch himself breaks the code in the cookbook and is responsible for finding the treasure.

Definitely a satisfactory story with lots of lovely food in it. And Julian is home! He hated Cornell and has come back to fill the void which his departure left in the Schulz family.

A Night Too Dark by Dana Stabenow

Just a trifle preachy. Not that I would argue with the text of the sermon - which appears to be on a text about the power of gold (both literal and metaphorical) to corrupt.

In a continuation of the previous story, the gold mine is changing everything about life in the park. There are none of the usual scenes of the community from the aunties and their current quilt to some congregation or other and their service to the belly-dancing class all at the Roadhouse. The community no longer gathers at the Roadhouse because it is overrun with mine workers.

One by one, the constants of Niniltna are falling - even the aunties. They no longer make the quilts which might symbolize the continuity of a way of life. Auntie Vi has sold her B & B to the mine for them to use as transient housing. Another of them is making cheap versions of the native costume to sell for souvenirs, another is serving fast food to the miners. To underscore the passing of life as we have known it for a whole bunch of stories, Old Sam dies; his passing is very like that of Ekaterina way back books and books ago - quietly, privately, without any fuss.

On the other side, Johnny and Vanessa have their first jobs working at the mine. Other younger members of the community are working because jobs are available because others have gone to work at the mine. Unfortunately, some of them are working as prostitutes and bootleggers.

Industrial espionage has come to the park and is the force behind the murders.

And, by the way, as far as I can tell the title has nothing whatsoever to do with the story. Perhaps I have read too many of these in too short a time, so it is a good thing that we have almost caught up with the current publishing year. Of course, besides that - school starts next week and there goes my reading time for the entire academic year! My latest Amazon order consisted of my textbooks for the coming term.

A Finer End by Deborah Crombie

I ordinarily wouldn't have read two books by Crombie (or anyone else) back to back, but I spent last evening in the emergency room - and couldn't connect to a wireless network to download the book I was reading on my desktop, so I had to read something that was already on my Kindle. By the way, everyone is going to be fine - even the dogs whose fight sent us to the emergency room.

This one was certainly different. I had read it before, but the parts I remembered, while central to the story in one way, were not really connected to the murders. I remembered the Lost Chant and that it was eventually discovered, but I had managed to forget all the murders and stuff.

I did not remember the supernatural angle at all. It was a complete surprise to me. Nothing like that has appeared in any of her previous novels - at least not in this series. The police investigation still went pretty normally, but the element of mysticism in many forms was an overlay to the whole thing. The artist painting over and over a face that she didn't know - the student of the Old Religion - the communication with the 800-year dead monk. And still the usual suspects - greed, passion, and guilt were fully present in their present-day guises. I suppose that setting the story in Glastonbury may have forced the issue.

The story took longer to coalesce that even the one immediately preceding it. We were fully 25% in before everyone who was introduced in a personal narrative was on the scene and more or less connected. Gemma and Duncan did not seem nearly as central to the story as usual. Of course, they were off their own "patch" or patches, now that Gemma is a full inspector with her own shop to run.

When they finally manage to get married, they will be bringing quite a lot of baggage to the business. There is Gemma's toddler son, Toby, who has been around since the first book. In the second book, Duncan inherits Jasmine's cat, Sid. In the book before this one, Duncan's ex-wife is killed - and he discovers that her eleven year old son, Kit, is actually his. In this one, we get a double. Gemma is pregnant, and finally gets around to telling Duncan - and she inherits a dog, a spaniel named Phoebe. Oh yes, Kit brings with him his dog, Tessa, which he rescued during the chaos and horror of his mother's murder and the investigation. That adds up to a fairly substantial household already. An adolescent, a toddler, an infant to be, two dogs, and a cat - I think they are going to have to find a house.

After the awful Americans in the Elizabeth George story, I was looking for references to Americans in this one, since Crombie, too, is an American writing in a British setting. There was one, but he was charming and slightly eccentric with a frequently mentioned hint of a Texas accent. Appropriate, considering that Crombie herself is a Texan.

Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie

I'm not sure what all the historical information about Isle of Dogs was for. I had never heard of it, and it was interesting, but I'm not sure how it really advanced the cause.

This was a generational thing, the animosities all began with shared guilt from the war years and the children evacuated from London. The scene where the children are being picked over like vegetables in the market was remarkably similar to the scene in the Kate Morton book The Distant Hours where the child of the story is left unpicked until the very end. I suppose that these are at least somewhat accurate representations of the events. It had never occurred to me to wonder how the children were actually placed when they arrived in villages across England. I had sort of vaguely assumed some sort of billeting system was in place. Apparently, they loaded the kids on buses and at their destinations they were treated rather like slaves at auction. Siblings were separated and the prettiest were chosen first. Since the evacuation plan had been in place for some time, I would have expected a little more organization at the receiving end, although in this story, the children were sent home from school with orders to be back in an hour to get on the buses. It made me remember the bomb drills at school during the fifties. We went to school on a military installation - we only had one type of drill - go out and get on buses. We were supposed to get on the buses by neighborhood, rather than grade, so our mothers could find us wherever we were taken, but I have to wonder how it would have ended up if it had ever come down to that.

The two stories are told in tandem rather than sequentially, which was a little confusing at first. It took a while for it to be clear that the people of the historical story were characters in the current time story. And this time Crombie started with that business of introducing all the characters separately each in his or her own little vignette, and I'm not sure she was completely successful in drawing everything into a tight narrative. With school starting next week, I guess I am getting a little impatient - I know that my reading time is going to be significantly shortened.

In the continuing saga, Duncan has gravely disappointed his newly discovered son, and Gemma has started piano lessons. Their relationship seems to have encountered complications which will require some redefinition.

A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George

I have a serious bone to pick with Ms. George, but first let me say that I enjoyed the story. She filled in a lot of back story without too much strain. Of course, the traditional format for a mystery story is to begin at the end with the discovery of the body and the narrative progresses as the cast and reader work through the whos and whys and sometimes the wheres, whens, and hows as well, so maybe it is logical to drop in back story as we go along as well. There is some major drama in Lynley's back story, but that is not unheard of. Sergeant Havers' tale is almost a parallel mystery, and George drops it as a bomb in the last chapter, although she has hinted at vague parallels to the investigation at hand.

Maybe some of the awkwardness in this story is a conscious attempt on George's part to set up a continuing cast for a series. Inspector Lynley's best friend, Simon St.James, is a forensic scientist - handy for a cop. He is also crippled - as a result of an auto accident in which Lynley was the driver - AND we first meet Lynley at St.James's wedding to the woman with whom Lynley is in love and was once engaged to marry. See what I mean about drama in the back story?

Then there is the fact that the gruesome murder happens in the village (in England, apparently, they don't have small towns) where St.James and his bride are staying on their honeymoon. I know England is a small country, but really!

I really don't have a problem with all that, but what is the deal with the ugly, stupid, obnoxious Americans? They appear with some regularity in British novels, but in this case although the setting is British, the author is American. Is she trying to convince a British readership that she is ok, even though she is an American because she despises Americans as much as they do? If these people contributed to the plot in any small way there might be some excuse for them, but they don't. Since they have no function with respect to the plot, it does rather leave hanging the question of the author's motive for including them. She has included a few British "types" as well, but in at least in the case of the proprietor of the inn (we'd call it a bed and breakfast) she makes it clear that the woman is putting on this eccentric Brit act to attract foreign tourists - like the ugly, stupid, obnoxious Americans whom she despises.

Speaking of ugly - I am curious (it has been years since I read these) about what George is going to do about Sergeant Havers. She has made the poor girl uncompromisingly ugly as well as bad tempered. We have now discovered the reason for her personality issues, and we can assume that with continued exposure to Lynley and his friends - who are really good people in spite of their aristocratic ancestry - she will learn to dress better and find a more flattering hairdo. (By the way, does anyone really believe that, even in this egalitarian day and age, the eighth earl of whatsit is really a cop?) But, back to my thread, George has made Barbara Havers physically ugly with piggy close-set eyes and a piggy little mouth in a doughy face and a shapeless body. How does she get around that in future stories?

I recalled that George's crimes are much darker and more perverse than the general run for this sort of thing. I know I have read this before, but remember that I don't remember. I was pretty sure what was going on in the main thread before very many chapters had passed. This story definitely has made me want to grab the next one immediately - if only to see if she continues with the stupid American routine and to see if/how she reforms Sergeant Havers.

Where Echoes Live by Marcia Muller

For a city girl, Sharon McCone can sure get into some weird stuff. "Echoes live" at a place that is a fictionalized version of Mono Lake with all of its grotesque tufa formations. And the precipitating activity is gold mining - or is it?

Sharon and her professor are back together, but drifting, and Sharon is facing some tough realities concerning her own character. She is haunted by the times that she could have, wanted to, and nearly killed a bad dude (go back and reread the last two, if you've forgotten). She didn't do it - but she really, really wanted to. Her mother, on a voyage of rediscovery herself, points out to Sharon that this might not make her the ideal partner for a Stanford professor who likes to put the world into nice neat categories.

Sharon gets off with only minor injuries this time; a subject she wished to question pushed her down a flight of stairs. On the other hand, the climax of the story is a scene worthy of the quotations from Revelations thrown about by the resident madman.

By the way, the kittens, Ralph and Alice, are thriving in Sharon's cottage. Sharon adopted Ralph and Alice after the demise of Watney (a souvenir of a very early case). They were the orphans of Ted the secretary's partner who died of AIDS. Her souvenir of this story is a little different.

I am looking forward with great anticipation to the point in time where Sharon can get a cell phone. Even with lack of towers and such in the wildernesses of northern California, it should be an improvement to having to drive down to the pay phone outside the bar in the nearest little town.

Oathbreakers by Mercedes Lackey

Part Two of Vows and Honor (some time last month). This held together better than the first book although even this was really two stories tied together by common characters. It certainly wasn't as episodic as The Oathbound, but it did read like two novellas rather than a single story.

Tarma and Kethry take their show on the road and join a mercenary company remarkably similar in general organization to Phelan's company in the Paksenarrion stories by Elizabeth Moon. The exiled nobleman leading Idra's Sunhawks is a woman and an exile by choice. We even have a magic sword to identify the rightful king.

The first story is a fairly standard mercenary company story. In the second, our pair, their wolf, and their battlesteeds are sent off to investigate the succession to the throne in the nearby kingdom of Rethwellan (that has come up before - the home of the traitor consort of Queen Selenay of Valdemar).

They get over by the border to Valdemar and meet a herald and his companion. Not just any herald - the heir to the throne of Valdemar. That places it outside the framework of the Arrows of the Queen series, since the heir is neither Selenay not Elspeth, but a fellow named Roald. He may fit into the Valdemar chronology somewhere, but I am not familiar with his name. I suppose someday I should read all those other Valdemar books. Probably should read all those Pern books, too. But it probably won't be any time real soon.

The Wandering Arm by Sharan Newman

Catherine finishes in fine form in this one. The beginning is a little rocky. In the opening scenes she is in labor with her first child, which is stillborn. She spends considerable time questioning her faith and her decisions. She is also called upon to question her faith in other contexts.

Her younger sister has rejected their father because he was born a Jew. Catherine she hates because, first of all, to her mind, Catherine received all the blessings and gifts - and always got her own way. Agnes has perverted that into a belief that the family (Agnes, herself) is being punished because Catherine rejected God (left the Paraclete/got her own away AGAIN).

Their mother has retreated from moral decision into madness and is confined to a convent. Hubert, their father, is tortured by his own sense of guilt and an almost hidden wish to return to the faith of his fathers.

Into all this stew, Hubert's much loved older brother, Eliazar, commits the worst crime a Jew can in a world dominated by the medieval Catholic church. Although inadvertently, he has converted a Christian to Judaism. This, if discovered, puts his family, and the entire Jewish community of Paris at risk. In fact, the risk is so great, that the Jewish community would have cast him out - or even put him to death and merely cast out the remainder of his family - if they had discovered.

Catherine is shaken to her core by this discovery, but by the end has regained her essential curiosity and a pragmatic faith that permits her to be aware of the physical cause of events, but to allow their interpretation as a miracle.

It is certainly an interesting view into the twelfth century mind. I think perhaps it fits with Arthur C. Clarke's observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In the twelfth century, it would be viewed from the other end and, admittedly, not specifically related to technology. But, phenomena unexplainable by current knowledge must be interpreted as magic (or miracle).

Whisper to the Blood by Dana Stabenow

I'm going to quit worrying about Stabenow's titles and their relationship to the story. I'm sure the connection exists in her mind and it is some failing in mine that keeps me from making the leap. They are extremely cool titles and their provenance is excellent. I have actually been reading some bits and pieces by Roethke - not bad stuff.

This story has its own murders and other crimes to be investigated, but its frame is the story left hanging in the last book. After exploring some of the most unlikely candidates in the park, the actual murderer is uncovered and confesses without even trying to escape or excuse his guilt.

In other matters, a company is setting up to mine gold and that has many unpleasant ramifications as far as the residents of the park in general and the Niniltna Native Association in particular are concerned. After the death of Billy Mike, perennial chairman of the board, Kate is forced to take a seat and is shanghaied into filling his term as chair. After being confirmed at the annual shareholders meeting, she proceeds to let the Aunties know what they have done. Things are changing in the NNA. Kate explains to them, "I told you I wasn't Emaa."

Wonder of wonders, neither Kate nor Mutt gets shot or otherwise damaged in this one. Shot at a couple of times, but not actually shot. And Mutt gets the opportunity to eat a chunk of another bad guy.

Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs

While there were some skeletonized remains here and there in the story, the bones from which the title pun originated were not among them. The bear bones that Boyd found had to go in the stinky autopsy room.

Boyd found them while at a barbecue which Katy had insisted that Tempe attend. All of this led to one of my favorite bits in this entire series. The discovery of putrefying remains effectively shut down the party, and to Katy demanding of her mother why she couldn't just bake cookies like other mothers. I keep telling my children that parents purpose in life is to embarrass their children.

I should quit reporting that I didn't remember much about one of the mysteries that I am rereading. I may remember more after this reading, partly because I do this writing, but more because I often discuss them with my sister who is also rereading. Actually, I consider my poor memory for the details of murder mysteries a gift. Because of it I can reread these stories. It would have spoiled the fun if I had remembered early on that Park is a common Korean name.

A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow

Doggone it! She needs to stop getting Mutt hurt! The last couple of times Mutt has gotten messed up, Kate has, too. This time it was just Mutt. We got a lot of back story on Mutt, though - about time.

When Kate returned from Anchorage after being almost killed by a violent child molester she holed up at her homestead and refused to come out. The aunties (and possibly Ekaterina, Kate's grandmother) decided that something had to be done. So they present her with a half-starved, mistreated puppy, and in saving her, Kate saves herself. Of course, a "tiny" puppy, as she is described several times, seems unlikely to grow up into a 140-pound dog. In my experience, large dogs tend to be large even as puppies. Details, details.

Stabenow's pattern does generally include the deserving victim and this one is exceptionally deserving. The murder victim is himself a known wife killer. He has married and murdered three very young women and been tried and found "not guilty" by reason of jury intimidation. Now he is setting up a fourth. And in case we miss the point, Stabenow has included the murders of the three young wives rather as she did the "hundred years ago" story several books back in The Singing of the Dead.

After that, things get complicated. And for the first time, this one ends without a solid resolution of the crime. We know who and why and how - but there is no nice neat march away to prison.

Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie

Here's a surprise - this time I had figured out who the murderer was - or at least who it ought to be. He was the only character who totally deserved to be the murderer. I also had guessed early on who the victim was going to be, the current victim, that is. There were others, going back over twenty years.

And the surprise connection in this book was the central position of Duncan's ex-wife and her son, but it turns out that Vic is a pretty decent person after all - as long as she isn't married to Duncan. Even Gemma likes her.

I trouble with time frame on this one. The precipitating events seem in the telling to be in the long past, but it wasn't all that long past. The dead poet died only five years in the past of the story. Her birthday is the same day as mine - and only a few years earlier. I guess all the discussion of her obsession with Rupert Brooke kept distracting me from the actual period of the back story. I don't remember quite so much silliness associated with the sixties - but I wasn't at Cambridge and I suppose college life at a small town cow college shouldn't be compared to such exalted heights.

It is hard to believe that a girl from deep in the heart of Texas writes with such authority in an British setting. I wonder how her stories go over in England. The end notes say that they sell well there. I once read a novel by a mystery writer who set his stories in my home area. I have seldom been so outraged by a piece of fiction. Maybe Crombie does legitimate research.

Grave Secrets by Kathy Reichs

Again, I remembered the scene setting at the beginning - both of them actually. The unearthing of the mass grave in the Guatemalan highlands was certainly memorable, and who could forget the body in the septic tank? Those were both drawn in so much detail that I remembered them as the openings of two different books. Actually, it turns out that, although everything is thoroughly entertwined, neither of those is the set up for the main thread of the story.

This one has it all - genocide, adultery, abuse of political power, obsession, mistaken identity, and murder for profit. Besides all that, this time Tempe is poisoned.

On the home front - almost all of the action takes place in Guatemala, just one quick trip to Montreal for a couple of reasons - one of which is some technology that is not available in the third world. The local cop with whom Tempe must deal turns out to be Ryan's old college buddy. And trust Ryan to find good reason to accompany Tempe back after her run to Montreal. Naturally, both of them are pursuing and Tempe is tempted.

Trophies and Dead Things by Marcia Muller

I do like Muller's stuff - and her titles. The "trophies and dead things" are from a poem by John Webster - a seventeenth century poet I'd never heard of. The connection is both symbolic and concrete - although the concrete is kind of out there. It does serve to give a sense of the true perversity of the central bad guy. He creates what he calls fetishes from the remains of dead birds and animals which he finds - fairly sick stuff. It may also be a reference to the futility of his attempt to create an image which will hide his true nature.

The roots of the mystery are again in the past - this time in the war protests of the sixties - certainly a period with enough comfusion and uncertainty to generate a mystery or two. In the cast we have some who served, some who ran to Canada, some who questioned, some who didn't, and some who were damaged beyond recovery. At the heart of it all - guilt on the part of those who were innocent and lack of guilt on the part of the truly guilty.

And - uncharacteristically for Muller - two separate "crimes" which only seem to be related. Usually it's the other way around - two seemingly unrelated crimes which turn out to be linked.

Thendara House by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Having reread The Shattered Chain, I wanted to go on and reread this one. I think it is a much stronger story. The Shattered Chain is actually several stories with overlapping characters with fairly wide time separations. The rescue of Melora and Jaelle from Shainsa and Jaelle's decision to stay with the Renunciates are really back-story to the main story, twelve years later, of Magda's mission to rescue Peter Haldane and her subsequent taking oath with the Renunciates.

Here we have the two women, one Darkovan and the other Terran "trading places" and each trying to find herself in the other's world.

Besides developing the characters Jaelle and Magda/Margali much more completely, this is the story in which Bradley really builds her image of the interaction between the contradictory societies of Darkover and the Terran Empire, and, in parallel, the contradictory natures and relationships between men and women, both trapped within the metaphorical chains placed on them by society and their upbringing. And all of that in the context of a really good story!

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

I bought the paperback a long time ago - the book came out in 2009, the paperback probably hit the shelves in 2010 - and I've probably had it since then. Everytime I picked it up I thought how inconvenient it was to read that many words in a book that thick. So I finally (after new kitties dumped it and another thick paperback in the dog's water dish) bought the kindle version yesterday.

This wasn't quite up to the level of The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons, but it was pretty good. He did telegraph the location of the secret in the very first pages, if not exactly what the secret was - but that was no real surprise. Even the secret identity of the madman was not a total shock.

There is, however, the moment when he lets the reader believe that he has killed Robert Langdon. That one was a bit of a shocker.

Comparisons aside, I enjoyed it - must have - since I read all six hundred plus pages since yesterday and even got a few other things done as well.

The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

My copy of this has a cover price of $.50 - what does that tell you? Actually, it is nowhere near an original copy. It is the 1963 printing. The original copyright for the collection is 1951, and the copyright dates of the individual stories go back to 1941. The book includes an abbreviated version of his "future history" timeline.

As time goes on - it is now fifty years since my copy of the book was printed and over sixty since it first came out - it is interesting to see how he anticipated and failed to anticipate. Heinlein consistently shows a deep contempt for the government and its functionaries, but he assumes somehow that technology and space exploration will be a high priority.

In all fairness, this was before an unmanned probe penetrated the "clouds" of Venus and discovered the completely inhospitable desert there, before men had walked on the face of the moon, and before long range probes made close observations of Mars. It isn't really fair to be amused by tales of the swamps and jungles of Venus.

It was also before women broke loose from "kinder, kuchen, kirche." I think he tried to understand the women's movement and the civil rights movement in later work but simply lacked the imagination in the direction of social structure to see their implications. Although his wife (the second one, I think) was also an engineer, his female characters still tend to be silly and superficial. The few that are not are terrifyingly efficient secretaries and such - in spite of the female radioman in "Delilah and the Spaceriggers." Even though Miss Gloria "Brooksie" McNye is quite good at her job, the point of the story is that since the commander can't legally get her off the space station, he brings on more women -- and a chaplain.

Still, I loved them at the time - and they are still good stories now.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

This isn't a very long book, and I have procrastinated for quite some time. A friend told me, "You must read this." But the whole thing just seemed so depressing that, even though I did buy the book, I let it sit for a long time. It turned up again in the current shuffle of stuff in the house and I decided that maybe I could at least open it and look at the first few pages.

Here's the general background. The "Last Lecture" series at Carnegie-Mellon (and I gather at other universities) is a mind game for professors. If they had only one last lecture, what would they tell their students. Randy Pausch was on the schedule for the series which at Carnegie-Mellon had been retitled "Journeys." For Pausch, at age 47, it was indeed his last lecture because he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He gave some statistics, most people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are dead within a year. Fewer than four percent make it five years. My father lived six years after his diagnosis, making him one of even a smaller group. Randy Pausch was not. He left a wife and three small children, the oldest only five years old.

This is quite possibly the most upbeat, positive piece of writing that I have ever encountered. He says it himself: it isn't about dying - it is about living - and specifically about teaching. After a sabbatical at Disney, he was offered his dream job - as a Disney Imagineer - and turned it down to return to his classroom. I read it through and then went to the web and watched the video of the actual lecture. I was in tears at the end - but it is truly inspirational.

The Shape of Dread by Marcia Muller

I like having the title actually referenced in the text of the story and the reference in this book is worth a quote here. "It was the amorphous shape of dread - that chimera that, once glimpsed, forever waits implacably in the shadows." Nicely said, deserves reading aloud, besides how can you resist a sentence which includes the words "amorphous," "chimera," and "implacably." You just have to love it when a writer of series murder slips and lets you know that she has a real vocabulary.

Sharon is poking around in a two-year-old crime. A young comedienne has disappeared and is presumed murdered. A young black man, Bobby Foster, has been convicted and awarded the death penalty. But one of the All Souls attorneys has taken on his appeal and something just doesn't seem quite kosher, so he coaxes Sharon to look into things.

The first issue is the lack of a body. Is Tracy dead or not? Her mom says she is alive, her father says she is dead. Bobby says that she is dead or she wouldn't have let him be convicted, because he didn't do it. We get to waffle on that for quite a large chunk of the book. But, as is customary in this sort of thing, all is made clear in the end.

Reading these gets you a pretty good dose of history and geography of San Francisco. I think it would be more appealing if I actually knew the city. It is enough to make me think it is a place I might like to know as well as Muller clearly does.

Mourn Not Your Dead by Deborah Crombie

Another cryptic title - and this time no cryptic quotation at the beginning to set the framework. Of course, the first murder victim in this story certainly did not merit any mourning, and this isn't always a feature of Crombie's mysteries, at least, Jasmine Dent in All Shall Be Well didn't deserve to be murdered.

The initial victim in this one is a cop, not just any cop, but a division commander. As the story moves on we see a lot of good cop/bad cop - but not in the usual TV sense of interrogation techniques. We have a cop who has gone bad as a cop. We have a cop who is a bad excuse for a human being. We see theft, extortion, brutality, and murder of a fellow officer. We also see a group of good honest cops and a cop that is truly good on all levels and apparently at all times.

Constable Will Darling is in many ways a surprising character to find in fiction of this type. His goodness is apparent when we first meet him - at the crime scene. It is customary to have a WPC - a woman - to "sit with" the victim's family. Gemma is a little grumpy because often there isn't a WPC and she has to fill in, even though she is a detective sergeant and very uncomfortable with that duty. They arrive to find PC Darling sitting with them, willingly and effectively. We learn quite a lot about PC Darling as he helps Gemma deal with her issues regarding her relationship with Duncan and with her own grief and guilt over the murder of a good friend - some of it from Darling himself, some of it from others. I would like to see him reappear in the series.

By the way, Gemma does work out her issues, although it took the entire book for her to get there.

The Devil's Door by Sharan Newman

These are decidedly more substantial than the other series mysteries that I have been reading, both in pages and content. The twelfth century was a tough place to live. I'm sure I'm getting heavy doses of history along with the story, but they don't seem to interfere. I know that some of the characters and events are real, but I'm not even sure where the line is.

Catherine is an appealing character - intelligent, curious, intuitive, and unabashedly in love with her new husband, that odd foreigner from a wild place called Scotland. She is also incurably clumsy - at least in part because when she is thinking out a problem, she forgets to watch where she steps.

The Le Vendeur family is complex. Hubert, Catherine's father, is the son of a Jewish merchant who was orphaned in one of the excesses of the Crusaders, who decided to start their killing before they got to the Holy Land. He was raised a Christian by a family that rescued him. He has never lost his connection with the surviving members of his birth family, in fact, he is in business with them. Catherine as a child was her father's pet and traveled with him and played with her Jewish cousins without knowing that they were relatives. Madeleine, Catherine's mother, discovered the truth of Hubert's birth and after that devoted her life to penance. When Catherine learns the truth, her reaction is very matter of fact - she is only surprised that she had not already realized it. Her sister, on the other hand, becomes hysterical and refuses to have anything further to do with either Catherine or her father. Accepting Newman's research as accurate (she does, after all, have a doctorate in Medieval Studies specializing in twelfth-century France), the level of interaction is certainly higher than I would have expected in the time and place.

In a way, reading these is like reading the better fantasy novels. Since I don't have a ready-made context for the story, it's necessary to just read and accept and let the context grow from and around the story. Somebody called it "suspending disbelief."

A Taint in the Blood by Dana Stabenow

I was beginning to think that the Jim and Mutt rescue was going to be a regular feature. They rode to the rescue in this one, too, but they were too late - Kate had already rescued herself. More like it.

The title is Roethke again, but at least this time it actually plays pretty well. We don't go back a hundred years for the roots of the crimes, as we did a couple back, only thirty, and most of the principals are still around - or at least they are at the beginning of the book. It's one of those family horror stories.

Almost the entire story takes place in Anchorage, a bit of a departure. Johnny is dumped with Auntie Vi. But it seems that adolescent boys are becoming a bit of a thing. Kate picks up a couple of them in Anchorage - she finds them on a park bench when she is out for a morning run. They have a home, but find it expedient to get out when their parents are drunk and fighting.

And, by the way, Kate has brought Jim to his knees, but he isn't quite ready to admit it yet.

The Grilling Season by Diane Mott Davidson

As always, nothing too deep here, but good fun. And, of course, lots of food - cooking and eating. Her recipes are way out of my depth, but they always sound so delicious! I am extremely reluctant to attempt a recipe with more than four or five ingredients, but I love the descriptions of the ingredients and the process and the final product. The mysteries aren't half bad either.

This time Goldy's abusive ex is the prime suspect in the murder of his current girlfriend (or one of them). Naturally, Goldy is the one to discover the body, and, also naturally, Arch want her to investigate and exonerate the jerk.

The background catering events are a Stanley Cup celebration (several months after the fact) at which many/most of the concerned parties are present - and at which Goldy is run down by one of the party attendees in the course of a hockey game (with players on rollerblades, since even in Colorado there is not much ice in August) - and a doll collectors convention - a specialized convention for collectors of a fashion doll resembling in all particulars the ever popular Barbie (in this setting called "Babsie"). There is something fundamentally perverse about collecting toys, not playing with them. Beyond Barbie, witness all those "action" figures for every movie targeting teens and younger. Most of them are carefully preserved in their original packaging by adults - Star Wars comes to mind.

I try not to accuse the writers of series mysteries of deep societal motivations and the use of symbolism. At one point, we were using a couple of mystery stories by a popular regional writer as our teaching novels. One day after discussing the cross-cultural symbolism in one of the books with my class, I realized that I had been teaching it too long. I was starting to see things that just weren't there. That said, I think that Davidson enjoys making fun of some of our sillier habits.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle

Okay, book club, could we rethink this? This was delightful. It is almost irresistible to describe it in the sort of ridiculous terms that are used throughout in discussion of wines. Never mind, I won't go there. It is full of likeable characters and the plot is solid with just enough gentle twists to keep you awake.

A young Englishman, all in a day, is fired from the job he hates and inherits a large house and small vineyard in France - and off he goes. The house and vineyard are neglected, but not hopelessly so, the wine is putrid - described in French by a waiter as "cat piss" - but Max and his friend have concocted a dream (not really quite a plan) of turning out the wine equivalent of a microbrew for the discerning vinophile.

We meet a beautiful and seductive lawyer, the rough-hewn manager of the vineyard and winery and his amorous dog, the beautiful and charming restauranteur, the solidly built and very loud (both vocally and in costume) housekeeper, the blonde and unexpected Cali-girl cousin, his almost incredibly English best friend, Charlie, and a scoundrel or two as well.

The scene at the village fete is a delight. The chunky, middle-aged, flamboyant housekeeper turns out to be a most accomplished dancer and dance teacher. The manager and his wife are competition level dancers. All to the strains of the paso doble performed by a local accordion band.

Everybody, but everybody, ends up happy - even the scoundrels decamp satisfied with their winnings to date. What's not to like? Several at the book club meeting reported that this or that person had said that this was their favorite book. I'm not sure I would go quite that far - but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Our last two book club selections have been of the sort that we generally thought were significant and definitely worth reading, but not a lot of fun. This was fun!

The Shattered Chain by Marion Zimmer Bradley

After being disappointed by Lackey's effort, I decided to go back and reread the Bradley that it reminded me of. Actually, this one precedes Thendara House. As I recall - and it has been a number of years since I undertook to reread Darkover - there are occasional references to the Free Amazons in other books, but these two are the only ones which deal with them directly. In this one, the Terran, Magdalen Lorne, is caught disguising herself as a Free Amazon and is required to take oath and make the deception a reality. In Thendara House, we have her year of training.

On Darkover we have the blend of science fiction and fantasy that has become fairly standard these days. McCaffrey's Pern and Shinn's Samaria are examples of the type. Humans have arrived on the world by ship in some unimaginably distant past and from there they have adapted and adapted the place into what is essentially a fantasy setting rather than a scientifically rational setting - but with that underlying sci fi premise. Pern's dragons and Shinn's angels along with Bradley's psi caste all have "rational" causes.

In The Shattered Chain, Bradley sheds light on two of Darkover's unexplored cultures - the barbaric desert dwellers of the Dry Lands and, of course, the Free Amazons. A high caste woman has hired a team of Free Amazons to go to the Dry Lands and rescue her cousin who was kidnapped some years earlier - and her twelve-year-old daughter who is at the age to be chained as all women of the society are.

This allows a great deal of consideration of the condition of women in the rest of Darkover and, by extension, in our society as well.

All The Difference by Kaira Rouda

Why did I decide to read this book? It is our book club book for next month. Why is it our book club book for next month? Because one of the members - the next one up, in fact, since we take turns alphabetically choosing the next book - found a box containing ten copies of this book on her doorstep. Sounds like kittens that we found on our doorstep in another time and another place. Apparently, she had signed up for something and had registered our book club as well - and here they came. Many books simply come with discussion questions for book clubs these days - and maybe this is an extension of that idea. It may also be a last ditch effort to sell an unsaleable item.

The blurb billed it as the stories of three women - I never could count them, but there were certainly more than three whose lives were improbably intertwined. Then there was the italicized abused child whose catastrophe (you could hardly call it a life) is interspersed throughout and is never clearly identified, although the reader is supposed to make an assumption.

It is written in the ADD point of view. The writer starts narrating about a character - when she encounters another character, she suddenly starts narrating from the new person's perspective. (OOOO, look, a bird!!) No one is to insignificant to have his or her thinking explicated on the page. For a women's story, the writer spends an awful lot of time in the minds of the men in the story, probably because she wants to leave absolutely no doubt about what complete sleazes they all are. Of course, the women are pretty petty and generally nasty, too.

The blurb also calls it a murder mystery which kept him/her guessing clear to the end. He/she must either be remarkably dense or an experienced blurber who no longer considers it necessary to actually read the book. The murderer is obvious from the beginning - well, actually from the middle, where the first murder occurs. Rouda does try to drag some red herrings across the trail, but with limited success.

There is a remarkable shortage of plot. There are lots of events, but not what I would consider an organized plot. The characters are shallow, one-dimensional, and universally unlikeable. The action is pointless. And, she uses make an model of car to define social status for everyone. I never read so many Lexus's and BMWs and Mercedes is a comparatively few pages in my entire life.

So - why was I up until four am finishing it? I think there were two reasons, first - I couldn't sleep anyway - and second - I was afraid that if I put it down, I would never pick it up again. Fortunately, our book club hostess for next month also gave us the title of the book she had intended to make her choice before she received these freebees. I think I still have enough money to purchase it immediately.

The Oathbound by Mercedes Lackey

Maybe this is cheating. The title belongs to the first half of a double entitled Vows and Honor, but I don't think I could get through the whole thing in one go. I'll give it a few weeks and see if I want to go back for the other half. I found it in a box, out where I have been going through boxes and trying to thin things out. I don't think it had ever been read. Part of my problem with it, of course, is that it is on paper, and that is so much more difficult to read - even with my new eyes. I've gotten used to being able to read and do something else with my hands at the same time - and back in the day, my reading distance was a lot more flexible.

Never mind. Now, about the book. It is set in the Valdemar universe, but in a different part of the world, so we run into magic and critters than do not inhabit the Valdemar stories beyond a few allusions. I don't really have a problem with that, but I think it could have been better set in a world of its own. And we have the mismatched sworn pair of a swordswoman, Tarma, and a sorceress, Kethry, the whole business vaguely reminiscent of Bradley's Order of Renunciates (AKA Free Amazons) on Darkover and the mismatched pair in Thendara House.

Part of the problem is that the original story was published in an anthology under Bradley's name called Sword and Sorceress, the first of such anthologies, which now number nineteen. A second story about the pair appears in the fourth of these anthologies. This pair of books is set in the period between those two stories, but unless you happened to have gotten hold of that first anthology (which came out in 1986 and is now out of print, but is probably somewhere in my father's vast collection), you don't really know how the story started.

Another problem is that it doesn't really hold together as a novel. It is so episodic that each chapter could almost, but not quite, stand alone. It is still good - it just isn't up to Lackey's best. It is a little uncomfortable to read a book by a writer some of whose work you have reread routinely for years and find it wanting. I suppose nobody hits a home run every time they are at bat.

There's Something in a Sunday by Marcia Muller

After that gently paced non-mystery story by Mankell, this one was like an overdose of caffeine. Muller does tend to start out quickly and accelerate all the way to the conclusion. No time (or print) wasted on introspection - well, maybe a few pages were spent musing on her defunct relationship, but she was driving down the highway to confront a potential murderer at the time.

I like the way Muller keeps Sharon's personal life off the front page. It isn't that I don't like the ones - like Stabenow - where the detective's life is more of the story than the mystery itself. But this is nice, too. Sharon's break-up with DJ Don happened between books, although it was clear in the previous one that the sparkle had gone out of the relationship. Same with previous boyfriend, Lt. Marcus - in one book they were and in the next they weren't. No boyfriend at all in this book - which is all good, because the entire story was about a whole crowd of disfunctional relationships.

I don't think I've read anything lately in which they carted quite so many people off to jail at the end. The murders were committed by -- but maybe I shouldn't spill that much - and I guess one of them didn't exactly go to jail, but was committed to a psychiatric facility. Lots of fun.