Death Du Jour by Kathy Reichs

Interesting. There are two distinct plot layers and they only obliquely get tied together, both related to religion - maybe there are more connections than I thought.

The background plot is the one I remembered. This one opens the book as Tempe digs through the dirt beneath the floor in a long abandoned Catholic church for the remains of a nun buried there. The body needs to be found and identified so they can proceed with the process of her beatification. I'm not sure why they have to have the body to make her a saint, but that's why they are digging her up. Only (of course) she wasn't where she was supposed to be - you'd think that dead people would just stay where you bury them, but it doesn't work out that way much in stories in this genre.

Did I forget to mention that it is March - Spring in North Carolina, in Montreal, not so much. Finally, it occurs to Tempe to ask the World's Oldest Living Nun (who is ferrying hot tea out to them) if she knows anything about the situation. "Oh, yeah," she says. "They were doing something or other about something back in 1911 and moved her." Sure enough, old nun was right on target and they find the would-be saint.

Everything is dug out and boxed up and sent to the lab. Where the next day Tempe begins sifting and sorting through everything. She picks up the skull and looks at it and says, "Uh oh." She calls a colleague over to take a look. He says, "Uh oh." And that is the end of that for another two hundred pages.

I'm going to definitely have to watch out for that sort of thing. Kind of a cheesy trick, but it worked - on me, at least. Every time Elizabeth Nicolet was mentioned I would speculate again about what the big "uh oh" could possibly be. I actually had guessed, but it might not have been as obvious to a reader twenty years ago.

The main plot has to do with a bizarre and murderous cult, which, curiously, had branches in North Carolina and Montreal. That was one of the oddest things about this bunch was that the guy that you assume is the big bad turns out to be just the local franchisee, very odd.

Now for a brief look at the important part, the continuing story. It is clear that the Tempe/Ryan thing is going to happen. In the first one Tempe's girlhood friend, Gabby, falls victim to the serial killer. In this one Tempe's sister, Harry, is the victim - but Tempe saves her in time. And - Tempe's cat is not dead - I figure there is enough angst in this one without leaving you in suspense on that point.

Leave a Message for Willie by Marcia Muller

I've just been considering whether or not this book follows the pattern that I think I have discovered. I think it does. The murderer(s) appear early and innocuously. This time we have flea markets, stolen Torahs, and survivalists, which add up to a rather odd mixture. I don't recall a trigger event or phrase, but there was the session of almost free association which results in the full solution. The title comes from a near fatal game of phone tag. Hard to believe that the cell phone was not the essential appendage that it appears to be today.

New boyfriend, Don, is moving to San Francisco and that is much too close for Sharon's comfort. So the eventual demise of the relationship is already in place. Seems like the boyfriend that hangs around the longest is also in the PI racket - and tends to disappear for long periods of time. I'm not certain of that, of course, but that's what I think I remember. Then too, there are the ten years of books that I haven't read ---

Games to Keep the Dark Away by Marcia Muller

Good thing I've got the next one handy. It seems strange, but I really didn't remember this one either. You'd think that if I own them on paper, I must have read them at some time but it doesn't seem like it. I think I remember New Boyfriend being or becoming ex-boyfriend. I remember Greg Marcus being ancient history, but I don't remember the book where they met or the one where they were together.

Sharon gets out of the city proper this time - and about time - or there would be no one left alive down in her neighborhood. She is off down the coast to a fishing village that didn't quite make the transition to industrialization - a place where nobody wants to be and nobody seems to be able to leave. A place where she spent a summer vacation with a friend as a child - back when it was a thriving concern.

I may be seeing a pattern emerging. We meet the murderer very early in the story in some innocent role and the motive only surfaces after much investigation - and after a session of "meditation" on the known facts after something triggers something which shuffles all the pieces into place in Sharon's mind. It could also be part of the pattern that not all the victims are all that innocent either. I rather like "deserving victim" story - although it can make the list of potential suspects unmanageably long. That problem is often handled by having almost everyone at choir practice - or something from which their absence would be noted.

I'm still enjoying them - but the one after the next one I don't have, so I may go dig out early Kathy Reichs or something - or finish reading Cleopatra - or something -- just until payday!

The Cheshire Cat's Eye by Marcia Muller

Maybe a measure of this sort of writing is how many can I read back to back before I have to take a break. I am quite ready to start on another one of these. And I won't even have to buy it. I pulled her books off the shelf this afternoon. I have thirteen of the twenty-nine Sharon McCone books and three from the other two much shorter series. There are a few missing, on the other hand, we apparently quit buying them in 2000 or thereabouts, because the last one I have is the 1999 book. That leaves only five of the first twenty missing - since I only had one of the first three (which are on my Kindle) on paper. The reading won't be as easy, but it will be significantly cheaper!

I thought Sharon was moving! She still seems to be at the same address, although the apartment seems to be a bit upscaled since the last book. Maybe after her friend Linnea got through burning the furniture and barfing all over the place, Sharon was forced to replace some things. She did manage to get to bed with Lieutenant Marcus, though. The cat she inherited in the previous book is still a presence.

This one is about what I think is called gentrification. The old Victorians for which San Francisco is known are cycling to the top of the wheel again, after being chopped up into apartments. Unfortunately some of those who are dispossessed of their homes are less than happy. There is some nice explanation of the types of Victorian houses and some history of San Francisco. I had no idea that, in the effort to block the fires that were destroying the city after the great 1906 earthquake, they dynamited whole streets of some of the most luxurious homes. I guess I did know that it was not the earthquake directly that did so much damage but the fires from the broken gas mains, rather in the manner that it was not the hurricane itself that came so close to destroying New Orleans, but the storm surge that broke the levee and the subsequent flooding.

The title refers to a Tiffany lamp of a unique design, and the mystery turns on the misinterpretation of a phrase. There was some of that in something else that I read recently, but I can't remember which one it was, though ---

Ask the Cards a Question by Marcia Muller

"Read a book every day" was really a joke, at least I thought it was. People kept asking me what I was going to do this summer and I finally came up with "I'm going to read a book every day." I can't believe I'm already getting tired of it - I guess that isn't exactly true either. I'm getting tired of writing them up - and it is getting easier for me to pick out flaws. So I'm going to try writing them up much more briefly. I didn't start this record to write substantive commentary on the light fiction that constitutes 90% (ok, 98%) of my reading. I didn't even start it to write substantive commentary on the rare things that I read that are not light fiction.

Of course, if becoming better at picking out the flaws in my usual fare, series fiction - murder, SF, and fantasy, meant that I was reading and enjoying serious writing and non-fiction more it might be a good thing. But I don't really think that is happening. I am, perhaps, reading a little more serious stuff because I am mildly embarrassed to admit that what I really enjoy is this kind of stuff - but I still have not deep and compelling drive to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables or that recent biography of Einstein. I am finding myself rather captivated by that new book on Cleopatra - but I have it on paper and that slows me down.

I am going to quit rationalizing and get on with it. If I must have some greater purpose than simply rereading all these series from the beginning than just because it is fun, I will try to figure out why it is that I enjoy reading and rereading them rather than picking them apart. And maybe I will read the second of Stabenow's SF novels after all.

As for this book (the second of the Sharon McCone books by Marcia Muller - in case we have all forgotten by now), I enjoyed it. I didn't remember it at all, except the title, and for that reason I'm reasonably sure that I have read it before. I'm certainly glad that I don't have that total recall disorder that the heroine of And She Was has.

Sharon's odd relationship with police detective Greg Marcus is entertaining and leaves me willing to read the next one immediately to see where it goes from here. I seem vaguely to remember from later books in the series that it all ended badly. The crime which sets the murders in motion in this one points up an almost Biblical moral - money, and covering up the criminal enterprise by which a rather large number of characters in the story are gaining it, is sufficient to "justify" two (almost three) murders and results in the deaths of three others. In And She Was, the entire sequence of events was set in motion by an attempt to cover up an affair by someone highly placed.

Maybe it is like a dramatic operatic device. In La Boheme, one of the four starving artists has sold a painting, and they are celebrating with great joy and silliness. That may be the only purely happy moment in the entire opera. As they celebrate, there is a knock on the door - and Musetta is there to tell them that Mimi is lying at the bottom of the stairs dying. The contrast is shocking and heightens the effect of the final tragedy. In these two murder mysteries, at least, a certain amount of the horror of the murders is the cause which provokes them.

Stop - erase the last paragraph!! I said I wouldn't pontificate any more!!

And She Was by Alison Gaylin

I will definitely be reading the sequel to this one. I was a afraid that the perfect recall thing might be a little too gimmicky, but Gaylin handled it well. It is well imbedded in the story, but I am not totally convinced that it is essential to it. The whole thing is so fast paced that I didn't have time to consider whether or not someone intelligent and insightful might accomplish the same things without the trick memory. Actually in most cases, the memory was a problem for Brenna rather than a help. It did reduce her need for telephone directories and GPS systems, though. I'm trying to imagine a perfect career for someone with perfect recall - not merely an eidetic memory, Lisbeth Salander has that - but perfect recall.

The mystery was engaging, with a monster that reminds me of Salander's evil half-brother whose strings were being pulled by another monster in the background. Maybe I am seeing these parallels because I just watched the first two Millenium movies again.

The crimes seem to spiral in around an incident in the past, the disappearance of a child, but there are motivations and events which have grown all around it. This draws Brenna, whose speciality as a PI is missing persons, because the central event of her childhood was the disappearance of her own sister. This event echoes through Brenna's investigation.

The only thing I found really predictable is the developing romance between Brenna and the cop. Saw that coming a mile away.

Second Star by Dana Stabenow

After my comments on the previous Kate Shugak book, I decided to investigate first hand and determine if Stabenow's SF efforts are in fact an undiscovered gem. The endnotes say "Her first science fiction novel, Second Star, sank without a trace, ..." and go on to tout her success in the mystery and thriller genres. I would say that it justifiably sank ... - I can only conclude that her success in the other genres is the only thing that got her two sequels to this book published.

About the best I can say for it is that she took the masters as her models. Her space station is very heavily based on Clarke's Rama space traveler. One of the plots is clearly based on Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and not just the one of the sentient computer, here Archy (from archy and mehitabel) instead of Mike (from Mycroft Holmes).

Whole incidents are lifted - the formation of the government at Copernicus on the moon is almost plagiarized from Heinlein, down to the reason for the one vote against "I've always felt that if everyone is for a thing, there has to be something wrong with it. So I voted against it."

She continues her homage to her friends and relatives (I assume) in the names that appear in this book. Since it was a bust, she reused them freely in the Kate Shugak books. Marisol made an appearance as the derelict "no-namer" in the Shugak book I just finished, and Kate herself is a minor character in this effort. Star's sister, Charlie, is the spitting image of Kate Shugak. All that is forgiveable.

It think the fatal problem with the book is that it is boring. Derivative, I can excuse; pedantic, not so much. My father's fatal flaw in writing fantasy and science fiction was that he was determined that everyone should see what he saw and described and explained his stories to a dusty death. Stabenow, in this effort, falls victim to the same syndrome - with a heavy side dose of "baffle them with bullshit." She confesses in the foreword to falling into Heinlein's definition of a subhuman - "one who cannot cope with mathematics" - and then proceeds to innundate the reader with pseudo-engineering. Inevitably, one of the problems of leaning heavily on engineering to support a story is that within twenty minutes of publication the parameters have all changed, and within a remarkably short period of time all that tech talk/explanation/description just sound silly - especially when they are largely founded on bs to begin with.

The other major issue with this book is the lack of plot focus. Had I neglected to mention that she has thrown in a first contact scenario in addition to the military take-over of the habitat and the sentient computer? And that she allows the heroine to calmly send her seven-year-old niece and two kittens off with the alien entity without even consulting or informing the child's parents? And then there is the romantic subplot (very sub, barely romantic) - we come away uncertain whether her lover/husband-to-be even goes along on the next adventure - out to mine the asteroids.

I suppose it is unreasonable to complain. The mysteries are lots of fun - and I will probably give the thrillers a try at some point. I don't think I am likely to read the other two books in this series. After all, like Stabenow, I have already read the classics of SF.

Killing Grounds by Dana Stabenow

Although Stabenow's run at writing science fiction was less than successful, she betrays her affection for the genre in her murder mysteries. There are frequent allusions and references to and quotations from the classics, in this one, Heinlein. And then there's Star Wars. We have a pair of preteen sisters whose sole contribution to the story is their obsession with Star Wars. We first meet them as their mother admonishes them in Yoda-ese, because, she explains, when they are on a tear, that is the only way they will listen to anything she says. Add to that the fact that she is a Presbyterian minister (a sign of progress, Baptists may be the only ones left who don't allow women in the pulpit) who gets to take the summer off, every summer. That seems significantly improbable to me. I don't know much about Alaska, but I am fairly familiar with the functioning of mainstream Protestant churches.

While the Star Wars thing is the contribution of the daughters, the mother/minister has another function in the story of Kate Shugak. In all of these books there have been references to earlier stories, but this time an earlier story actually plays a role in the action of the current story. It isn't a direct line, but Kate's thinking and the consequences thereof are a result of the characters and events of the earlier story. I guess I am too accustomed to try and avoid direct information about the stories in these posts, I shall attempt to address this a little less obliquely. About three books back Kate encounters a fanatical fundamentalist cult led by a truly evil man - who escapes essentially unpunished. When Kate encounters the minister in this story, reacts badly - even rudely - and one of her elders takes her to task for it - by throwing her overboard and allowing her to walk back soaking wet.

She spends a lot of time in this book soaking wet - fortunately, it is high summer in Alaska, not late fall as in the one in which she goes undercover on a crab boat and is thrown overboard. This time we get a good look at the salmon industry - commercial fishing vs sport fishing vs subsistence fishing - along with a simplified course in the political and financial issues governing it.

What I missed in this one was any hint of the mysticism which has faintly colored these stories - unless - one of the sets of voices she hears when she is recovering from her last and most nearly fatal dunking actually belongs to her grandmother Ekaterina and her associates rather than the minister and her daughters, Jack and his son, and the four aunties. I reviewed that section and I don't think it is - I think it is one of the aunties. Oh well, I am nowhere near the end of this series so it may resurface.

Friends in High Places by Donna Leon

Although Raffi and Chiara are on the set for only a few pages in this book, they connect the theme of the whole story as Brunetti continually connects criminals, victims, and events to them in his thinking.

The first criminal is Vice Questore Patta's son Roberto. He is picked up in a raid on a club with sale weight of Ecstacy. Roberto is only a few years older than Raffi. Patta comes to Brunetti begging his assistance in rescuing his son from the consequences of his crime. From that point there is a recurring theme of young people, drugs, drug dealers and gray areas, such as the club owner, an old friend of Brunetti, who escapes consequences because he has goons prevent patrons from leaving his premises while incapacitated. The police give him a pass because they do not have to go clean up as many fatal auto accidents, parents of the young people prefer having them held overnight to attending to their funerals, and everyone comes away a winner.

From there we move on to the murder of an honest housing inspector - a phenomenon anywhere, but particularly so in Venice where public corruption is a centuries old institution. He is connected to Brunetti because the construction which added their apartment to its building was done without recourse to permits or any such formality - long before the Brunetti's purchased it - and in order to correct the problem, it may have to be destroyed.

When the issue of the apartment arises, all readers familiar with the series immediately assume that the Brunettis will call on Paola's father, Count Falier, who knows everyone and can fix such trivial problems with a mere word over a glass of wine. But Brunetti does not want to be indebted to the Count to that extent and proposes to handle the problem himself - in proper Venetian fashion by calling on his own friends who owe him favors.

The title theme continues as Patta calls on friends of his own to make the rock solid evidence against his son melt away - along with evidence which would have punished those responsible for the death of a gifted young architecture student.

The final level involves a family descended from 14th century nobility to the point that nothing exists of their "nobility," except the name itself and their own self-aggrandizement, which lead to truly horrific consequences.

Killer Pancake by Diane Mott Davidson

I don't think I had read this one before. There were a couple of incidents that I really think I would have remembered - like the body falling out of the wall in the department store - and Julian having a serious girlfriend (although she only lasted a few pages). More significant to the way my memory works for series fiction though is the "new marriage" uncertainty that is laced through the whole story. The previous book in the series, The Last Suppers, was set around Goldy and Tom's delayed wedding and Tom's kidnapping. I remembered the kidnapping and the wedding craziness, but very little about the crimes and the story behind them.

In this one, the marriage is just a couple of months old and while there is some of the "newly wedded bliss" that one would expect, Davidson concentrates on another and very realistic aspect of "new marriage" which is generally overlooked. Of course, Tom and Goldy are "non-trads" where marriage is concerned. Tom, in his mid to late thirties, has never married, and Goldy is the survivor of a brutally abusive marriage. Davidson makes it clear that they love each other very much, and that they never fear that an argument is going to be the end of it - but she deals with the day to day uncertainties of a new marriage. Goldy spent the years after the end of her first marriage redefining her life as her own, and now she is consciously redefining again - from "mine" to "ours." Davidson captures the inevitable ambivalence of a woman who has, with considerable effort, learned to set her own boundaries and create her own life on her own terms resetting those boundaries in terms of a new relationship.

Her uncertainties lead her into error in both directions. Overconfidence in her new life makes her careless with security which leaves her open to an attack by her vicious ex who comes to pick up Arch for his weekend. Lack of confidence makes her unwilling to share with Tom some of the critical incidents that might have saved problems.

Maybe a part of the reason that I remember the extended background story and not the crimes in these books is that the background story has substance (compared, for example, to the "recipe" mysteries by Joanne Fluke) and the crimes often originate in motives which are very human and trivial to anyone besides the criminal him/herself. That might also account for the fact that Hannah and her silliness are beginning to annoy me, but Goldy and company are definitely not.

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell

Wallander struggles with this one - and with his personal life. We have a serial killer who believes that he is channeling both Geronimo and J.Edgar Hoover - and the serial killer is not the kind of killer that our hero is comfortable running to earth. And for that reason he keeps running after red herrings - I believe that metaphor is sufficiently mixed.

On the personal side, daughter Linda is changing directions again and if one has read the rest of the titles in the series, it is clear that sooner or later she is going to circle around to her father's line of work - although I am not willing to guess whether they set up as PIs or she becomes a cop. Also, Kurt is scheduled to go on holiday with Baiba. He is afraid that the case will prevent him from leaving - and he refuses to return her calls because he can't figure out how to tell her that this is a possibility. His father has an "episode" and he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He asks a final favor of Wallander - a visit to Italy.

The killer has chosen to name himself after J.Edgar and imagines that Geronimo speaks to him. This is the first language misstep that I have noticed in this series. He names himself "Hoover." No one in Sweden seems to think it is funny - they think it is an unusual name - but that is it. So it probably made no difference at all there. Here, I think most people, even those of us who remember J.Edgar as the head of the FBI, think of vacuum cleaners when we encounter the name. It is a bit jarring in situations that are in no way amusing.

The title is tied to Wallander's sense from the very beginning that he is missing something and that this oversight is taking him in the wrong direction. In this book the murders are clearly tied together by the MO, but there are also pronounced differences which lead them away from the primary connection between the victims. We finally in this book see Wallander as a philosophical cop who expands the evidence into a theory which he must then convince others to buy into - in spite of the lack of direct evidence. He pieces fragments together into a compelling scenario, and saves the killer's last intended victims - Wallander himself and his daughter Linda.

Affairs of Steak by Julie Hyzy

Still fun, although this time the title food does not figure at all - except as a means to a pun. "Affairs" is the keyword in this title. It also suffered from the emphasis on a commercial kitchen tool(?)/appliance(?) that I had never heard of and had a great deal of difficulty visualizing from the description, a tilt skillet. It seems that a tilt skillet is a really big rectangular lidded cooking pot mounted on its own base with its own independent heat source, either gas or electric. It was unclear to me that the thing actually tilts, but maybe that is something you only know if you are in the biz. You may have figured out where this is heading - the first two bodies were stuffed inside a pair of these things in the kitchen at the venue selected for a major administration function which Ollie and the unlikeable Peter Sargeant are checking out.

Since the two victims are the ones who would logically be planning and facilitating the event, Ollie and Sargeant are put in charge. So Ollie and her sworn enemy are jointly in charge of the operation, under the supervision of the second string staff manager (I can't remember his actual title at the moment) and he is a dubious value because he has only worked under the supervision of the retiring manager.

We also have the obnoxious personal chef for the First Family, whose mission seems to be to discredit Ollie and --- it isn't clear what he wants, because he does not seem to want to have her job - only to have her out of it. In the interests of promoting himself, he commits some rather serious security faux pas (whatever the plural of that is), and is left wading through eggshells at the end, no doubt set up to be the primary irritant in the next one, since Ollie and the insensitive sensitivity officer, Sargeant, have arrived at a position of mutual respect by the end of the book.

Also, Ollie's relationship with her new Secret Service boyfriend is actually established by the end of the book, rather than dangling in an indefinite state. The crimes are resolved with satisfying definitiveness and everyone lives happily ever after, except for the ones that are dead and those whose are happier when unhappy.

Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs

It's been a long time since I first read this one. My then stand partner in the then still extant symphony orchestra, was working on a master's in forensic anthropology and recommended it (and the others already written) very highly. I thought that her recommendation ought to count.

I've recently read a fairly recent one (Devil Bones) and have to grant that it was much more polished than this one. Tempe and her cast of associates are very much still under development. The science is laid on thick, not a bad thing at all, but the transitions between frantic, furious Tempe and Tempe the scientist are a little abrupt. But all of that is to be expected in the beginning.

The science points to a serial killer that the overt evidence does not necessarily indicate and the persistent conflict in the book is between Tempe and officers of the two involved branches of the police in Montreal who are not willing to crawl out on that particular limb. And let us not forget the charming and enthusiastic cadaver dog, Margot - she was willing to go the distance with Tempe!

A good many of the Tempe/police confrontations arise from her insistence to "run and find out" for herself, when the cops don't step up as quickly as she thinks they should. A nice bit of irony is that when the killer comes for Tempe, she is doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. And another thing I like about that part is that Tempe saves herself, instead of having Ryan and Claudel burst in at the last moment to save her. Speaking of whom, Claudel is just a bit too sexist and condescending and Ryan is just a bit too gorgeous - and Brennan just a little too appreciative of said gorgeousness - to fit in with the story progress, but still a minor problem.

I have always liked that Tempe is fortyish and concerned about aging, but I thought that her daughter Katy was younger at the beginning - she is already in college - and preparing to drop out and follow a rock band to Europe.

Reichs does like her critters. Bird the cat is very much a presence, and, honestly, Margot the cadaver dog has more personality that any of the police officers. And there is Alsa, the murdered capuchin monkey, the sense of mourning for Alsa seems more real than for any of the murdered women.

On rereading in the context of a significant series, it still presents as a very strong beginning.

Cherry Cheesecake Murder by Joanne Fluke

I might have dropped this series if I weren't reading so many others at the same time. They are rather predictable and fluffy, but the recipes really sound good. And they are predictable and fluffy, which occasionally is a good thing.

Recall from the previous one that Hannah's swains have both proposed and she is stringing them along. So, under pressure from all and sundry, she tells them both "no," but don't listen too closely - she is still stringing both of them along. And a new man comes along in the form of an old college friend, now a movie producer, who is making a film in Lake Eden.

The film has a remarkably uninspired name and a stereotypically vile Hollywood director who, much to everyone's relief, is the murder victim. Like the conductor in the last Donna Leon book, everyone concedes that he is a genius, but knows that he is a truly rotten person.

As usual, Mike forbids Hannah to investigate, but she does so anyway with her team of sisters and little old ladies and the dentist. Her niece and cat get feature roles in the movie, and she may have finally discovered a way to keep the eternally hungry Moishe out of the cat chow.

The Righteous by Michael Wallace

I know that Amazon uses their Kindle specials to push new and/or unknown writers - and generally I don't mind. I'm not sure I mind this time. I think it is more a case this time that this trilogy isn't really my sort of thing - right now I'm not sure if I want to read the other two.

I suppose that fundamentally they are thrillers not mysteries - and pretty brutal in spots - like the scene in the first few pages where the bads rip the first victim's tongue out before they cut her throat. The remainder of the murders are gruesome as well - and those that happen "off stage" are described in great detail.

The setting is among the outlawed polygamist Mormon groups scattered around Utah and other areas with more land than population. It is interesting in that it takes on one of the most fundamental problems with a social order arranged around polygamy - what about the extra young men? As I understand it, the original vision or whatever making polygamy the order of the church arose from the charisma of the leader, Brigham Young, who attracted many more women followers than men. Since they had already adopted a fixed patriarchal order wherein women could only be admitted to heaven if they were married, it followed that the faithful must take up the slack by marrying all those extra women. However, as procreation followed its natural course, the numbers evened out - and now they had a surplus of young men. In many such societies, that problem is handled by war and other things frequently fatal to young men, but the Mormon church did not have recourse to a handy little war. I suspect that when the government came after them to give up the practice, most thinking members of their leadership were thinking, "What took them so long?"

According to this writer, what happened to those loosely connected communities which refused to give up the practice was that they simply kicked out the surplus boys. As told in this story, they would select the "likeliest" - the brightest, the best looking, the most athletic - and put the others out on the road. He compares it to a pride of lions and the roving bands of bachelors.

Throw into the mix a couple a rather nasty eugenics programs and a little tax fraud, a few drug induced visions, and some really warped conditioning - and there you have it.

I may come back to Book 2 - in spite of it all, he produced a couple of rather appealing characters - but not just yet. I think I need to read another cozy cookbook mystery - or a dozen - first.

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

Finally, after all these years - the first one of the Brunetti books by Donna Leon. It was interesting in the context of the series to see some of the development of the character of Brunetti and supporting cast. It is a little more heavy-handed in its handling of the veniality of the police and others of authority, but she clearly lays out the contradiction of Brunetti's mind. He is a man who is interested in justice, far more than the law. This certainly plays out in this story. Although I suppose he reports the truth to his technical superiors, it is far from the whole truth.

His contempt for his supervisor, Vice Questore Patta, is not muted at all. And Patta's office definitely suffers because he has not yet hired the amazing Signorina Elettra. Several of the regular cops have not made the scene yet. Brunetti has to manage with the "assistance" of two foreigners (nonVenetians), who seem to be drawn from the stereotypical American cop - more interested in doughnuts (brioche) and coffee than in the crime.

Then there is Brunetti's relationship with his in-laws. By the time of the latest of the books that I have read, their interactions seem fairly normal. In this one, we learn that that is a recent change. Brunetti does not visit them except for two ceremonial occasions every year even though he and Paola have been married for twenty years, and although his children and Paola are frequent visitors to the Palazzo and enjoy their company. It is too simple to simply chalk it up to the social distance between even a fairly high ranking police officer and the traditional Venetian nobility, but that is a fair starting place. After twenty years, Brunetti finally realizes that "that sort of people" have access to people and information that he does not.

Another thing: in this book Leon introduces two characters which she brings back in a later story: the opera singer Flavia Petrelli and her companion, American Brett Lynch. There are the recurring characters of the background setting, of course, but these are different. And I believe that when they return they are central to the crime. Of course, at the moment, I have no idea which one of the books that is. This is the gift that enables me to reread murder mysteries with enjoyment - I never remember who done it ---

Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

The end notes state that the author is claiming as virtue her complete ignorance of the fantasy "canon." The virtue, of course, is not being driven by the traditional/conventional devices of the genre. The pitfall is, of course, that she is left vulnerable to all the cliches which she does not know to avoid. A minefield without a map. It is possible that she missed one or two of them, but not many - although, there are no dragons.

The experienced fantasy reader will have spotted all the hidden characters and decoded the totally cliche mystic prophecy and all the micro plots within the first few chapters. Given all that, it still read pretty well up to the last ten percent. At that point, I got the feeling that she had lost control of the story. She had finished all the action, but had neglected to get the two main characters in bed - or at least definitively headed in that direction. So rather than going back and embedding that in the main story line, she meanders around for much too long rather than just getting to the point - "and they got married and lived happily ever after." After several hundred pages of high drama - all of a sudden we are confronted with a cliche scene with the heavy duty fantasy standard of the symbolic crone, matron, and maiden (or Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) leading somehow to an utterly ridiculous comic declaration scene, from which she tries to go directly to the heights for the finale. It worked for Puccini in La Boheme, but here, not so much.

Now, after all that crabbing, it was mostly a good read. Those fantasy quest addicts who blasted through all of the Shannara books and other derivatives of derivatives will probably love it. It seems that it won awards in Australia - the land of its birth. Perhaps something was lost in translation. I did enjoy it, it kept me coming back - even during finals week. Perhaps I am merely annoyed by the superior "I can write rings around you slobs who write fantasy without knowing anything about it" attitude. Actually, the fantasy is a fairly minor element of the story. The curses and prophecies could have been dealt with in other ways, and the "walking the sleep" could also have been worked around. Beyond these, we have medieval warfare without the restrictions of history or geography - although, I suppose that alone makes it fantasy.

One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming

In another year or so, I suppose we'll know if this was the last one of this series. There are certainly indications that it could be, but you never know what a story-teller may do to tell a story.

The story revolves around a group of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who are variously pressured into a support/counseling group for returning vets. There is the nineteen year old Marine suffering from depression only in part because he left his legs in Iraq. There is the doctor with traumatic brain injury. There is the cop whose anger is completely out of his control. There is the young wife who can't manage to put the things she did behind her. And there is Clare, herself, who has become dependent on drugs and alcohol to keep the demons at bay.

The lives of the continuing characters in these books is such a large part of the stories that it feels as if the conclusion of one part of that story is the end of the series. Russ is waiting for Clare with a ring when she returns from her tour of duty, and eventually does actually manage to propose. Clare finally does manage to accept his proposal, even though they have taken opposing positions on the first death - well, not actually the first ... - never mind that. They actually manage to get married - eventually.

The crime in this book is, typically for the series, convoluted and broad of scope. Unlike some of the others, the bad guys are called to account for their deeds, including some unpunished in previous books. This also helps give the book a tone of finality.

Each of the vets resolves his or her issues, or takes steps in the direction of resolution - another bit of finality. They discuss the fact that they have each taken steps to control the monsters - as they stand together after the funeral of another young Marine from Miller's Kill dead in the middle east.

There are a few bits and pieces that are not resolved, but fundamentally it feels very concluded. I will be interested to see if a new one turns up.

Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

I'm certainly glad that I don't have any rules for the sequence of my reading. This, I think, is the eleventh in the Tempe Brennan series by Kathy Reichs. I had every intention of starting at the beginning, but so it goes. I picked this up off a shelf and started reading, then had to get the ebook to speed up the reading. I'll get back to Deja Dead in good time.

This one is classic Reichs: a long dead body, actually parts of a long dead body, are discovered in a hidden cellar, and suddenly there are bodies everywhere. Also, we have a particularly offensive speciment of the southern (only they no longer seem to be confined to the south) politician/religious bigot. Sadly, his is not one of the corpses, but one may hope from events that he was sufficiently discredited as a man with the ear of God to fail at any re-election attempt.

There is a sub-theme of what Reichs in her endnotes calls "fringe religions" such as Wicca, santeria, voodoo, and a number of others. This is addressed largely in the context of our current national paranoia about "otherness." "'Think as I think,' said a man. ..."

Others have mentioned to me Reichs' justification for the Tempe Brennan character in the TV series Bones. The rationalization is that she sees TV Tempe as a young Tempe, before the series of books begins. I don't like to pick at things like this too much, but --- Tempe in her forties, has a daughter in her mid-twenties. In this book there is a discussion of persuading Katy to graduate from college after six years by cutting off funding (that plot is vaguely familiar, somehow). So, Pete, Tempe's ex, and Katy had to have "happened" before the age at which we find the multi-PhDed "young" and socially inept Tempe in the series.

Personally, I think my second word choice was correct - it is a rationalization which Reichs uses to excuse the quantities of money that she is making from the TV rights. It doesn't really bother me; I even enjoy the series to a certain extent, but every time I read one of the books, I can't help recognizing how much better they are than the series.

The Brummstein by Peter Adolphsen (translated by Charlotte Barslund)

This isn't really a novel, not even a novella. It's a short story. A singularly pointless short story. I don't think the problem had anything to do with the translation (from Danish) - it is just a stupid, non-story. There is no plot; there is only a succession of boring characters over a period of a hundred years or so who for some reason hang on to a pebble which the first one carried out of a cave. It vibrates, but it is never explained.

Really, don't bother. This was a complete waste of 99 cents.

Edwin of the Iron Shoes by Marcia Muller

Muller's name came up in the conversation with my sister the other day, so I added her name to the list and bought the first book. I had forgotten how much I enjoy these. I think she is going to have to move up into the sequence - of course, I had intended to move Kathy Reichs up. No reason the sequence can't be longer than six, I suppose. I probably ought to get Muller into the loop - according to the wiki, there are now twenty-nine (29) books in the Sharon McCone series. The last one came out last year - so she is still at it - and I haven't read one in years and years.

This one was a little like the Gilbert and Sullivan song, "Things are seldom what they seem ... ." The characters keep switching personas - or more accurately - keep displaying sides of their character that were not quite expected. And that is rather the nature of the crimes around which they all keep dancing and which precipitate the requisite murders. Can't have a murder mystery without a murder. Of course, in this case the murder is the loose thread which unravels a complicated and widespread criminal enterprise (not for nothing have I watched all the seasons of Law & Order).

The title refers to an antique mannequin of a child which for some reason is anchored in place with iron shoes and actually does have an oblique role in the story. Even the antiques in the antique shop are not entirely what they seem.

I think some of what I thought was the background of Sharon McCone is stuff that I mixed in freely from Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone and possibly even Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawsky. A potential romantic interest is established in the person of the lead cop, Greg Marcus. I distinctly remember his name, but I did not remember that they were ever a couple. I may be confusing it with Milhone's goto cop who was at one point her father's partner -- I think. Feel free to correct me - it may be some time before I review all of that stuff. Just tell me - it was Milhone that hung out at Mono Lake, right? And McCone is pretty much San Francisco - as is Kate Martinelli, Laurie King's cop. All Cali girls, anyway.