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!!