The Main Corpse by Diane Mott Davidson

I know I was apologizing for reading a book every day for a while here - not that I didn't finish this one until some idiotic hour this morning, and went to bed without writing the post. I didn't finish it earlier because I went down to school yesterday morning and that stretched into afternoon - and I'm afraid that my summer to read a book every day is shot to hell and gone. After doing six graduate hours in four weeks last summer, I swore never to do it again - but it looks like it is going to be nine this summer - and six during the regular semesters. They had better be easier than the ones I took last summer. It reminds me of a cheezburger caption - mostly pretty dumb, but every now and then --- Anyway, "What?" he says, "You knew I was a cat when you brought me in the house." Here it's - "What? You knew I didn't have a master's when you hired me in the first place."

Back to the book.

Maybe it is my personal aversion to white stuff falling from the sky and covering roads and that sort of thing, but I sometimes wonder if Davidson actually likes living in Colorado. She does talk about the glorious blue skies and the resin-scented air and says things like "These days are the reason why we live in Colorado." But there always seems to be a bank of black clouds on the horizon or "the promise of the day faded ... ."It seems to me that implies that there are many days which are not days which would persuade one to live in Colorado. And it seems to be those days which constitute an overwhelming majority of days - at least in Aspen Meadow and environs. I think I prefer a climate where - this wasn't actually about here exactly, but about my hometown - the golf course boasted that you could play golf three hundred sixty days a year. It might be chilly or windy on some of those three hundred and sixty days, but if you wanted to play, you could. Only five or six really bad days in a year - now that's a liveable climate (as long as you don't mind heat and the occasional breeze).

All of that to get to the beginning of the story. We open with snow and ice and an outdoor function - in June. And into a convoluted story of greed (on so many levels) and faithlessness and murder and general mayhem. On the other hand we have a new family beginning to gel as a unit - in spite of the fact that Goldy, this time deliberately, gets involved in a murder and actually becomes a felon before all is said and done - but she HAD to break Marla out of jail!!

At the heart of the story of the family Schulz is a bloodhound named Jake who has been given a dishonorable discharge from the police force for matters beyond his control. Tom rescues him from the animal shelter and takes him home to Arch who has wanted a pet for most of his life and is presently mourning the loss of Julian who is off at Cornell. Arch and Tom are determined to repair Jake's damaged training and Goldy is determined that if she must have a dog in her house, couldn't it be more like a cat --- at any rate, not an 80 pound drooling, howling monster.

Needless to say, Jake earns his creds by saving Goldy and Arch and by finding any number of bodies - both dead and alive. And almost everyone important gets out alive.

Just a side note - maybe not so much a side note given that the recipes are the gimmick in these. Davidson has seen the light and a good share of her recipes are now low fat/low cholesterol. If they are not, she generally issues a gentle warning - in this one she tells us that someone refers to one of the recipes as "a heart attack on a plate." Remember a couple of books back when Marla had the heart attack? I wonder if someone in Davidson's real world got the same wake-up call.