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.

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

This is very different. A man in his sixties has retreated from life after a catastrophic error on his part cost a young woman her right arm. Earlier, he had abandoned his girl friend by lying to her about when he was leaving for the States (Arkansas, believe it or not) to finish his medical training. When she comes to see him off, she is a day late. Now he lives on the remote island where his grandparents had lived with his aging cat and dog and no human contact besides the hypochondriac postman.

Then one day everything changes. He doesn't realize at first that everything has changed, but he sets out to repair - or at least acknowledge - the damage he has done.

This is still a study in Swedish depression, but it is possible to read a faint upbeat at the end.

A Grave Denied by Dana Stabenow

Another great title lifted from Theodore Roethke - and again the reference to the story was a bit too vague for me. Maybe I'll just have to read Roethke. She does do a very nice line in literary references - or in references to literature, generally stuff I'm extremely partial to. In this one we had Johnny reading Between Planets at one point and A Civil Contract at another. And he picked up Have Spacesuit, Will Travel along the way, too - one I like much better than Between Planets. We also have references to H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy books and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books. Kate's cabin is burned to the ground - and with it her library. She should invest in a Kindle - but I did check and the Travis McGee books are not available for Kindle - yet. Neither is much Bujold.

We get another regular killed in this one, not an important one, but one that was very much a feature of their little town of Niniltna. And, as usual, the killer nearly gets Kate, this time so nearly that Kate and Mutt are actually buried before Jim comes to the rescue.

The body count is pretty high in this one - seven - two current and five an old secret. Not to mention two attempts on Kate (she was supposed to have been in the cabin when it burned, with Johnny as collateral damage).

No real cliff-hanger this time, thank goodness. The Kate/Jim thing is left at an anomalous position, but what's new about that? The big news, romantically speaking, is that Johnny has a girl friend - and narratively, that Johnny and his friend discover both of the bodies around which the investigation is centered. We even have Johnny narrating portions of the story via his "journal" which he is keeping for his eighth grade teacher. His prose is rather uncharacteristically verbose and grammatically sound for a fourteen-year-old, but why quibble? Makes me wonder about his role in the future of this series.

Farnham's Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein

This one is not one of my favorites. So much so that I had forgotten almost everything about it except that they survived the nuclear holocaust. Twice. Once they survived because the got in their bomb shelter and it took a direct hit which bounced them approximately two thousand years into the future - or did it? Second when they get sent back to their own time just in time to survive the bombs again - or did they. I do remember when this book came out back in the early sixties. I could hardly wait to get my hands on it - and even then I was disappointed.

This is one of Heinlein's less pleasant exercises in racial and gender bias. I expect he saw it as simply an exploration of the possibilities of societal development when the white power structure is wiped out - not exactly. The society developed by the dark-skinned people who were left out of the war is nightmarish. And, as usual, the women were buxom, randy, and fertile.

I'm not at all sure which is the cart and which is the horse, let alone what order they are in. Do I dislike this book because of the problems which I noted above - or am I unusually aware of them because I dislike the book? Beats me. I would have to look again at a chronology, but I think this is about the point at which he gave up story telling and started preaching. And the time gimmick again - do it over and get it right. It worked in The Door Into Summer, here it feels more like a cop-out.

Death Comes As Epiphany by Sharan Newman

It's been a long time since I read this. Newman certainly knows the period and infuses the story with a sense of realism that isn't always present in fiction set in the medieval period. The mystery and accompanying romance are set against the story two of the most towering figures of the twelfth century, Abelard and Heloise, in their later years. Heloise is the abbess of the Convent of the Paraclete and Abelard is in Paris lecturing on the philosophy of reason.

Catherine LeVendeur is a novice and brilliant student at the Paraclete and Heloise sends her away "undercover" in supposed disgrace to uncover a plot to discredit the convent, Heloise herself, and Abelard. At the great abbey of St. Denis, Catherine encounters a most unusual stonecutter's apprentice. We eventually learn that Edgar is an English student of Abelard's sent on a similar mission.

Newman doesn't over-romanticize the period. It is a dangerous and uncomfortable place to be and she lets us see that clearly. We also see superstition driving people to madness. The motives behind the crimes are characteristic of the period, not the sort of thing that one would expect in a mystery of a later period. On the other hand, the basic motivations are still greed and revenge, but the form they take is not much like what we find in novels of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Eye of the Storm by Marcia Muller

There's never any question about Muller's book titles. They are as memorable as Stabenow's, and they always relate directly to the story. In this case, Sharon is summoned by her youngest sister to an island in a part of California that I had never heard of, the Delta. I'm not sure what river it is the delta of. A storm is brewing as she arrives and almost the entire action of the story takes place during a series of storms, apparently a fairly typical phenomenon in the locale. When it isn't storming, it is foggy - sounds like an ideal location for a bed and breakfast.

It is very reminiscent of some of the real classic mysteries, a version of a "locked door" mystery. It reminded me of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. The murderer is one of the group and there is no escape. And like many of the things I have been reading, the motives reach back across a number of generations.

I find that when I finish something late in the evening, I have much less to say about it.

A Fine and Bitter Snow by Dana Stabenow

Stabenow does have a fine way with titles. It isn't always entirely clear to me how the title connects to the story, but they are excellent titles. In the previous one The Singing of the Dead, the allusion is (I think) to the lives and deaths of four generations earlier and how those events warped the current generation. In this one, I'm not sure what the connection is. The line is from a poem by Theodore Roethke, but the connections to the people and events of this story are not obvious to me. Great title, though. Of course, inarguably, it does snow a lot in Alaska.

The opening crisis is the news that the good guy chief ranger of the Park, Dan O'Brian, has been asked to take early retirement to clear the way for someone more sympathetic to the Bush administration. That implies, someone less interested in conservation and stability of wildlife populations and more sympathetic to oil drilling, mining, logging, and development. Kate is canvassing everyone in the park with high powered contacts to make a few calls, and one of her visits is to a pair of elderly ladies who were WASPs during WWII and after the war discovered that Alaska was a place where they could continue to fly. They are the first victims, and the life of one of them holds the threads of the mystery.

Green issues and Native Alaskan issues seem actually central to the story and the mystery plays out against them, sometimes seeming primarily a vehicle to get the right people in the right place.

The right people frequently being Kate and Jim Chopin. Jim's job has also been threatened by the machinations of the then current administration. As they explore ways to bring industry and development to the park and take money out, it is decided that it would be a good thing to preemptively provide more law enforcement to the area and one proposed move is to divide the enormous area that Jim Chopin covers into two regions. This would be a major hit on his career, and, besides, as it says in the song "you gotta know the territory," and he does - and the people. So he is also contacting those who know people to find a way to avoid that.

Kate continues prickly and antagonistic, Jim is now cautiously pursuing. There are signs of a thaw by the time they have successfully concluded this investigation. Jim saves her life again, again with Mutt's assistance - or insistence, depending on how you look at it. And to all good dogs (or wolves) comes their eventual reward - this time she does get to eat the bad - well, sort of, partly.

And Johnny is resolving his ambivalent feelings toward Kate - he ran away from Arizona to find her in Alaska, but he has still blamed her for Jack's death. Kate's own sense of guilt has been an issue, also, but they both seem to be getting over it - together.

The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow

A dual time line this time, a bit of a departure for Stabenow. The life and death of a woman a hundred years ago precipitates murder in the here and now of the story. The primary setting is political; a candidate for the state senate is receiving threatening letters and Kate is hired (against the wishes of the campaign manager) to protect her.

The situation with Johnny Morgan provides a second thread. Remember, when Kate returned to her cabin after reluctantly crawling out of the hole she tried to hide in after Jack's death, she found Johnny there waiting for her. What we weren't aware of at the time was that his mother, in an effort to remove him from Kate's influence, had taken him to Arizona and dumped him on her mother in her retirement community. He had run away and hitchhiked back to Alaska - at age 14. Of course, he had been running away from his mother for years.

Since Jack's last words to Kate were a request that she look out for Johnny, she does her best to do it. Jane does finally figure out where he must be and comes for him and, eventually, most of the Park is in on the game.

As for the Kate/Chopper Jim thing, Stabenow is still trying hard to recreate the character. I don't believe he is referred to as "Chopper Jim" in this book at all. They are still at the mutual antagonism stage - and Kate has the opportunity to renew an old, old flame, much to Jim's displeasure. Still, he does come valiantly to her rescue when she falls afoul of the murderer.

Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

Another one of the great ones. An out-of-work actor is recruited to fill in for a kidnapped politician. When he realizes what the job is, he believes that he has been set up to take the bullet in an anticipated assassination attempt. Unfortunately for Lawrence Smith, the self-styled Lorenzo Smythe, it wasn't nearly so simple.

Heinlein's fifties paternalistic attitude toward women is fully apparent. There is only one female character in the story, the politician's faithful secretary, and she is quite stereotypical - buxom, adoring, jealous. Still, good fun.

Fatal Voyage by Kathy Reichs

I remembered the beginning of this one. Tempe is hiking out to the site of a plane crash and seeing bodies and parts of bodies strewn grotesquely everywhere. And apparently, that is all I remembered of it.

The investigation into the plane crash is only background for the real meat of the story. Of course, it is also the device for getting Ryan on the scene - as his partner had been escorting a prisoner back to Quebec and he and the prisoner were passengers. The real mystery is far darker and more perverse than a mere air disaster killing 88 people including both the boys and girls soccer teams from some university or other.

Tempe stumbles on a body part unrelated to the crash, and suddenly she is the subject of a systematic campaign to discredit her. And the bodies continue to pile up.

In happy news, we have a new continuing character in the person of Boyd the chow. Tempe and her ex have a joint custody arrangement regarding the cat, Bird, and Boyd now joins the party. Ex-husband, Pete, has inherited Boyd from a client he unsuccessfully defended, who is now serving a somewhat lengthy sentence. Last minute changes of plans send Boyd to the crash investigation with Tempe - and very fortunately so, because he saves her life when the bads catch up with her.

Blackberries, Blackberries by Crystal Wilkinson

This is a collection of short stories about black country women in Kentucky. Many of them are told in first person. They are almost lyrical, although the experiences described by the narrators are very down to earth. I was not at all surprised to learn in the end notes that the writer is part of a group of performing poets.

To my ear, the language seems generations old, but the events and contexts make it clear that they are present day stories. Perhaps where I grew up language had shifted more than in the hills of Kentucky - or perhaps I simply was never exposed to black culture. For whatever reason, these stories have a rhythm and flow that I have seldom encountered and compelling imagery.

It is possible, I suppose, that it would be a very difficult style to sustain for the length of a novel, but it would be interesting to see what she could do with it.

Leave the Grave Green by Deborah Crombie

Talk about your cliff-hangers! How could she do this? Obviously, I have to go get the next one in spite of my good intentions. --- OK, I went to Amazon, but before I bought the next book, I read the review of Crombie's most recent book, so I can let this go for a while. Thank goodness I am reading them years after they were written. I don't even want to imagine having to wait a year for the next installment as early followers of this series.

As for the main story, I didn't know she had it in her. I went through the next to last chapter thinking "Oh, HE did it" then "No, SHE did it" four or five times. In the first book, the identity of the murderer was a complete surprise to me. In the second one, I had a pretty good idea of who it was. In this one, I was down to trying to figure out who was the least likely murderer.

It is almost a Miss Marple setting - and conclusion for that matter - English country manor house, lots of tea and good manners - and sins of the past that refuse to be buried. Most enjoyable. And then the ending.

And to think that I was recently complaining about Stabenow and leading endings!

There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of by Marcia Muller

I do love a good honest murder mystery that isn't too demanding of one's thought processes. Muller has a handle on that. Although this time it certainly helps if you know your British romantics. Can't fault her setting either; San Francisco is one of the places in the world that simply compells fantasy. And I do believe that in this one, Sharon comes through without any personal physical damage.

This story takes us down to the less than savory section of the city and the world of the post-Vietnam Asian immigrants. And once we're all set up for hate crimes, Muller changes direction and shows us the desperation of the lost members of our society. She also shows us charity from an unexpected direction.

A very satisfying read. All the bad guys got taken care of, people looked out for each other, and even the murderer earned some sympathy. I know this is short, but I'm not going to tell you the story!

Thirst by Andrei Gelasimov translated by Marian Schwartz

This is another translation of a foreign piece; this one from Russian. Another very short one, but not quite as short as the German one I told you not to waste your time on. The translation is excellent, although I suspect it diverges from the original text in places. The divergences insert English word play and slang usage for things which are probably very different in Russian - and probably would be incomprehensible to the American reader.

The voice is that of a young man who was badly burned when the APC in which he was a passenger is hit by a rocket-launched grenade in action against the Chechyn rebels. In the opening scene his next door neighbor calls on him to frighten her young son when he refuses to obey her. It is a little mystifying because at that point the reader is not yet aware of his injuries.

The events of the day his life was changed are fed out slowly mixed with stories of his school days and what is going on in his present. His only friends are the other young men who had enlisted with him and were with him in the APC. The usual occasion for their getting together is the periodic disappearance of one of their number. The guy who disappears is the one that pulled the others out of the burning APC and nearly left Kostya behind because he thought he was dead.

It is unclear which is the most damaged of the group. Physically, it is clearly Kostya, but he is functional and self-supporting. Seryoga is not.

By the way, the thirst, which they share, is for vodka which one assumes is their escape.

Before the Frost by Henning Mankell Translated by Ebba Segerberg

Wallander figures heavily in this book, but the story centers around his daughter Linda who has finished her course at the police academy and is waiting to join the Ystad police force.

Although the action of the story takes place entirely in Sweden (except for a ferry jaunt or two to Copenhagen and the prologue in the voice of the murderer), Mankell ties in international connections. The prologue is about the Jim Jones mass suicide in Guyana. At the end of the final chapter the people at the police station are gathered in the break room for a special news report on television from the United States, the date is September 11, 2001. He doesn't tell the story, he just assumes that his readers will recognize what is going on. The two incidents seem to be parentheses bracketing another story of madness on a global scale.

The story itself begins with more than the usual dose of gruesomeness - the bad lures a group of wild swans to him, douses them with gasoline, and sets them on fire. The series of incidents of this type is never adequately justified even from the perspective of the warped mind of the killer. Nor is his primary doctrine for selecting his victims.

The thread which holds the story together is the contentious relationship between father and daughter. And, unfortunately, both come off seeming rather irrational. We have seen glimpses of violent temper from Wallander in the past, but it is a constant in this book. There seems to be no solid pattern - this behavior on Linda's part brings on a fit of rage from her father, that behavior does not, but the next time similar actions on Linda's part provoke opposite responses from Wallander. And on the other side, since the story is told from Linda's point of view, we never are sure whether she adores him or fears him.

The mystery is resolved, but the story seems to be more about fathers and daughters. The relationship between Linda and her father is tangled with the even more disfunctional relationship between Linda's friend Anna and her father.

Mankell apparently dropped this as a continuing series. Perhaps he is not comfortable with women protagonists, not uncommon among male writers. Consider Heinlein and his endless parade of female leading characters who were never quite plausible. Linda is emotionally and personally involved in this story in a way that her father has never been. The crimes all come to him in the normal course of his job. That is difficult as a continuing thing - after all, where are all the red shirts going to come from if they are personally connected to a character who has very few personal connections.

Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs Ed. Witherspoon and Friedman

This was fun. I have to concede to points made in Amazon's review - that it wasn't as funny as it could have been, and there seemed to be an excessive use of the f-bomb - but it was amusing. Many of the "greatest chefs" bailed by reporting (occassionally with viciousness) on the failings and disasters of their colleagues. And most of them reported disasters which were salvaged by their own cleverness or simple good luck. Still, it was an entertaining set of anecdotes.

I guess I'm not such a big-time "foodie" because I had only heard of a few of the "World's Greatest." I was intrigued by the story that one of them told about going to France as a young man simply to eat at the world's finest restaurants. He would eat the cheapest local fare available all week and on Friday he would dress up in his suit and good shirt and tie and dine at a Three Star restaurant (maybe a few Two Stars). When he ran out of money and had to come home, he left France with the impression that the French were the kindest and most gracious people in the world. Later, he learned that he fit the profile of a food reviewer - male, young, dining alone.

It left me absolutely convinced that people who go into the restaurant business are even more insane than teachers. The hours, the working conditions, the everlasting stress, the monumental egos - it is hard for a non-fanatic to understand the appeal.

All Shall Be Well by Deborah Crombie

This time the murder takes place in Kincaid's building, so again, he is on the scene of the crime and has a personal interest. This is an interesting switch - these are not the usual police procedurals where the cops are called to the scene and have no personal involvement. On the other hand, Kincaid and Sgt. James follow basic investigative procedures.

As in A Share in Death, there are long buried motives and convoluted and hidden relationships to complicate things. Sgt. James is dealing with personal problems and these color her view of the investigation and the participants. She does get all that cleared up by the end of the story. Kincaid realizes that, although he considered his neighbor a friend, he really didn't know her well at all and questions his own detachment from personal relationships in general.

This time we do actually have a few scenes at Scotland Yard and a meeting with Kincaid's boss. He is definitely a much better sort than, for example, Brunetti's superior in Venice. He gives Kincaid the freedom to investigate the death of his neighbor, Jasmine, although it closely resembles suicide. In the previous book, he even pulls strings to allow Kincaid into the investigation which is not under his jurisdiction.

A Share in Death by Deborah Crombie

It's been a long time since I read one of Crombie's books, and I'm not sure I ever read this one. Crombie is American writing in a British setting. Duncan Kincaid is a Superintendent at Scotland Yard; his sergeant, Gemma James, is a single mother with red hair and freckles.

British detectives and their sergeants, at least in fiction, seem to develop a sort of symbiotic relationship, and these two are no exception. In this story they actually are working separately, but the connection is still apparent.

As for the story, we have a series of murders at the British equivalent of a timeshare where Kincaid is a guest courtesy of his cousin who is unable to use his week. Every guest - and member of the staff - has a hidden agenda. These agendas intersect in any number of ways and with curious results.

The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

The opening paragraphs of the book are one of my favorite passages in prose anywhere. The narrator describes his cat's winter search from door to door in their old house for a door opening into summer weather, and uses it as an analogy for his own wish to escape from the pain and disillusionment of his current situation. Nice. And Pete the cat is a great character - without ever seeming more than a real cat.

The book came out in 1956 and is set in 1970. Well, the base setting is 1970 and the final setting is 2000. Heinlein did love playing with time travel and the associated anomalies. In this case, our 1970's hero ditches his troubles by taking the "long sleep" of cryogenic suspended animation. His plan is to be awakened in time to find the woman who dumped him old and wrinkled while he is still young, a petty but compelling motive. He planned to take Pete with him, of course. His plan got messed up and he ended up having to come back and rescue himself. All very tricky, but not bizarre and silly like the one that I dumped back on the shelf.

His imagined Y2K language evolution was rather odd - and fundamentally unnecessary. Imagining the near future is a risky business. Besides working cryogenics in the 70s, he introduced any number of major and minor technological advances which have not arrived, but overlooked many which have - inevitable.

The gadgetry was wonderful though. Our hero was the engineer responsible for a device called "The Hired Girl" - a robot which cleaned house. I want one.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell

Short stories. A couple of them weren't so short; there were only five in a volume the same size (about 400 pages) as his novels. They are billed as early cases intended to give a view of Wallander as a young cop, before divorce, booze, and midlife in general take over. The first one takes place before he and Mona marry - during their decidedly uneasy courtship. We go directly from there into failing marriage and divorce.

I'm not sure that the reader learns much more about Wallander in these stories. We do get to see him interact with his mentor Rydberg, who died of cancer early in the series. On the other hand, the Rydberg that we see alive is not much different from the Rydberg we know through Wallander's mental conversations with him.

Then there is Mona. Mona seems to be a much nicer person as Wallander's ex than she does as his fiancee and wife. From their interactions before they marry, it is surprising to me that they get to the altar.

The mysteries, however, are very similar to the novels. Innocent victims who turn out to be not quite so innocent. Apparently unrelated crimes which turn out to be part of the same scheme. Quite satisfying. I do like an honest mystery story.