Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes by Marcia Muller

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

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

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

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

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

Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson

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

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

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

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

Riding Lessons by Sara Gruen

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

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

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

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

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

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

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

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

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

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

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

Variant by Robison Wells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Heavens Trilogy by Kylie Chan

White Tiger

Red Phoenix

Blue Dragon

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

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

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

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

Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs

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

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

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

Willful Behavior by Donna Leon

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

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

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

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