Lifelines by CJ Lyons

18Dec. Kindle.

Maybe I delayed commenting on this one because I needed time to catch my breath. I could bring myself to complain some about the writing - grammar and spelling are ok, but the writing is a bit, to use a technical term which English teachers use with students, clunky. I did catch myself often thinking this or that could have been expressed more smoothly or that another word might have been a better choice. Still there simply wasn't much time for that sort of thing - I'm not sure I ever read anything with more action and less ... anything else.

The timeframe is very tight. The new doctor reports to the ER on July 1 and we wrap up with a big finish on the Glorious Fourth. And we even manage to kill the bad guys. Improbably tight - especially since in the midst of all the action, she meets, spends the night with, and gets taken home to meet Mom all within that three or four day window. Oh, yeah, she also nearly gets Mom killed and spends another night - or day - the date/time headers didn't keep me on track - in the hospital with Mom and sister who goes into labor during the crisis (that crisis).

I am anxious to read the next one to see if the pattern continues and how many of the cast continue, so I have started five other books (one in the bathroom on paper, one on my kindle, one on my NEW kindle, one on the kindle ap on my desktop, and one that the preacher handed me Sunday morning saying "I know how quickly you read, so read this and next Sunday let me know what you think") to postpone the inevitable - I don't want to get totally hooked on all that adrenaline.

Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery

17Dec. Kindle.

Now with Anne safely engaged to Gilbert surely I can move on and read something else before coming back to the remaining eight books in the series. I'm enjoying this reread far too much.

This is the college book. I guess I haven't read them since I started hanging out at a college all the time. I don't think my undergraduate experience was much like theirs - and I'm sure that is even more true today. Still, the issue of a group of girls renting a place together sounded a little familiar - although our sweet girl undergrads are unlikely to require a live-in housekeeper/chaperone - and they are almost as likely to have male housemates as female. And somehow I doubt if "gentlemen callers" are often restricted to Friday evenings.

The program of English, Classics, Philosophy, and Mathematics with no talk of "majors" didn't sound very much like the stuff that they are required to take these days - but the discussion of "what did they learn that was of any practical use" certainly did. Now, however, that argument would come from the students themselves rather than from the older women around them.

Dune by Frank Herbert

16Dec. Kindle.

I don't know why I was suddenly struck with a wish to reread this. I haven't read it in years, although I have worn out a couple of copies in the past. And, as with all books truly worth reading, I have spotted things which I never had before.

Herbert, like some others I could name, inserts great chunks of "history and moral philosophy" throughout. One of his devices is quite cute. All the chapter headers (I know there is a word for them, but I can't think of it at the moment.) are quotations from various imaginary works by Princess Irulan. Princess Irulan is the eldest daughter of "Our beloved Padishah Emperor" and appears only in the last few chapters. She is bartered to Paul Atreides as part of the bargain which will leave him on the imperial throne. As Paul's mother, Jessica, and his beloved, Chani, go out to negotiate the deal, Jessica tells Chani that she has heard that Irulan has literary pretensions and that hopefully she will find them sufficient to satisfy her for the rest of her life.

This book was such a success that Herbert followed it up with a long line of sequels. There was a Hollywood movie and a couple of rather elegant miniseries. I have never cared for any of them but this book - I read the first couple of sequels, then quit and never read those again. The Hollywood movie was, to borrow a word from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, an abomination. I never could bring myself to watch either of the miniseries, although I have heard that they were better.

Perhaps part of the problem was that my friends and coworkers spent considerable time "casting" a film of Dune and other favorites of ours. Our rules would have been problematical for Hollywood producers. We could cast anyone regardless of time or proximity. For example, I always wanted to cast a young Diana Rigg as Jessica. Granted, Jessica had a fifteen-year-old son at the beginning of the story - and her hair was the wrong color, but that's manageable. I suppose that with the kind of stunts they are doing now - they could probably have done it.

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery

14Dec. Kindle.

This one has one of my favorite anecdotes from all the Anne books. One of Anne's students at the Avonlea school announces that when she grows up she wants to be a widow - because if you aren't married people call you an old maid and if you are married your husband bosses you around. Widows are spared both. Excellent reasoning on the part of a seven-year-old - I suspect that may have been a bit of Lucy coming through.

How does she do it? These characters are all so very, very nice - but somehow they aren't boring even on lebentieth reading.

The Boy from Reactor 4 by Orest Stelmach

10Dec. Kindle.

I read this on my actual Kindle and the Anne book on my computer. And I couldn't sleep last night, so I sat up and read most of the night. Except during holidays, I seldom finish two in one day. My bathroom book is generally slower going.

This was one of the "100 books under 3.99" last month. It looked interesting, so I bought it and the sequel. Since book one ended with a total cliff-hanger, a practice which I find quite annoying, I haven't decided yet whether or not to go on to book two.

The general setting was a little different. I have read books with multi-lingual characters, but Nadia's collection of languages includes English, Ukrainian, and Russian. The heroine is a Ukrainian-American and she travels through Ukraine and Russia and Siberia with considerable focus on Chernobyl to rescue her nephew and ten million dollars (no discussion of how she is going to pack up and carry that much currency) or a secret formula which has the potential to change the political dynamics of the entire world. We also have the Ukrainian mafia following her to get the money (or the secret). These are extremely unpleasant folks. Surprised? The favorite toy of one of them is his cattle prod which goes with him everywhere and which he uses frequently. I'm not sure how he got it from the US into Ukraine - connections I think.

The book seemed to be one interminable chase. The bads are right behind Nadia Tesla (cool last name, at least to us tech nerds) from the time she gets the message from her uncle until they seem to have done each other in. The chase by train across the steppes of central Asia seemed to go on forever, of course, I suppose the Trans-Siberian Railway does just about go on forever.

I didn't have any trouble continuing to read, but I'm not sure I really enjoyed it. The problem may have been that it was depressing - and I was feeling pretty depressed without its assistance. I am putting the second book on hold for a while, however, maybe come spring break or summer I'll be ready for some cold reading.

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

10Dec. Kindle.

This is one of the series that I reread when I am tired and depressed. It is so very satisfying. Just for fun I read the wiki on Lucy Maud - in part to see how much Lucy there is in Anne - a good bit. So I have two rereads in hand, two women best known by their initials, one British, one Canadian.

Anne is one of the most engaging characters in children's literature - maybe in literature for any age. She may be extremely unlikely - considering the nature of her early childhood - but her flaws make her a delight. Who wouldn't love the scene where she breaks her slate over Gilbert's head - and the cake flavored with liniment - and never forget the time she dyed her hair green.

I am not certain that I plan to reread the entire series - all twenty or whatever of them. The omnibus edition that I have on my kindle has fourteen - maybe those are all the "Anne" books - at some point they branch out to her children. I seem to recall thinking that they became a little too sweet at some point. We'll see. I expect I'll at least reread the first three or so.

Cover Her Face by P. D. James

8Dec. Kindle.

I probably have this on my shelves, but it is so much easier to read on the kindle. Ambivalence -- I love books - the objects themselves - but I am finding reading print and paper more difficult. I commented once (about one of the Dunning "bookman" books, I think) that I could not understand people who treasured books as objects in that way. And I have considered that I could condense my library to manageable proportions through electronics, but still ...

All of which is neither here nor there - I reread this one not all that long ago, but the death of the author has prompted me to move the reread of her books to the top of the queue, and this is the first. I think I enjoyed it more this time than the last; I have no idea why.

Many features seem pretty standard: the English country house, the locked room (well, that didn't remain very mysterious for long), the gathering a la Hercule Poirot, the completely deserving victim, the least likely character as murderer - but somehow it moved beyond all that. Melancholy Dalgleish is nothing like Poirot, and his sergeant is so unobtrusive that he almost isn't a character at all - does he develop more in the later books? I don't remember. Another reason for looking forward to the reread.

The Gordonston Ladies Dog Walking Club by Duncan Whitehead

29Nov. Kindle.

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. It is an utter waste of electrons. So - why did I read it all the way through? I think it was just a sort of horrified fascination, like people slowing down to see an accident on the highway. It couldn't really be as bad as it seemed, could it? Yes, it could. I toyed with the idea that the whole thing was some sort of elaborate hoax. One might think that events so improbable, implausible, impossible would at least be laughable, but they weren't. Everyone in the neighborhood has hired a hitman from the same mysterious international agency? Hitler survived his suicide and escaped to Argentina? They had sex eight times in four hours without chemical assistance? She had breast augmentation surgery and was displaying her new boobs a couple of hours later?

It ought to have been funny, but it was boring. Stilted language, paucity of dialog, characters that never even manage to achieve two dimensions, lengthy pedantic description of pointless activity, no continuity of plot.

He repeats his lengthy prologue word for word at the end. Possibly to stretch the mess out to an acceptable page length? I suppose his idea was to make the "mystery" who the murder victim was to be rather than who did it, but he totally failed to justify the choice of victim. Then he epi'd at seriously excessive length - even if someone actually cared about his characters by that point, they couldn't have cared that much. Of course, he had to - because he hadn't developed his supposed plot throughout. "Oh yeah, they don't know all this secret stuff ---"

I have read and commented here on a number of books which I did not like, but most of them I was willing to concede could appeal to someone whose tastes in reading were different from mine. I even read a rather poorly done book by a friend of a friend which at least had the merit of potential. With this one, I finally concluded that the glowing reviews must have been written by the author's mother. If this is the work of an inept fifteen-year-old, he needs to read a lot more before he tries to write again. And read good stuff, not formula crap. Self-publication makes it far too easy.

I sincerely hope that this rant does not encourage anyone to encourage this writer by purchasing his book to see if it can possibly be all that bad.

Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good by Jan Karon

28Nov. Kindle. Book Club.

This book is very nice. You keep thinking that something dire - or exciting - is going to happen, but it never does. I read the first one of these a number of years ago. I loved the opening in which (as I recall) the rather stiff new Episcopal priest in the village of Mitford is assaulted, accosted, and adopted by a large unkempt dog eventually named Barnabas - no doubt for some Biblical reason which I have totally forgotten. This is the tenth (or twelfth) of the Mitford or Father Tim books and Barnabas is still in there, although he is now frequently referred to as "the old gentleman."

The action (so to speak) only covers a few months, so if that is a pattern, I suppose it is reasonable that Barnabas is still kicking around. So - here is a series in which the dog doesn't die. I suppose I should like it better for that reason alone. Still, not much happens - and it is all so very, very nice.

If I have a serious complaint, it would be that she never lets a character go. The village is going to sink to overpopulation since no one ever leaves. The actual problem with the writing is that she continually makes reference to events from previous volumes in the series which leaves the less than devoted reader occasionally wondering if she (the reader) skipped a page or two. My other problem was with the number of sections that began without making it clear who is thinking or talking or (rarely) doing whatever. Possibly some of that is "Kindle artifact" - but not all, I think.

Still, I did not have to force myself to read it, and managed to get teary over a couple of the more sentimental passages. "Consider it done."

Imago by Octavia Butler

24Nov. Kindle.

Another of Lilith's children. This one has taken a biological leap which is ahead of the Oankali program and there is division in the Oankali ranks between those who want to keep things properly on track and those who believe in the new breed.

Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler

21Nov. Kindle.

The single volume trilogy is titled Lilith's Brood. This story follows one of Lilith's first generation offspring. The biological son of Lilith and Nikanj and one of the original group resettled on earth and murdered by some of the human "resisters."

Dawn by Octavia Butler

20Nov. Kindle.

Many years ago I read a short story by Butler that totally grossed me out. I think Jack Williamson assigned it in the course I took from him. Sometime later I read and reread Kindred and was completely caught up in it. Why I never went on to read more of her work may be a product of the ambivalence resulting from two such disparate experiences with her writing. This was on the November "100 Kindle books under $4" list, so I got it for me on my second annual birthday shopping spree on Amazon.

The blurb informed me that it was the first of a trilogy, but I hedged my bets and just got the first one. After a few chapters, I bought the rest.

The aliens rescued the survivors of a completely human global holocaust. What comes next is the uncomfortable part. They renew their own species by mixing their genetic heritage with that of new species that they encounter and creating essentially new lifeforms. Humanity as we know it would cease to exist.

Amazingly, the sympathetic characters are the aliens. Butler has created a species which is destroying "us" but they are the ones the reader roots for.

Lilith is the person selected by the Oankali to lead the first group of humans back to earth. She accepts their "deal" but intends to use the return to earth to encourage her people to cooperate until the get "home" then do their best to escape. Only later she discovers that that is anticipated - and the only way humans can reproduce is through their Oankali partners. Still - the most likeable and sympathetic characters are the Oankali.

Silks by Dick and Felix Francis

15Nov. Kindle.

Geoffrey Mason is a barrister (I think that's the right one: barristers go to court, soliciters do everything else - all of which falls under the title lawyer over here). He is an amateur jockey, inevitably nicknamed "Perry" in the jockey's changing room.

He unsuccessfully defends a monster who intimidates his way out of his well-deserved prison sentence and comes back for a little revenge.

This is the "and" that I read when it first came out. I remember being reasonably pleased with it in spite of my bias against "ands." On rereading, I agree with myself. The characters are well-crafted in the Francis mode and the mystery moves right along with sufficient action to fulfill expectations.

The King's Hounds by Martin Jensen

14Nov. Kindle.

Yet another period in ancient history to become the setting for a series of murder mysteries. King Cnut and Angles and Saxons and what all. The detective team consists of a wandering ex-monk who peddles the art of illumination which he learned in the monastery and a young ex-nobleman whose father chose the wrong side. Good fun.

Jensen actually wrote this in Danish. I have learned to be wary of translations, but this is excellent.

David Starr, Space Ranger by Isaac Asimov (Paul French)

10Nov. Paper.

Someone who is using my bathroom for the time being was reading this and I picked it up. I haven't read the Lucky Starr books in many, many years. What fun. Early YA SF was definitely a thing of its own. I should probably do a considered comparison to the Heinlein juvies, but I won't - not here, not now anyway.

Dead Heat Dick and Felix Francis

8Nov. Kindle.

Max is a chef who falls for a violist who is suing him. What's not to like? Except, perhaps, the quantity of time that Max spends writhing in jealousy of Viola. This is only resolved when Caroline chooses her viola as her weapon of choice to rescue Max from the bad guy. Seems like an odd choice to me. Seems to me that my viola IN its case would make a better bludgeon than out of it.

Under Orders by Dick Francis

6Nov. Kindle.

The last of the Dick Francis books. There follows a string of Dick and Felix Francis books - Felix is his son. I read one of those some time ago and was generally favorably impressed. Those are followed by a several "Dick Francis's ..." by Felix Francis.

Francis elected to go out with a bang, though. This is another Sid Halley book - the last, I imagine. After all, in this one the angst-ridden Halley a) comes to terms with his hostile ex-wife Jenny and b) gets married to a Dutch supermodel (okay, she really isn't a supermodel; she is a biochemist or some such super-scientist who looks like a supermodel). Not only that - the model and the ex-wife become good friends. Hard to top.

The Healing of America by TR Reid

31Oct. Paper.

This is probably my most unsettling read in an extremely long time. I have been aware for quite some years that the American "system" for health care was screwed up, but I had no idea how screwed up it is.

The author takes his sore shoulder (the result of an athletics injury in high school or college) on the road and examines health care around the world. The kick-off incident was the death of a young woman from lupus. Bad stuff, unquestionably, but well-understood, and manageable. She had the poor judgment to be diagnosed between the time she "outgrew" her parent's insurance and getting insurance on a job. Bingo! A pre-existing condition - and she is uninsurable and dies of something that with treatment permits patients to live a normal life-span productively.

The US is undeniably the richest country in the world and spends a greater portion of its income on health care than any other country in the world. It also has the highest infant mortality rate among the nineteen richest nations in the world. It is also the only industrialized nation in the world which does not have some form of universal health care. Millions of US citizens were not covered by any form of health insurance at the time of writing a few years ago. I'm afraid that the Affordable Health Care act will fall to the true perversity in this country - its political system - before we can even assess whether or not it would do the job. Reid continually refers to universal health care as a moral choice made by nations. It reminds me of a story my father used to tell which compared two philosophies of government - one which would put a fence at the top of the cliff, and one which would park an ambulance at the bottom.

BTW - the author's bad shoulder. The only treatment that he found which helped (short of the surgical replacement of his shoulder, which his American doctor recommended and most international physicians felt was both extreme and unlikely to restore complete function) was a course of massage and meditation which was prescribed in India.

The Brethren by H. Rider Haggard

24Oct. Kindle.

Two noble knights - brothers, of course - are both deeply in love with the same fair maiden. This set against the background of the crusades. Thank goodness, the fair maiden is not the Victorian fainting away at the sight of blood type. She is kidnapped by minions of the great Saracen chief, Saladin, and the brethren pursue her through all sorts of extremely improbable adventures until at last she must declare her preference for one of the brothers.

Lightning Bug by Donald Harington

18Oct. Kindle.

A Staymore story - perhaps even the first Staymore story, which would make the one I tried to read some time ago a "prequel." It is told from the point of view of a young boy, Donnie (Dawnie, in Arkansan), who may or may not be Harington himself. The boy is fascinated by Latha Bourne, a woman that he as a five-year-old passionately loves, and he tells her story through his adoration and jealousy.

The Red Box by Rex Stout

15Oct. Kindle.

Someone has the audacity to murder a man in Wolfe's very own office - in his presence. And the victim gasps with his dying breath that Wolfe must find the red box which holds the critical documents.

The Rubber Band by Rex Stout

10Oct. Kindle.

A pact made in the gold fields of Montana (I think it was Montana - I really need to start doing this more promptly). The payoff for rescuing someone from the hangman's noose is postponed for nearly fifty years and the survivors of the pact would like a share of the loot.

Second Wind by Dick Francis

7Oct. Kindle.

The hero this time is a meteorologist (boy, does that word look funny - but it is right, I looked it up). He and his buddy have an opportunity to go fly into a hurricane - and uncover a convoluted crooked scheme. And encounter a rather convoluted attempt to murder them. And, as in Come to Grief, his good friend turns out to be less than he thought.

Field of Thirteen by Dick Francis

5Oct. Kindle.

Short stories were simply not his strong suit. Persuasive characters are, to me, the mark of Francis's work and short stories simply don't allow enough development for them to be interesting.

Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

2Oct. Paper.

A classic, I don't read them much. A young idealistic teacher takes on the hard realities of teaching English in a trade school in the forties.

10 Lb Penalty by Dick Francis

1Oct. Kindle

We meet the hero as a seventeen-year old who is fired by the trainer for whom he rides. The stated reasons are that he isn't very good and never will be - and that he is known to use illegal drugs. The first is deeply painful because he suspects that it is true, and the second is infuriating because it is completely untrue. Curiously, a limo hired by his single father is waiting out front for him.

It seems that Dad is entering politics and wants his son at his side to prove that he is a family man. His wife died in childbirth and Dad has remained affectionate but somewhat distant. Now young Benedict becomes his father's bodyguard as well as his campaign companion as someone is out to kill him.

Necessity's Child by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

29Sept. Kindle.

The next generation of Korval is establishing their presence on and reforming the chaotic "politics" of Surebleak. The principal character is Nova's young son Sil Vor, inevitably called Silver by the natives of Surebleak.

Killer's Payoff by Ed McBain

25Sept. Kindle.

Now, a couple of months later, I don't remember a thing about this book except that the new hero, Cotton Hawes, is becoming extremely annoying. This may account for the fact that I haven't read another of them in the intervening weeks.

House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones

24Sept. Kindle.

This is the third of the Howl's Moving Castle series. It is more fun than the second, but not as much as the first.

Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and Paul Newell

20Sept. Kindle. Book Club.

Not my sort of thing. At all. Still it kept me reading, if only to see what idiocy and excess this scion of the super-rich could come up with next. This woman, Hugette Clark, operated about as far from the blatant publicity-seeking modus operandi of the Hilton daughters as is imaginable, but the excess is just as excessive.

The author continually catalogues examples of Clark's vast generosity - she gave her nurse millions of dollars - but in the last analysis, it all read to me as attempts to buy loyalty, which, inevitably, produced amazing greed among those same individuals and institutions.

The Sign of the Book by John Dunning

16Sept. Kindle.

Another punny title - I didn't expect it from Dunning. All about ghosts from the past - this time the past of Janeway's sweetie, Erin - who has managed to be around for a couple of books now. A former friend of hers (former because she couldn't keep her hands off Erin's boyfriend) is charged with the murder of said boyfriend, now her husband and the father of their five-year old twins and to their adopted child.

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

13Sept. Paper.

Loaned to me by a friend. Not a particularly pleasant piece. A couple with problems of their own has a teenage daughter who is the victim of date rape - or was she? She is tried in the press and gossip networks and since the young man is a top jock at their high school ...

The girl's father has an odd past. His mother (a single mother) was the school teacher for an Alaskan native village. He grew up the lone outsider in the village younger set and was ostracized - on good days. He becomes a graphic artist and the book has pages of "his" artwork which add up to a graphic novel throughout. I believe the graphic novel is intended to parallel the "real" story. Bit of a reach.

To the Hilt by Dick Francis

11Sept. Kindle.

One of his punnier titles. The hilt is an artifact connected with Bonny Prince Charlie which is the focus of a search by the bad guys in the course of which they beat up the hero rather badly. The hero is a painter, specializing in portraits of horses (of course), the despair of his family. He lives in an unmodernized cottage (I know there is a proper Scottish word for structures of this particular type, but I can't think of it at the moment) without electricity or other "mod cons" and plays the bagpipes in his spare time.

Castle in the Air by Diane Wynne Jones

9Sept. Kindle.

This one has a Middle Eastern cast and setting (more or less). Howl and Sophie do appear momentarily at the end, but I found the whole thing just a bit strained - compared to the original book - it is still better than many that I have read. I did like the flying carpet, however, and the squid vendors bad-tempered dog.

Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers

8Sept. Kindle.

Sayers has such a way with words! It is only recently that I have discovered that she was a noted educational theorist and theologian as well as an outstanding mystery writer.

Here we have a couple of essays on the subject of the assumed subordinate nature of women in twentieth century society .

Howl's Moving Castle by Diane Wynne Jones

6Sept. Kindle.

I reread this because I just discovered that there are two more books in the series. I enjoyed it as much this time as the first time.

The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout

2Sept. Kindle.

Weak premise, perhaps. A bunch of men who are trying to atone for a hazing stunt gone wrong many years earlier when they were all in college are hounded by the victim of the stunt.

Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers

31Aug. Kindle.

Short stories - not my favorite sort of thing. Reading a whole collection of short stories is definitely not my thing - even short stories by Sayers were getting a little predictable by the time I finished.

Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough

28Aug. Kindle.

Always somebody who just can't leave well enough alone. One must note that this prequel to the series is not written by Rex Stout. I'm not entirely certain what Goldsborough's credentials are, and while the story is pretty true to the flavor of the series, it is totally unnecessary.

Killer's Choice by Ed McBain

26Aug. Kindle.

Enter the new guy: Cotton Hawes. New detectives in the precinct fits with McBain's stated plan for the series, but it is also indicative of serious wobbling on the part of his publishers. They agreed with McBain's concept that the precinct would experience changes in personnel as in a real police precinct - but when he killed Carella, they forced him to resurrect him. Then he married him off - and discovered that to his publisher that was the same as killing him, only more permanent. As a happily married man, he could not possibly be a hero.

Hawes' first act in the precinct is to almost get Carella killed, but not quite. My suspicion is while McBain introduced the super-macho hero, he believed that his readership will prefer the married Carella. Perhaps he will reveal the truth in future intros to this rerelease of the books.

Jewel by Bret Lott

24Aug. Kindle.

Jewel devotes her life and to some extent sacrifices the lives of her husband and other children to her unexpected sixth child who has Down's Syndrome, or, as the specialist puts it to her, is a Mongoloid idiot. The world was not nearly as PC back in the early forties. Actually, the sacrifices that Jewel manipulates for Brenda Kay work out pretty well for all of them - except her husband. And it would have been better for him as well if he hadn't been a red-neck bigot.

Grievous Sin by Faye Kellerman

21Aug. Kindle.

While Rina is in the hospital near death after the birth of daughter Hannah, a new-born is kidnapped from the nursery. Decker, of course, takes the case in spite of his close connection to the situation. He is doubly close to the crime because not only was infant Hannah in the nursery, but his older daughter Cindy was there keeping tabs on Hannah while Rina was unable to care for her.

As always, Kellerman's story unwinds through a jungle of generational abuse and perversity. How does a nice Jewish girl like Faye come up with these things?

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

21 Aug. Paper.

Answers to the questions you never quite dared ask about the space program, such as "what did they use for toilet facilities?" and "what would they do with all that 'end product' on a two year mission to Mars?" Roach boldly goes where very few women (or men, for that matter) have gone and asks the hard questions.

In addition to questions of physical logistics, she investigates the studies into what sort of person makes a good astronaut - and into the sociological differences which makes the selection process very different in the United States and Japan and Russia.

Come to Grief by Dick Francis

17Aug. Kindle.

A return of Sid Halley. I can't decide whether I am more pleased that Francis resisted making Sid a genuine series detective with a novel a year or frustrated that he did not. Sid is a great character and I would really enjoy more stories about him, but I would hate to see him degenerate into a stock character. Also I would certainly have missed the many other great characters that populate the Francis stories, especially in his later books. Granted, many/most of these men share some of Sid's virtues and faults - and they are all men, perhaps Francis was reluctant to subject women to the physical abuse that his heroes invariably take.

Someone is gruesomely mutilating the best young racehorses in England by cutting off one of their forefeet. The investigation leads Sid through a tortuous re-examination of friendship and loyalty.

Murder: London - New York by John Creasy

16Aug. Paper.

I picked this up off the freeby table. Back in the day, I used to read John Creasy, not faithfully or obsessively as I did others, but he was definitely on my list - and a number of them are still on my shelves. My sister reminded (or informed me, because I have no memory of having known) that Creasy (under that name and his many other pen names) is one of those who challenged Isaac Asimov for most prolific writer of the 20th century. Apparently, it has been said that he was cranking out a book a week for years. Whatever, as long as he was still putting out entertaining reads, I'm okay with that.

As the title telegraphs, this one is a transatlantic number calling for the cooperation and collaboration of a detective of New Scotland Yard and a member of the NYPD.

Into the Out Of by Alan Dean Foster

15Aug. Kindle.

Alan Dean Foster at his most whatever it is that he is. The world needs saving and the leader of the team has collected the right people for the task: a girl from Seattle who works as for Eddie Bauer as a night phone order taker, an undercover federal agent, and the team leader himself: a several hundred year-old elder of the African tribe which lives near the out of from which comes the peril.

Good fun and not nearly as silly as the above paragraph makes it sound.

109 East Palace by Jennet Conant

12Aug. Kindle.

I have fallen terribly behind again. So much for resolutions. Maybe I should resolve to make entries short and to the point - did I like it and why, would I recommend it to this group or that - or to the other group with reservations.

I liked this one a lot. An acquaintance at church recommended it (the same Sunday that another acquaintance recommended the Julia Child book). She had lived and worked for a number of years at Los Alamos and found, as I did, that The Wives of Los Alamos was a sorry excuse for a novel and gave no insight whatsoever into the Manhattan Project days of the labs. She thought that this one was a much better look at the place, people, and period.

The book focuses on two people: Dorothy McKibbin who was the face of the lab to newcomers and the world during the closed years and Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory director. That is not to imply that other members of the collection of brilliant and volatile people who, for better or worse, made it all happen were slighted in the telling. The famous feud between Oppenheimer and Teller gets plenty of coverage, as do the issues with housing and schooling for the children of the families relocated to the mountain. The situation of the wives and kids was supposed to be the subject of Wives, but this book made it all much more immediate in the direct narrative and names of those involved.

McKibbin ran the office in Santa Fe where everyone, but everyone, in-processed. It was also the clearing point for all shipping and receiving (a lot more receiving than shipping) and a handy place to park babies while doing a little shopping. One of the more entertaining threads concerns the baby boom up on the mountain - the population of scientists and workmen and their families increased far beyond the original expectations - somehow they had neglected in planning to consider that young couples with limited options for entertainment would soon produce another generation, requiring the lab to add an ob/gyn and pediatrician to the staff.

Oppenheimer comes across as enigmatic and charismatic. His bizarre marriage gets plenty of play, as does his gift for creating controversy.

My future boss got a fair amount of coverage as one of the rabble-rousers among the scientists. The concerns of the scientists about what they were doing was a revelation. There was a point at which they considered the possibility that the nuclear reaction would set of a chain reaction which would ignite the atmosphere of the planet. Think about going to work with that in your mind.

Did I say "short" commentaries? Oh well, I really did like it.

Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life by Karen Karbo

6Aug. Kindle.

A friend at church recommended this one. It came up somehow because I mentioned reading Child's My Life in France, loving it, and being disappointed by Julie and Julia. This is a kick. It is part of series of books on Kick-Ass Women. Other entrants are Coco Chanel, Georgia O'Keefe, and Katherine Hepburn.

The reviews on Amazon complained because it was as much about the writer as the subject. Well, it was, but I didn't see that as a problem. It isn't biography, it was more about how this writer engaged with her subject. She did a tremendous amount of research, but produced a work that is anything but pedantic. She left me wanting to find and read some of her resource material.

Another complaint was that the footnotes were unnecessary - they could have been included in the text. True, but, in spite of the inconvenience of reading footnotes on my kindle, I think it worked. I think she uses footnotes to actually emphasize some of the remarks found there. If I choose this one for my next turn in book club, I will tell them to be absolutely certain that they never skip a footnote. Another book, the one I am reading in the bathroom, uses footnotes similarly. The passages that have reduced me to giggles and carrying the book down the hall to read to my daughter have all been from footnotes. Bathroom books go much more slowly, it will probably be a week or two before I finish it.

As I said, this is not a biography. It is very roughly chronological in presentation, but it is more tied to threads which ran through Child's life as perceived by Karbo: Julia Child Rules - rules for living. What emerges is Karbo's personal portrait of Child and how Child's life informs her own.

Let the Drum Speak (Kwani #3) by Linda Lay Shuler

5Aug. Kindle.

I don't quite know what to say about this one. It was rather repetitive, the basic cycle (new place: she's a witch) repeats several times. Now we are dealing with Kwani's daughter Antelope since Kwani died at the end of the last one.

The incorporation of actual prehistoric Native American sites is intriguing, but beyond the physical layout of the sites, I'm not sure that anything in the stories can be supported by anthropological evidence.

Antelope and infant daughter Skyfeather travel from the pueblos of New Mexico to a major site in eastern Oklahoma, and other characters travel down the river (the Arkansas?) and up the Mississippi to the Cahokia site in southern Illinois. They eventually return to New Mexico to be the ancestresses of the guy that led the pueblo revolt.

Maybe this wasn't all that bad, it just wasn't up to the level of what I've been reading lately.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2Aug. Kindle.

Surely I have reread this since high school, but based on what I didn't remember about it, I'm not sure. I've read Wuthering Heights by sister Emily several times; of course, it was required for at least two lit classes that I took within the last twenty years.

Jane is definitely not as complex as Wuthers but it was a fairly satisfying read. I'm pretty sure that some of the things that I "remembered" about it came from movies rather than from my earlier reading. I remembered St. John as a good, well-intentioned guy that loved her - not exactly, he was arrogant and manipulative. I did remember how nasty Jane's Aunt Reed was, but I didn't remember that she made an attempt (minimal, but still) to repair the consequences of some of her nastiness - too little, too late - but at least a gesture. At least Charlotte killed off the vicious, hateful cousin. I am quite certain that my memory of the scene of Jane's reunion with Mr. Rochester was from a movie. Oh, well.

Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

31Jul. Kindle.

So, to avoid reading the bookman books back to back, I thought I would go back and read some other classics. It has been a long time since I read Nero Wolfe, and I never read them in order. This is the first, but Stout gave it the feel of a long established series. Archie Goodwin has been with Wolfe for seven years. References are made to previous cases. The staff and routine of Wolfe's establishment are all in place: gourmet meals and orchids.

The murder weapon is a golf club - but it is certainly not used in the obvious way, and only Wolfe has all the pieces of the puzzle. Even Wolfe has to dig for them.

I'm not sure why Wolfe is so entertaining. He is more mannered and annoying than Hercule Poirot, and easily out-does Poirot at the exercise of "the little grey cells." At least Archie is not as terminally clueless as the hapless Hastings. He couldn't be, since friendship has nothing to do with relationship between Wolfe and Goodwin. And Wolfe entrusts all the legwork to him since Wolfe himself never leaves the house. Up to that point, the parallels between Poirot and Wolfe are striking. Both are physically absurd. Poirot is small and prissy with an egg-shaped head and a ridiculous mustache. Wolfe weighs upwards of 350 pounds.

Whatever it is, it seems to work for both.

The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning

30Jul. Kindle.

I'm trying to catch up, so these are going to be short.

It is difficult to be brief about one of the Bookman books. It is a shame that there are so few of them. It isn't that some of the writers of series which run to twenty or thirty volumes aren't good. Many of them are excellent - I keep reading them, don't I? But these are orders of magnitude above the usual.

Janeway came home from his last adventure with a goodly chunk of change - so he decided to buy a book. After all, the money was just "Indian Money," a term that a friend used to describe winnings from the casinos on the reservations.

After he returns home with his treasure, a mint first edition of a work by Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), an elderly lady comes to see him claiming that the book was part of her grandfather's collection which had been stolen (well, at least purchased fraudulently) from his widow. She extracts a promise from Janeway that he will find the collection. She dies before she can even return to South Carolina, but Janeway, being Janeway, feels bound to fulfill the commitment he made.

The background educational material is Burton - did he or did he not spy for the British in the days leading up to the Civil War.

The rest of these books are in my queue. It is going to take some restraint (and high class reading material) to resist reading them in straight sets, but I am determined to try. Anticipation ---

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers

28Jul. Kindle.

Nothing like the classics. It seems to me that Bunter figures much more largely in this one. We already know that he was with Lord Peter through the war and knows how to deal with his flashbacks, but in this one he is very active in the investigation. He is Lord Peter's entire CSI team: fingerprints, trace evidence, photographs, the whole package. And this one is a tricky one, even by Sayers standards.

The elderly general is found dead in his chair at the club, and across town, his sister has died as well. And all the money goes to the heirs of the one who didn't die first. Complicating things is the fact that it is the British equivalent of Memorial Day - or Armistice Day, I think it was called back after WWI - and this is soon enough after the war to be a pretty big deal.

This is also an opportunity for Sayers to express some feelings about the war and its devastating effects on those that survived.

Louisiana Lament by Julie Smith

27Jul. Kindle.

This one is all very literary - more poets, of course - but everyone has hold of a Gatsby analogy for the crime and much of the dialog involves casting and recasting the various characters in the various roles. It actually works, but it certainly helped to have read The Great Gatsby, maybe Smith figures that most people will have at least seen one of the movies. I did like the part where tough Italian PI, Eddie, sits on a dock waiting for a suspect to return from a fishing trip and reads the book. Never did find out if the book was in his pocket when he got dunked.

In the first one, we knew who the child molester/murderer was almost from the beginning. This time we switch from one suspect to another down to the last couple of chapters. A much more conventional approach to the genre.

Again, families and perversions of families run through everything. We discover that Talba has a half- sister, and that half-sister is central to the plot. Talba is also required to do a lot of "decoding" of the poetry of one of the players. And she throws in an extemporaneous performance to defuse the final crisis.

Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon by Donna Andrews

25Jul. Kindle.

I think Andrews has finally hit her stride in this one. Flamingos was entertaining, but the whole craft show/Civil war reenactment thing was pretty chaotic - and we all know that no Southern (with a capital "S") town is going to allow some flatland furriner to come in and run the circus. Or perhaps, the general scenario in this one just appeals to me because of my first career - and besides, I have always had a weakness for geeks and nerds.

Remember Meg's brother? The one that hated law school (although he did graduate and pass the bar on his first attempt)? The one that spent much of his time during law school inventing a role playing game (the uninitiated may think of Dungeons and Dragons) called Lawyers From Hell. The game caught on and a computer version has been created and is meeting with phenomenal success. Space-cadet Rob who can barely manage to read his email is now the CEO of a software firm. The staff is peopled with every kind of computer geek you can think of. They (or some subset of them) have also rescued a buzzard, George, from a pack of dogs and installed the now one-winged raptor in the reception area of their new office facility as a sort of mascot.

Something weird but indefinite is going on at Mutant Wizards and Rob has begged Meg to temporarily fill the receptionist position and investigate since she is presently recovering from a blacksmithing injury. The receptionist position is proving difficult to fill permanently because most sweet young things appear to have an unaccountable aversion to sharing space with and being the primary caretaker for a disabled buzzard - among other things. One of the other things is the practical joke nerd who is deeply enamored of the automated mail cart. As the story opens, Meg is ignoring him as he rides the mail cart around the office with a stage knife in his chest and stage blood dripping. Several circuits later, Meg happens to notice that this time he actually IS dead - strangled by (can you guess?) a mouse cord. Reminded me of the time that some of my nerdier students pretended to hang themselves with mouse cords in my classroom.

Absurdity mounts upon absurdity. By the way, the intractably vicious Pomeranian, Spike, is resident in a cage under the receptionist's desk. Did I mention that, a la Google, dogs are welcome to come to work with their owners at Mutant Wizards? Hopefully, the tattooed biker dude turned holistic veterinarian will succeed in reforming him.

Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop

24Jul. Kindle.

Second books can be difficult. Characters are established and a balance has been created - if the writer has done that which I most unreasonably demand of them - that they finish the story rather than sign off leaving Pauline tied to the railroad track with the 8:15 due at any minute. Inevitably, the new crisis must be bigger and badder than anything in the previous book and yet have its roots in the events of the original story.

The Crows are one of the more charming of the various terra indigene. They are curious and acquisitive, making them naturals as watchers and informers. One bit in the first book has one of the human characters trying to explain to a Crow in human form that she must give the customer the correct change even if it means that she has to give him some "shiny" not just bills. And, since they are such fun and fairly harmless characters, it is doubly shocking that they are singled out for deliberate mass murder.

It all develops into a world-wide plot to exterminate the terra indigene and make humans dominant. The vehicle being used by the Humans First and Last movement is significantly gruesome. No question about who are the bad guys.

There are still some threads carrying over. Will Lieutenant Monty recover his daughter? Are Meg and Simon ever going to realize that they are in love with each other - everybody else knows. The baddest bad escaped capture and becoming dinner, can he rebuild his evil business? There are doubtless future installments.

Louisiana Hotshot by Julie Smith

23Jul. Kindle

I don't know who is tagging all these books with "a humorous New Orleans mystery" and other subtitles of the same ilk. I have had to disagree with almost all of them. This is not funny story. For a funny murder mystery read Donna Andrews and her "bird" books. The juxtaposition of humor and horror is a time-honored literary device; the contrast heightens the effect. I first became aware of it in college when I was involved in a production of "La Boheme" (much, much later adapted into the musical "Rent"). In the original there is a scene where the starving artists in their garret are celebrating the sale of a painting with wine, food, and (in our production) a mock battle with paintbrushes and such as swords. In the midst of all that there is a knock on the door, and they find Mimi lying on the step at the point of death. Maybe that is a little extreme an example, but the fact that a competent writer uses the device does not make the book humorous. Besides, who wants to read a story that is grim and morbid all the time - maybe that is why the Matthew Scudder stories by Block are so short ---

Maybe the idiot at Amazon just thought the idea of a performing poet becoming a PI was so hysterically funny that it had to be a humorous story. New Orleans, "the city that care forgot," isn't a funny city either. Smith does a remarkable job of dealing with the contrasts and contradictions of the place. Obvious example: to most of the world, Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the party to end all parties; to the level of New Orleans society that is throwing the party, it is a deadly serious business. In fact, it is a major business in New Orleans, as Carnevale is in Venice. Those floats are not thrown together over a weekend by a bunch of college students fortified by a keg of beer. The costumes come with a ticket price that puts haut couture to shame. And at the same time New Orleans is a genuine modern city with one of the gulf coast's busiest ports. Okay, rant over.

This was fun (NOT funny) and old friend Skip Langdon slips in around the edges - although I don't recall being informed of exactly how she and Talba got to be such good friends. Still, every PI needs a police contact, so we will let that pass. And Talba Wallis in her persona as The Baronesse de Pontalba is a working poet. It must be fairly obvious that a working poet must have a day job, so since, in addition to being curious to the core, she is a self-confessed computer hotshot, Talba seems to herself, at least, an ideal candidate for a position advertised for an assistant PI. And Smith is off again crossing the lines of New Orleans society.

The case is brutal. A predator is working the middle class private school set for young girls. Smith sets up an appealing running cast, at least I hope they all hang around. Talba's mother, Miz Clara, is a tough lady who is crazy about Talba's boyfriend, Darryl. Darryl's day job is as a teacher and counselor at the school attended by one of the victims. By night he is a member of one of the best and best-known jazz bands in the city. Talba's new boss, Eddie Valentino is a former cop and self-identified tough guy, who is absolute putty in the hands of his wife and prosecuting attorney daughter.

For a first book in a series, it holds together well - although there is an awful lot going on. The theme is family - the families of the victimized girls, Eddie's exiled son, and Talba's own feud with her brother, even the family of the predator. To Smith's credit, she resolves all these loose ends rather than leaving some of them hanging as a lure to the next book. I suppose, on consideration, that family is one of Smith's persistent things; it is certainly a standing issue in the Skip Langdon books. Must be a New Orleans thing.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

22Jul. Kindle/Book Club.

This is an odd little story of a blind French girl and a German orphan boy whose connection is tenuous at best. It begins in the years leading up to World War II. Marie-Laure's father is the locksmith at the Natural History Museum in Paris and she grows up haunting its corridors and laboratories. Werner Pfennig and his sister, Jutta, grow up in an orphanage in the mining district of northern Germany.

It is also a story of obsession and the madness on many levels. Individual madness playing against the institutional madness of the Third Reich.

The threads of the lives of these two young people cross and re-cross delicately. I was beginning to fear that they would never actually meet, but they do - for a day in the midst of the seige of Saint-Malo. Then the threads float again, crossing in the lives of the people close to both of them.

The End of Always by Randi Davenport

20Jul. Paper/Library.

A friend from church checked this out and read it - and wanted someone else to read it, too. So she called me and had someone drop it off at Vacation Bible School for me. I think I understand why.

This is set in the late 19th or early 20th century. The story is about a young woman whose life has been defined by "mother's terrible accident." It is pretty clear that the "accident" was the deliberate murder of her mother by her father who proceeds to abuse his three daughters. The middle daughter falls for a handsome young carpenter and runs away with him only to find herself reenacting her mother's life. He beats her and starves her until one night the beating is so severe that neighbors rush in and rescue her.

At this point the real abuse begins as she seeks a divorce in a time and place where that is virtually unheard of.

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block

18Jul. Kindle.

This is the one I read many years ago and it put me off the Matthew Scudder books until just a few months ago. Now I'm not sure why I found it so horrifying. This the one where Scudder is fighting his way through his alcoholism. Six or seven days are about his limit for sobriety, but a major black-out frightens him badly.

The booze makes pursuing his case a little difficult. A high-class hooker hires him to tell her pimp that she is retiring - getting out of the life. That turns out to be a non-issue - until she turns up dead, butchered. And then it happens again, to a transvestite streetwalker. Then - well, you get the picture.

The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning

15Jul. Kindle.

Dunning just doesn't miss. I read these years ago at the suggestion of a friend and member of our teacher book club (now pretty much a retired teacher book club). I think I probably got into all that when I read the first one - which I didn't remember having read back whenever.

Denver-based ex-cop turned bookman, Cliff Wakefield, against his better judgement accepts a short-term contract as a bounty hunter. All he has to do is go to Seattle and collect a fugitive book thief and return her to Taos. Yeah, right, nothing is ever that simple in murder mystery land. By the way, the fugitive is named Eleanor Rigby.

As always, the technical information is fascinating. This time, the background is printing, as in fine printing of limited editions. And more about the dollar value of books and people who love books as objects rather than for their contents. I will admit to liking books - even though I prefer to read them electronically. I like them enough that I can't quite bring myself to do those clever crafty things which turn books into decorative objects, not even Reader's Digest Condensed Books, but not obsessively for their beauty and dollar value as a good bookscout and his/her clients do.

Written in Red by Anne Bishop

13Jul. Kindle.

Thanks to my sister for recommending this. I do enjoy a new twist in fantasy. The story takes place on the continent called Thaisia which bears a striking resemblance to North America. The names are disguised, but the places are pretty obvious. The city is called Lakeside, but if you catch a few landmarks, it is in the general vicinity of Chicago. Humans arrived in Thaisia to be confronted with the terra indigene or earth natives, who happen to be shape-shifters. They permit humans to live and farm in restricted areas and to share their technology with them.

The real difference in Bishop's world is the nature of the terra indigene. The main character is a Wolf (capitalized to distinguish the terra indigene from ordinary wolves) named Simon Wolfgard. Wolfgard is sort of the family name for all terra indigene Wolves. In myth and legend the were creature is a human being who under certain circumstances turns into a beast. In Bishop's story, the terra indigene are creatures who can shape themselves as humans if they wish. Simon Wolfgard is a wolf first and not a human being at all, regardless of his shape. The terra indigene come in all flavors - Wolves, Bears, Coyotes, Owls, Hawks, Crows, you name it --- and the Sanguinati - vampires, whose other shape is smoke. And various and sundry others, but telling you all that would spoil all the fun.

It opens with the arrival of a young woman dressed in light clothing in the heart of a Chicago winter night - I've been there in winter, and I wouldn't be out in it wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a t-shirt. For reasons which he can't explain even to himself, Simon hires her to be the Human Liaison (mail room clerk) for the Lakeside Courtyard - the interface point between the terra indigene and the humans of the city of Lakeside. He is the co-owner of the bookstore Howling Good Books (gotta love it) and the leader of all the terra indigene of the area. The bookstore, the coffeeshop next door (A Little Bite) are open to both terra indigene and humans and are staffed by both.

In spite of all this cleverness, this is not a piece of fantasy fluff. Tensions are high between humans and terra indigene, and the situation could easily degenerate into outright war with the humans being the inevitable losers. A good solid read.

The Con Man by Ed McBain

11Jul. Kindle.

Okay, so I finished the Dick Francis book earlier today. What can I say - McBain's 87th Precinct books are short - and tense. This one was actually under 200 pages. You can't fault the action, though.

There are actually three con men in the story, a pair who work doubles cons strictly for the money and a really nasty guy who cons unattractive spinsters out of their savings then feeds them a dinner well-laced with arsenic and dumps their bodies in the river.

Several of the cops we are getting acquainted with at the 87th are featured and I think Arthur Brown is a new addition to the cast. He has the distinction of being a black cop in a city in a time where the desk clerk can inform him that they don't rent rooms to niggers. Since the first call for their attention to the cash con guys is from a young black girl, he feels a particular interest in the case.

Detective Carella is the main point man on the other case, and his wife, Teddy, gets into the act in a big way.

I am slightly annoyed by the images of police files. I suppose it is nice that Kindle now supports images, but they are too small for me to read even with the scale as big as I have it. I suppose I could try increasing it even more, but that would slow me down so - even if it works on the images. So, I tried it, the scaling does work on the images, but if I continue to read at that scale I get 10 to 15 words on a page by actual count. I don't think I can click fast enough to read comfortably at that rate. What a gift it would have been for Grandmother, who was nearly blind. Before her death, my sister and I spent hours scanning the pages of a book that she wanted to reread and blowing them up and printing them so she could read them. Oh well, I just checked and that book is not available in a Kindle edition.

Wild Horses by Dick Francis

11Jul. Kindle.

Film again. This time the hero, Thomas Lyon, is a director. Although based in California, he is on location in England near his childhood home to make a film based on a book about an unsolved death that occurred when he was a small child. One level of conflict is between Thomas and the novelist who (silly man) signed a contract which basically gave the film company the right to do whatever they wanted to do. The writer, of course, is committed to his ethereal and inconclusive novel, and Thomas is charged with making a film that will draw crowds, that is, neither ethereal nor inconclusive.

In spite of the vagueness of the novel and the interference of the writer, bits and pieces start coming out and it becomes clear that someone is determined to prevent the completion of the film - if it means killing the star, the director, or a harmless little old lady who just might hold the critical piece of evidence. It should not need saying that the original crime occurred at a training stable.

It seems to be all about knives - but in characteristic style, Francis does tie in the wild horses. I was impressed by the visual images that he produced. The hero thinks in images, certainly appropriate for a film director. Francis made me see the images in Thomas's mind - and want to see the film.

Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos by Donna Andrews

10Jul. Kindle.

What a relief! This one is far better than the first two (peacocks and puffins). I was sure I remembered that from having read it some time ago, but it was worth the rereading to verify my memory which, as we all know, is faulty at best.

Andrews managed that satisfying feat - neither the murderer nor the murdered is anyone we mind seeing either dead with a knife in his back or carted away by the constabulary in handcuffs. My current thinking is that this may be one of the defining elements of the cozy mystery (I'm trying to write that without quotation marks, but it is difficult - it is just such a precious little phrase).

Flamingos flaunts all the silliness of the earlier two, but somehow doesn't quite sink to the level of utter ridiculous stupidity. Tall, dark and handsome Michael's mother has returned; she managed to be absent for the first two books, and she is an absolute monster. She is shaping up into the mother-in-law from hell - a reliable source has informed me that he and Meg actually marry and commit parenthood in future volumes. The reader should not be surprised by Michael's mother's monsterness since we all know that dogs grow to resemble their owners (or vice versa - dogs in personality and owners in appearance, maybe) and we know that she is the owner of the dog from hell. Yes, the infamous Spike of the earlier books is fully present in this one.

The setting is a craft fair and revolutionary war battle re-enactment chaired by Michael's mother, to the disgust of all and sundry since she is a newcomer to the area. I won't even attempt to explain how the flamingos figure into that.

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

9Jul. Kindle.

Mr. Kloos made excellent use of his study of the classics - Heinlein, in particular. He didn't wrap it up as cleanly as Heinlein did Starship Troopers, but he did manage an ending that made the book complete enough to stand alone. I know he didn't intend it to stand alone because the next book is in my queue already, and there are two heavy-duty lines trailing out of the end of it - the competition for land in the form of liveable planets with the aliens and the parting with his sweetie. The girlfriend aspect is one that Heinlein left strictly alone - no girls allowed in the Mobile Infantry. And as for aliens, Heinlein's world was already fully engaged in a war with the "bugs" when the book began.

The action is fairly clear. The bootcamp sequence is fairly well done, we are told about the high drop- out rate, but don't really experience it. Kloos's world is far more dystopic than Heinlein's. A large portion of the population of Earth resides in Public Residence Clusters - nowadays we call them "the projects." They collect minimal rations and simply exist - killing each other and taking drugs. The occasional full- scale riot is addressed by the army and the military is the only avenue of escape. Our hero, Andrew, makes the cut and has no intention of returning to a PRC.

That does bring up a minor point - Kloos may be a little heavy on acronyms. I suppose it is partly to reinforce the military setting of the major part of the book. I find that I tend to "read fast" through battles and passages heavy in quasi-military babble whether the context is medieval knights in armor or space aliens. It generally doesn't make much difference to my understanding of the story. And, in all fairness, I suppose there are readers (my imagination conjures hordes of adolescent boys) who really enjoy that stuff.

Crooked Man by Tony Dunbar

8Jul. Kindle.

Tubby Dubonnet is not a good guy hero type like A. Scott Fenney in Accused. Of course, he isn't exactly investigating a homicide either. There was a murder, the genre does rather require it, but the murder was none of his business. His main problem is how to get rid of the million in cash that the murder victim placed in his keeping - before becoming the murder victim, of course. He tries spending it, but decided that was too difficult. He tried spliting up and banking it, but found that the feds track large deposits. Poor guy - such problems he has.

The case he is actually working is a malpractice action for a transvestite stripper against a plastic surgeon who failed spectacularly to darken his skin.

The unsettling thing is that the people who should be good guys turn out to be bad, sometimes really bad, and the bad guys are just trying to make their way and keep milk and wheaties on the table for the kids. Maybe that's what I found uncomfortable about the second one of these - which was the first that I read.

Dunbar is developing a running cast of characters - Adrian of Monster Mudbug fame, the venial sheriff (I won't give you his name because I can't figure out how to make a French accent in Notepad), his greedy ex-wife and their three daughters, not to mention his secretary, CherryLynn. Most of them are characters in the sense that goes beyond mere people who populate the story. We are even introduced to Jerome and his godmother, the praline lady, who figure largely in the second story. An entertaining bunch.

Vicky Peterwald: Target by Mike Shepherd

7Jul. Kindle.

Let me see, what was most annoying about this book? Hard to say - lots of annoying things. Ending in the middle is always annoying. The thread of near porn running throughout was annoying. It seemed to me that killing the first male sex object was unnecessary, except that it gave Vicky the opportunity to kill a bunch of people. His replacement was essentially a clone - minus the duelling scar. The whole situation is utterly assinine. Maybe the "emperor" is being drugged by his trophy wife. Even that makes it difficult to understand how someone raised to rule could allow his empire to be systematically destroyed around him.

And then there is Vicky. Who/what is Vicky? There seem to be several versions of her that switch in and out without warning. Is she the slut with one thing only on her mind, calculating wardrobe malfunctions for maximum effect? Is she the naval officer having difficulty with her dual role as Lieutenant and Grand Duchess? Is she the woman concerned about the fate of the populations of the planets that her stepmother is destroying economically? Is she jealous of Kris Longknife or worshipful?

And when Vicky is smuggled off the homeworld - what happens to her faithful staff? I don't believe Miss Vicky spared them a thought. I suppose they were simply left behind to be tortured and murdered by the Empress's myrmidons. Granted, they had never developed the character status that Kris's entourage has.

I have been known to complain that the Kris Longknife stories all seemed to have the same plot. Maybe the plot of this one was supposed to be "Vicky Peterwald grows up," but he didn't do much of a job of it. I suspect that he was much to fond of the spoiled slutty bad girl to enjoy making her into a strong thinking woman. Of course, he never gave her a chance. How could she possibly measure up to the amazing Kris Longknife, and he compares them continually - usually through Vicky's own words and thoughts. I think it is appropriate for an author to like his/her character - but there are limits. This was supposed to be about Vicky - and it was still just a Kris showcase. At least he didn't have one of her sex partners accidentally call her Kris - he did slip and call the main character in another book Kris.

Lord of the Isles by David Drake

6Jul. Kindle.

Fairly standard fantasy quest. Instead of a hapless hero who has been raised ignorant of his destiny, we have three hapless heroes (okay, one is a girl) who have been raised ignorant of their destinies. They all grew up in the same backwater hamlet and within a period of weeks they are all trotted off on their quest(s). Unfortunately, their quests never become particularly clear to the reader. There must be more volumes - after all, he committed that crime of series fiction and left things hanging over the cliff. Maybe that is just tradition. Tolkien did it, so it must be the way it is done.

The prologue was very engaging - the backlash from a great working of magic wipes out the center of civilization and a minor wizard survives and is washed up on the shore near the aforementioned hamlet. Gradually, we discover that not only was she swept across the sea from destroyed Yole, she was swept a thousand years out of time. Unfortunately, she remains a fairly minor character. She does become the quest guardian for one of the three; the local hermit accompanies another; and the third picks up a six- inch tall redheaded invisible (to everyone else) sprite for his companion.

This went off into "Volume II" mode fairly early on - switching precipitously among the three crisis-rich quests. It wasn't particularly difficult to follow the three threads; there was just that jolt at the beginning of each and every chapter - okay, where are we now?

Drake produced some fairly nasty bads, including some insectile zombies, revived by a careless wizard. My biggest problem with it is that at the end of volume one we really don't know where he is headed.

Accused by Mark Gimenez

4Jul. Kindle.

About time somebody took on Texas for a murder mystery venue. I enjoyed this, seemed slowish at times - but I guess I have gotten conditioned to cop action and this was lawyer not so much action. He did get beaten up, but since he had stirred up the cartels and the mob and sundry local bad guys it seemed inevitable.

The setting was Galveston although the guy is actually based in the Dallas area. I never knew that Galveston is actually an island. I have heard "Galveston island" but always assumed that it was one of those coastal islands that was off Galveston. Nope - the city itself is on the island. Seems like lunacy to me, my father worked for the Corps of Engineers out of New Orleans and I know that all those gulf islands get scrubbed down to the sand by hurricanes periodically. Seems a lot like building a subdivision in the arroyo that runs through the middle of town - except that builder sold them to flatland furriners who didn't know any better, and on those gulf islands the same fools come back and rebuild time after time after time ... .

The hero, Atticus Scott Fenney, addressed by his eleven-year-old daughter, Boo, as "A. Scott," is a lawyer and a total good guy - almost too good. His wife walked out and left him - and Boo. He won a high-profile murder case for a black prostitute who promptly died of an overdose - so he adopted her eleven-year-old daughter, Pajamae. (That name has got to be for real somewhere - couldn't make that up.) He walked out of a partnership in a major law firm because he was fed up with making money for people who already had too much money. Now he has taken his daughters and the rest of his crew to Galveston to defend his ex-wife who is charged with the murder of her lover, a professional golfer. Maybe it is the name; Atticus Finch is the prototype good lawyer. I wonder if the mothers of the two infants that I know named Atticus are trying to program their sons to be lawyers.

The future of the whole bunch of them hangs on the outcome of this trial. His practice is not making enough to support them. And he has two offers hanging - one is a return to his old law firm with a corner office and a cool million a year, the other is a seat on the federal bench at a much more modest salary - although more than I would make in about ten years. Guess which one he wants - and stands to lose if he loses the case.

Sun on Fire by Victor Amar Ingolfsson

3Jul. Kindle.

The title is, to put it mildly, unsubtle once you find out that there was a person named Sun and she died in a fire. It certainly points in big neon letters to the provacation behind the primary plot. And once the convoluted connections among the initially unrelated characters began to emerge, I started thinking about the Orient Express which was pretty much on point. Still, there were a couple of major twists, and he is certainly not the first to appropriate what is possibly Agatha's most stunning plot - unless you consider And Then There Were None, which is sort of the reverse of the Orient Express plot. I'll have to think about that when I get to them in my Agatha reread.

There were a few things which I figured were translation artifacts - odd word choices: a formal word when a casual one would have been more appropriate, and a one or two the other way around - but then the afternotes identify an Icelandic/British couple as the translators. Maybe British English really is that different from American English.

The story fits right in with the other Scandinavian mysteries that I have read - depressing, every single character had an appalling back story. It was a good read and kept me at it, in spite of the chaos of the past week. The most frustrating thing to me was that he created a really interesting detective team - a Vietnamese raised by an Icelandic couple and the usual drunk - who still lives at home with his mother - and an incredibly neurotic crime scene tech, but I didn't feel that he let me get to know any of them well - just hints ... .

Maybe he has intentions of making these people a series and background will be dropped in along the way.

Paper Towns by John Green

2 Jul. Paper.

I apologize, darling daughter, for not having read this sooner. It has been on the shelf in the bathroom for a number of years. It has been quite some time, but I think I enjoyed it more than the other books of his that I have read.

YA is a tricky genre. The teenage angst has both greater depth and more limitations than most adults recognize. Green is certainly the master of that mind.

Here, a girl in the struggle to become herself drags a group of friends into her quest. Perhaps inadvertently setting them a more concrete quest when she disappears and they feel compelled to find her. Her guide and their clue is Whitman's "Song of Myself," a multi-layered metaphor for almost everything that is or happens in the story.

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

1Jul. Kindle.

Nice. Not much in the way of plot - it is a memoir rather than a novel. A little (maybe a lot) repetitious, but not unbearably so. A bit pretentious, perhaps: she is a university professor - and she coyly never reveals to which of the universities in the San Francisco area she is attached (SF State - it's in her wiki. Did she want me to guess that it was Berkeley?) or what is her discipline (creative writing - gotta love wiki). She is a southern country girl by birth and upbringing, perhaps that accounts for what seems to me a bit of an ego trip.

Part of my enjoyment was pure unadulterated green-eyed envy, I would so love to do what she has done: buy a falling down farmhouse in northern Italy and turn it into a showplace like the ones that some of my friends lived in. Personally, I would choose the Friuli instead of Tuscany, Tuscany is SO cliche! (How's that for a little pretentiousness?)

A minor irritation: it was not always clear when the English word or phrase that followed an Italian word or phrase was a translation and when it was simply another item in the list. Mechanics. And the one word that made me twitch each of the many times I encountered it was "siesta" - in five years, I never heard that word spoken in Italy by an Italian. Over in the Friuli, it was "riposo," a lovely evocative word when considered with its English cognate. "Siesta" is Spanish, "riposo" is the Italian word for exactly the same thing; siesta is unquestionably more commonly understood in the States, but in my experience, native speakers of Spanish and Italian are very defensive of the differences between their languages.

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers

27Jun. Kindle.

Talk about taking it home. The setting is Duke's Denver and the suspect arrested by the dependably incorrect Inspector Suggs is the Duke himself, Lord Peter's older brother. In spite of having little in common with his brother, Lord Peter does love him, if only because his removal would make Lord Peter, himself, the duke - and that is a fate he is committed to avoiding.

Again, as in Whose Body, the plot is terribly convoluted. Coincidence piled on coincidence piled on coincidence, but Sayers makes it all work. We even get a flying trip to the States thrown in for good measure. Lord Peter makes the return in a two-seater in foul weather with a daredevil pilot - Lindbergh had already broken the ice on that sort of thing. But from this trip Lord Peter brings the critical piece of evidence - arriving just moments before the jury retires to consider its verdict, thereby saving his brother from the hangman's noose, and himself from the House of Lords.

In addition, Lord Peter's good friend, Charles Parker - a good cop from Scotland Yard - meets the girl of his dreams.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

26Jun. Kindle.

Okay, THIS is the first of the Lord Peter books - and a complex and gruesome crime it is. The opening event is the appearance of an unidentified body in a bath. The bath happens to belong to the architect hired by the dowager duchess to manage repairs on the church at Denver, the ancestral home of the Wimseys. She naturally calls Lord Peter to counsel and console the poor fellow and to see what he can do for him.

He arrives to find Sayers' caricature cop, Inspector Suggs, hauling the architect and his housemaid off to jail, an utter absurdity, of course. If the architect had done the murder, would he have left the body in his own bath? and called the constabulary?

At about the same time, an important financier has simply disappeared (a Jewish financier, we are frequently reminded). One might guess -- but no, nothing so simple or obvious. In spite of a superficial physical resemblance, the body is definitely not that of the missing businessman.

I reread these first three back to back to back - without commentary - so incidents extraneous to the actual stories have slipped a bit. It may have been in this first one that Sayers fills us in on some important back story. The inimitable Bunter is far, far more than even Bertie Wooster's Jeeves, and Lord Peter is a far deeper character than Bertie Wooster. Bunter was Lt. Wimsey's sergeant - he is sometimes referred to as his batman - during the war (WWI, of course) and led the team that dug him out when he was buried by the collapsing wall of a trench. In which ever of these books it is, Lord Peter has a flashback - easily recognizable to us today as a symptom of PTSD, which hadn't been "invented" yet. They called it shell-shock. Bunter nurses him through it. Lord Peter's vulnerability to Bunter is totally different from the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster. Jeeves quite blatantly manipulates Bertie while rescuing him from his various stupidities. Maybe I should start taking notes on "Master/Man relationships in British detective fiction" or some such thing.

I'm thinking this is the story which includes the flashback (I remember it well from the TV series) because of the particularly hideous nature of this crime.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers

25Jun. Kindle.

I'm going to have to start checking before I start reading. I thought this $1.99 book must be the first - wrong again. It is the third Lord Peter Wimsey book.

The Lord Peter Wimsey stories definitely have a continuous back story. So I shall immediately go back and get the two preceding this one.

I am continually surprised on rereading how racial and ethnic references that I never noticed before jump out at me. It leaves me wondering where/when/how I became so sensitive to that sort of thing - maybe I read them all before I started teaching school. That could be it.

This crime deals with a matter that was addressed in a lit course I took one summer - surplus women. WWI changed the face of British society in many ways. An entire generation of young men had been wiped out, leaving a society in which women were expected to marry with a demographic landscape lacking husbands for them.

Decider by Dick Francis

24Jun. Kindle.

I read a pile of excellent mysteries and decided it was time to treat myself to another Dick Francis. I am trying to ration them. All of those others are well-written (well, most of them were) and well-crafted and none of them could begin to compare to "the next Dick Francis."

Lee Morris is a builder. He searches out "ruins" and restores/converts them. His newly completed project was a decrepit barn and is now a uniquely liveable house which suits his family down to the ground (so to speak). Unfortunately, his working pattern has always been to complete a project, sell it, and find another ruin to fix. This time his family has dug in their collective heels (all fourteen of them - heels, that is, if you count the baby - wife and six sons, counting the baby), and are demanding to stay put rather than move on to another wreck to live in - another round of leaking roofs and collapsing walls.

At this point, a representative of his unfamily walks in. Francis has presented his readers with some unusual families before, but this time he has outdone himself. In the near view, Morris and his wife have taken "staying together for the kids" to a whole new level. In the long view, the "family" in question is not his family by blood at all. His mother escaped with her life from a brutally abusive husband, and part of her settlement was eight shares in the Stratton family race course. The patriarch of the clan has died and the family is engaged in a vicious battle over the fate of the race course - one group wants to maintain the tradition, and the other to sell out to a developer for as much as they can get.

These people are individually and collectively as nasty as any bunch Francis has ever put on paper, definitely a clan that needs to die out. Although a couple of them eventually turn out to be somewhat human.

Morris is intrigued by the issue at least in part because the structures of the race course badly need updating - and he was, after all, looking for a new ruin. This one ends up more of a ruin than he anticipated, but in the manner of all Dick Francis heroes, he gets things done.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

23Jun. Paper.

This one has been my bathroom book for several weeks, but even at a few pages each time things do eventually get finished. I was tempted several times to bring it out and read it in chunks instead of nibbles, but I resisted.

This was completely fascinating. Why does this marketing campaign rocket a product to the top and another for an equivalent or even superior or the same product utterly fail? Who are the people who make the difference - and what would history look like if Paul Revere hadn't been who he was and where he was and the kind of person he was at the critical moment? I hadn't known that two fellows set out on similar rides that night: Paul Revere headed one direction and a guy named William Dawes in the other. Why does every school child know about Paul Revere's ride and only a very few revolutionary war buffs are aware of the other? According to Gladwell, it is because Revere was just one of those people who knows everyone - a connector.

He compares an "epidemic" of suicides among the young men in Micronesia to smoking among American young people. Why have all attempts to reduce smoking among teens and preteens failed? It seems that kids who take up smoking are the cool kids and others imitate them. The smoking equation is far more complex, but that seems to be one of the triggers. The suicide epidemic was even sadder. The trigger was the suicide of a very popular young man, and many that followed were much younger boys who just wanted to "try it out," not really wanting to die.

Who of my generation doesn't remember Hush Puppies? They were relegated to the back shelves of staid and boring shoe stores until a bunch of cool people with lots of connections decided that they were "in." I believe the standard Class A uniform pump for women in the Air Force is still black patent leather Hush Puppies.

He discusses at great length the people and mechanisms which make things happen. Cool stuff and well told.

Jazz Funeral by Julie Smith

23Jun. Kindle.

This is billed as a Skip Langdon story, and she is the primary dectective, with LA boyfriend having found another excuse to spend time in New Orleans. There is even considerable worry about their relationship. However, the story is really focused on Melody Brocato. Melody is the sixteen year old half sister of the murder victim. She disappears at about the same time as the murder. For the first few chapters we don't know if she was kidnapped or kidnapped and murdered or did the murder herself or saw something and ran away or ... . At about that point, it switches to her point of view and that is most of what we see for the rest of the book.

It was interesting seeing Skip from "outside," but I really missed being privy to her mental processes. Almost all that we see from Skip's point of view had to do with her insecurities about her relationship with Steve, the increasingly close relationship she has with her gay landlord, and her frustration at being placed again under the direction of the vicious Sgt. O'Rourke whose "management" style consists primarily of bullying and belittling his subordinates - reminds me of a guy I once worked for.

The primary setting is in and around the Jazz and Heritage Festival - or a fictionalized version thereof. Lots of music, lots of crowds, lots of food - sounds like New Orleans, all right.

Injustice for All by J. A. Jance

21Jun. Kindle.

J. P. Beaumont has worse luck with women than anybody around. He helps a beautiful woman drag the body of a murdered man out of the surf, ends up spending a night with her - the first since the death of his very short term wife in the first book. He feels that he is on the way to recovery, and - you guessed it - she is the next murder victim. Not only is she murdered, she is murdered in his red porsche. The next woman he mildly admires gets killed too. No wonder Beau is fiction's most depressed detective - after Matthew Scudder, Lawrence Block's creation.

To complicate matters, Beau is on vacation on one of the islands off the Washington coast. Of course, his many years with the Seattle PD have left him with connections in many smaller jurisdictions. And he needs them. This one is all tied up with political aspirations and lots and lots of money.

Then there is the fact that Beau has lots of money - thanks to short term wife, Anne Corley. He spends it well, often by paying for the services of lawyer/friend, Ralph Ames, whom he also "inherited" from Anne Corley. One of the major beneficiaries in this story is Beau's partner, who is fighting for custody of his children with his ex-wife who has taken them with her into a religious cult. I really like the idea of being able to afford to do something about situations - and doing it. Thanks, Ms. Jance, for bringing that fantasy to life, even if it is only on paper (or electrons).

The Man with a Load of Mischief by Martha Grimes

20Jun. Kindle.

This is actually the first in the series by Grimes. In this one we get to see the cop, Richard Jury, and the aristocrat, Melrose Plant, meet and develop an appreciation for each other. In book two, which I read just a couple of days ago, Plant just happened to be a guest of the master of the great house. I'm afraid that getting him on the scene for a whole series of these could be a bit of a strain, but probably no worse than many others.

This time we have a series of bizarre murders: murders of complete strangers to the village. (Do English villages really have such silly names? Long Piddleton? On the other hand, Grimes is an American, maybe she is just having a little fun at expense of the British.) Then the body of a local girl turns up.

It takes digging way back to discover the connections and uncover the mastermind behind it all.

This story takes place over Christmas. The next one - advantage of reading them out of sequence - is set following twelfth night, January 6. Running them pretty close.

There are some nice bits between Jury and a couple of kids from the village. Not enough to make me consider this "cozy," however. For some reason Jury loves to make tracks in fresh snow, and these kids present themselves and allow him to teach them tracking - by tracking up the snow in the village square. A really nice bit.

City of Beads by Tony Dunbar

19Jun. Kindle.

This is subtitled "A Hard-Boiled but Humorous New Orleans Mystery." Hmmm. Subtitles worry me for some reason. Do the authors feel that they must explain themselves lest their readers be unclear on their intentions? Do they want to ensure that the right readers find them? Is it the decision of the publishers? This particular subtitle reads like a cover blurb rather than a subtitle. And since when are there subtitles on mystery stories anyway. Beyond Murder blankety blah blah: a Fred J Muggs mystery, the inclusion of a subtitle seems a bit excessive. I guess I think lengthy explanatory subtitles should be reserved for those textbooks on abstruse topics that no one really wants to buy - Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach. Right. Obviously, that writer intends to do it better than any of the thousands who have preceded him. At any rate, I found this book neither humorous nor hard-boiled - scarcely even soft-boiled, except for the fact that it took place in New Orleans in the summertime when pretty much everything is somewhat boiled.

The whole thing was a little diffuse, but Mr. Dunbar managed to connect most of the loose ends into the same evil plot before it was all done. There were a fair number of bodies left lying around, the mob, the Vietnamese mob, a group of earnest environmentally conscious college students, a wise-cracking secretary, a barely aware drunk whose sole claim to anything is a giant mudbug (crawdad, to the uninitiated) float which he drove in all parades, and so on. I don't think many of the cliches were missing. Still made pretty good reading.

One more note, I have no clue regarding the significance of the title. He found a string of beads in the gutter at one point and passed it on at another. There was a parade at which, in true New Orleans style, beads and other things were thrown. But neither seemed to have any real connection with the story. So - another "I don't get it." Nothing new there. I don't get a lot of stuff.

The Old Fox Deceiv'd by Martha Grimes

18Jun. Kindle.

I saw this on one of the Kindle deals and bought it. I hadn't read any Martha Grimes in years. I vaguely remember that they were a little depressing and at a point I just started reading other stuff instead. To my utter amazement, when I looked up her wiki for a book list they specifically categorized her as a writer of "cozies." Really! I haven't read many that I would think less cozy than hers. The detective, Richard Jury, is seriously depressed and the crimes are not exactly lightweight.

I suppose his sergeant and his hypochondria are a sort of comic relief, and I suppose some might read his civilian sidekick, Melrose Plant that way, but not really. Her gimmick is the pub names for titles. Are gimmicky titles a "cozy" criteria? This is not actually the first, but I had it - so I read it.

I enjoyed it, except for Jury's interactions with his supervisor, who is abusive and stupid - and frankly not very realistic - except that I once worked for someone very much like him. That's probably why those parts of the story bothered me.

One of the problems faced by the detectives from Scotland Yard is that apparently they are not called in on a case until the local constabulary has totally fouled everything up. They prove how good they are by solving only cold cases, I suppose. How very British. In either this book or the first one (which I have already read, but not commented on) Melrose Plant comments on the fact that given the way they prepare and serve toast, there must be a prevalent fiction that the British actually prefer cold toast - was Grimes alluding to the way that cases are handled by their hierarchical police system?

Here a young woman is murdered - stabbed to death by a mysterious two pronged weapon - while on her way in a striking costume to a Twelfth Night revel in the local manor house. Then it develops that her very identity is at question and a couple of generation's worth of secrets are dragged out into the light.

Melrose Plant is on the scene, a guest of the local baronet and insists that Jury be summoned. Any number of intriguing characters wander through, including a 12-year old boy who has been abandoned by his mother but is working and supporting himself and his dog - under the watchful eyes of several of the ladies of the village. In a side action, Jury sets that matter straight. A satisfying bit.

Murder with Puffins by Donna Andrews

17Jun. Kindle.

It was a double - two books in one package - the file was open. So much for my rule about back-to-back books by the same author. Actually, that may have been one of my mother's rules from when I was much, much younger. I was not allowed to check out two books by the same author on our weekly expeditions to the library. I think I was also required to check out a non-fiction book - I'm not sure I always read those.

The story was ok. The opening was annoying: following hard on the heels of the weddings of peacock fame, Meg and the not gay professor slip away to a remote island off the coast of Maine for a few days of privacy - and find all her dear family there ahead of them. So Michael, the professor, is bunked in with other single men and she sleeps on the couch.

Then the villain of the piece is murdered and the murderer makes a couple of good tries at Meg and Michael. After all, everyone wanted the villain dead and they were just too nosy.

It is a good thing that I have already read later books in the series, because otherwise this would have been the last one I'd have touched. The puffin connection with the story is tenuous at best, so Ms. Andrews tried to beef it up by making her chapter titles familiar quotations -- with the word "puffin" inserted for the key word. It wasn't enough to make me quit reading, but I did put it away in irritation several times. Incredibly annoying. In Peacocks, she used date references to the wedding calendars - that worked. This was amazingly stupid. I also know that she gets on to more inventive book titles. Where could she have gone? Murder with Penguins? Murder with Parakeets? How many "P" birds are there?

I suppose the writer of "cozy" mysteries has some latitude concerning general silliness. So here we go again. There is no question in my mind that this is a cozy mystery, but there was no knitting and no cats - maybe it was the birds.

Murder with Peacocks by Donna Andrews

16Jun. Kindle.

I had been keeping up pretty well there for a while. This one was all written up, ready to post, and I wandered away for a while - then we had a thunderstorm and I had to go sit with my hysterical puppy lest he destroy the house. Naturally, one of the boomers was close enough to kill the power for a fraction of a second. Naturally, THIS time I hadn't saved my stuff - after all, I was going to post it immediately ----

It will be a few days before I make that mistake again.

I'm pretty sure that this evening's thunderstorm has passed over, so back to the book.

I've read a couple farther along in this series, but not this one. I quite enjoyed it. Our heroine, Meg Langslow, takes a leave of absence from her anvil and studio (she is a blacksmith) to go home and manage the weddings for three bridezillas - her bff, her brother's fiancee, and her mother. Things look up when she discovers that the local dressmaker is miles away recuperating from surgery and her totally gorgeous university professor son is holding the fort with the assistance of a flock of Vietnamese seamstresses who speak no English. Unfortunately, village rumor has it that he is gay. Oh, well.

The brides keep making outrageous demands and changing all the arrangements. One of the changes calls for peacocks (see book title) to stroll around the grounds being decorative. The brides totally ignoring the probable generous contribution of peacock poop and frequent raucous shrieking (I live near peacocks, I speak from experience). The the obnoxious sister of one of the groom's deceased first wife turns up and is subsequently murdered. Some writers of mysteries do see to it that the murder victims are the most deserving. In this case it was a toss-up in my mind between the sister and one of --- well, never mind, read it yourself.

All kinds of general silliness and what all. And, of course, the final reveal that the gorgeous professor isn't really gay after all. Meg had to be bludgeoned with that one although he had been trying to tell her through the entire story. Good fun.

Death Turns a Trick by Julie Smith

15Jun. Kindle.

In this series, Smith makes San Francisco her setting. San Francisco is a city of definite personality as is New Orleans, but it doesn't become a defining feature of the story as New Orleans is in the Skip Langdon stories. Here the heroine is Rebecca Schwartz, a feminist Jewish lawyer. I'm pretty sure that is the order in which the adjectives are repeatedly repeated. (A little redundancy never hurt anyone.)

Rebecca even refers to herself as a "JAP" (Jewish American Princess) at one point. However, none of those adjectives seem particularly critical to either Rebecca as a character or the story. The fact that she is a feminist lawyer puts her in a position to be the attorney of record for a coop of prostitutes, but I suspect that other devices could have accomplished the placement as easily.

Oh well, we have political and police corruption and a successful bordello in SF; all kinds of fun.

One little thing has been surprising me. Everybody in Smith's books that I have just read (or reread) goes around high most of the time. Is pot smoking by professionals really so commonplace? Rebecca doesn't smoke much or often although most of the other characters seem to be high most of the time, and in her series, Skip Langdon seems to live on the stuff. I never noticed that when I read these years ago.