The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling)

This has the characters and potential to be the lead in a string of series murder mysteries. A bit convoluted, but well managed. The opening is a scene of the death of supermodel Lula Landry. The police investigation submits a verdict of suicide, but the brother of the deceased eventually goes to private detective Cormoran Strike because he is convinced that it was murder.

Took me a while on the title. It seems to be connected to the fact that one of Lula's friends was in the habit of calling her Cuckoo. Each of her friends had a different name for her, it seems. However, that is not the real connection, I think. The cuckoo is best known (after its distinctive call) for its habit of finding a momentarily unattended nest, pitching out the eggs, and laying its own there for another bird to raise. Lula and both of her brothers, one of whom died as a pre-adolescent, were all adopted. The detective, Strike, is the illegitimate son of a much married rock star (perhaps patterned unsympathetically on Mick Jagger) who neglected to marry Strike's mother, an acknowledged supergroupie. A whole collection of potential cuckoos.

I would like to see a second book, if only to see how long it takes competent and concerned no-longer-temp secretary, Robin, to dump her tediously conservative fiance.

The Hydrogen Murder by Camille Minichino

Disappointing. Perhaps I just read it in the wrong company. It is a little unrealistic to expect a formula "cozy" mystery to hold its own among the stuff that I have been reading just recently. And this is definitely "cozy." I know I have debated with myself the definition of the cozy mystery genre without solving the puzzle, but I will unhesitatingly label this one. This leaves me with a PhD physicist as the protagonist of a cozy mystery while Miss Marple, an elderly lady who is never more than a few feet from her knitting, is not.

It is possible that my problem has something to do with the fact that this 55-year-old woman with a doctorate in physics (although Minichino never specifies her speciality) behaves like a 14-year-old with a crush on her history teacher over the cop who is heading the investigation into the murder. I found her twittering and dithering extremely irritating, even embarrassing. I also found the ex-boyfriend who had carried the torch for thirty years while she was on the west coast rather ridiculous.

Minichino, herself, is a physicist on faculty at a rather prestigious university. I assume that the science is not without merit. But even the science loses credibility in the hands of the cast of this piece. I do hope that the author is not attempting to pattern her heroine after herself.

Dead in the Water by Stuart Woods

When this appeared on my kindle, I thought it was the second book in the series, it isn't. It is the third - so I have purchased the second book for the sake of near continuity. I did wonder where the girlfriend came from since I didn't remember her appearance in book one. Sometimes things happen between books, but mostly not. She dumps him, though - and I don't believe she makes a live appearance at all.

They were supposed to fly down for a vacation on a yacht which they were to pick up at the island of St. Marks somewhere in the Caribbean. I satisfied myself that the island is completely fictional. She misses the plane, gets snowed in, and then goes to California with an old "friend." At least I know not to get too fond of her in book two.

In the meantime, our hero, Stone Barrington, has barely had time to become disgruntled over his sweetie's absence when the yacht Expansive appears - with a beautiful blonde sailing her. A blonde who had departed from the Canary Islands with her husband aboard and arrived at St. Marks without him. A murder trial ensues with Barrington acting for the defense.

I remember that the ending of the first of these, New York Dead, was extremely twisted and perverse. I don't know yet if this is the pattern for Woods, but the twists in this one fully measure up to that standard - and just when you think you have them all - there's another.

Woods is in danger of writing a book with no likeable characters at all. Barrington himself does not show well - he is in bed with the blonde while he still expects the girlfriend on the next flight and suffers no qualms about jeopardizing her case by allowing others to notice how easily she is comforted for the loss of her much loved husband.

Still, a good read - there was one point at which I considered putting it away unfinished, but I don't remember particularly what it was. Perhaps it was in consideration of the extremely bizarre legal system on the island. Trial one day, 24 hours for an appeal to the prime minister, execution by hanging the next day. It seems they were extremely short of jail cells.

By the way, he also dropped a teaser for his next book - which I found a little annoying. Remember the girlfriend who ran off to California. As this one wraps up, Stone gets a call from her now husband; she has gone missing and only Stone has a prayer of finding her.

Angel-Seeker by Sharon Shinn

Another one that has been around the house for years and that I hadn't read. I can't imagine why I hadn't. The Samaria trilogy are on my very short list of books to reread fairly often. It is a hard-cover and I don't like them much - they are heavy - and big. I suppose it could also have something to do with the reason I own the hard-cover copy of this book. I found it on a table at a garage sale for a quarter and picked it up and flipped it open to find that it was signed. I hadn't bought it before because I tend to resist the books that many excellent writers produce to line their pockets by cashing in on an extremely popular character or universe.

So - I finally picked it up and was captivated as always by Shinn's pure story-telling ability. This one is set in Samaria-time shortly after the end of the first book, Archangel. The book actually consists of two stories which overlap in time and space, but intersect only minimally. She picks up one of the more appealing side characters from Archangel, Obadiah, the angel who does most of the work of reconciling Rachel to her new role as Angelica, and one of the least appealing of the societal groups, the Jansai, nomads dedicated to greed and seething over the elimination of slavery under the new Archangel. She also tracks the career of one of the angel-seekers, as women who flock to the vicinity of the angel holds with the intention of conceiving a child by an angel are contemptuously called.

The story is exciting, the characters engaging and the line of probability stretched almost to the breaking point. That may seem like a silly statement in the context of fantasy/science fiction, but it seems appropriate here. It seems improbable to the point of absurdity that two girls who are part of a culture that does not permit women to be seen in public - or even in their own homes by men other than very close relatives - without full robes and veils are able to meet men from other groups and carry on long-standing affairs with them. On the other hand, having suspended disbelief to the extent of angels with wings who must mate with "mortal" women (or men) to produce offspring, I suppose it is unreasonable to expect probability in other areas. Although, I might argue that the feature that makes much fantasy appealing is the consistency and/or plausibility of the mundane aspects of life.

Good book, anyway. Upon googling, I found that Shinn has another series going. I will have to check that out - and I think I will be acquiring her books in Kindle format for the sake of convenience (that means not having to hunt for them on the shelves and in boxes).

Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck

I had never read this. I've read The Good Earth several times, even taught it once, but I never felt compelled to embark on a course of Pearl Buck novels. I probably wouldn't have read it now if my sister hadn't gotten it - and asked me if I had looked at it. So I did. Once started, I couldn't put it down. And that's a phrase I usually reserve for those extremely tense mystery/suspense novels that I am addicted to, not for a piece about life in an upper class Chinese household published in 1946.

Madame Wu has managed the Wu household since her mother-in-law's "retirement" on her fortieth birthday. On her own 40th birthday, however, although she intends to acquire a concubine for her husband to handle those duties, she has no intention of stepping down as CEO.

She understands that her oldest son's wife is fully engaged in bearing and raising children and has neither the time nor the inclination toward management. She is less aware that another reason is that she simply doesn't want to give up control of her world. As she continues to make the decisions which direct the lives of all sixty or so people in her world, things began to go subtly, then more seriously, wrong.

Then everything changes. She invites into her controlled and tranquil environment a stranger, a foreigner, a priest who comes to tutor her third son in English. Madame Wu is intrigued and joins the study and her entire vision of the world changes. When he is killed by street thugs, she is summoned to his deathbed and he charges her to "Feed my lambs." His lambs turn out to be the fifteen or so girls that he has rescued from certain death after they have been abandoned by their families as undesireable mere females. Madame Wu takes them home and installs them in the Buddhist temple on the grounds of the Wu home. Even so, the story is not about the inclusion of these girls in the household, it is about the changes in Madame Wu herself.

In many respects it is a somewhat transparent Christian metaphor. Brother Andre is the Christ figure and the transformation of Madame Wu is from a view from the perspective of tradition and her own personal judgement to that of individual well-being of each person within her sphere of influence.

Granting that my experience of Buck's work is limited, the two I have read suggest that the condition of women in Chinese society is one of her persistent themes. Although The Good Earth is primarily the story of the rise and fall of Wang Lung and his family, the thread that always fascinated me is the story of his wife, O-Lan, purchased from slavery, the only kind of wife he could afford. This is placed at the far side of the range of society, the Wu family is the wealthiest and most influential family in their region, and in a different period, WWII rather than WWI, but Buck is deeply concerned with the lives of the women in both stories.

The Rope by Nevada Barr

A prequel to Barr's popular National Park series featuring National Park law enforcement ranger, Anna Pigeon, this is not Barr's strongest work. A friend and I were speculating that it may be an early writing that is only now being published.

This features a younger Anna on the run from NYC and theater after the death of her husband. Anna has taken on seasonal work at Glen Canyon. Her job, with housemate, Jenny Gorman, is cleaning up the human waste deposited by indifferent tourists in one of the most amazing settings on earth. Charming. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that drew its water supply from that particular resevoir; I hope I haven't. The continual discussion of people poop was not pleasant - however accurate it may have been.

Barr does a brilliant job of giving the uninitiated (me, for example) a sense of the nature of the place. I've seen pictures, and that surface reality is amazing enough - sheer rock walls rising from an immense body of water. But from pictures it is hard to capture a sense of the depth and character of the place. I'm not particularly comfortable with large bodies of water, and I am more accustomed to naturally occuring lakes - or even partially artificial lakes like Lake Ponchartrain which is crossed by the longest bridge in the world. According to the wiki, the average depth of Lake Ponchartrain is 12 to 14 feet, and I believe I was once told that out under the middle of that bridge the depth of the water is 75 to 80 feet. The water in Glen Canyon is 7 to 8 hundred feet deep in places - and those places are not all "out in the middle." By the time she has finished, you get it.

Unfortunately, the whole thing seemed rather unfocused to me. Too many characters, too many plot twists, too many side issues which led nowhere. One of the most likeable characters is Anna's supervisor/partner/housemate, Jenny. Why did Barr make Jenny a lesbian? The fact that Jenny is a lesbian is not the problem, it is just that it truly does not contribute to the plot at all and requires a great deal of otherwise unnecessary discussion and explanation. Barr works it in, sort of, but there were simpler ways to accomplish the tasks that this sideline addressed.

Oh well, a lesser effort from Barr is still better than many people's best.

Slayride by Dick Francis

This was a very cold story. No doubt, part of that was the psychological effect of the Norwegian setting, but when the first attempt on the hero's life involves dumping him out of a small boat into the fjord, you know it is going to be a cold one. The title is not one of his greatest. One of the people killed is strapped to a sled and pushed down a slope and over the cliff above the fjord.

David Cleveland is neither unduly depressed nor does he pursue teenage girls. I like this change, which began in Smokescreen but the titles do not make me happy.

A British jockey riding in Norway disappears and so do the gate receipts for the race day - all this serves as a reminder of how close together everything in Europe is - it's a day trip.

Cleveland is an investigator for the Jockey Club in England and goes to Norway at their request (in response to a request from the Norwegian Jockey Club) to try and find the missing man. He does - and a whole lot of trouble besides. The mystery, including the murders, has very little to do with horse racing, but everyone involved is connected to racing.

In spite of the differences noted and the setting this seemed almost formulaic. Maybe it is time to let them rest and read other stuff for a while.