The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

 

By Dorothy L. Sayers

A Lord Peter Wimsey Novel

A man is discovered dead at the gentlemen's club that has Lord Peter as one of its members. As the man, General Fentiman, was quite elderly and known to have a weak heart, it is assumed that he died of natural causes.

But Lord Peter has his doubts. Something about the corpse seems off. 

One of the puzzles surrounding Fentiman's death is exactly when he died. Fentiman had a wealthy sister whose will stated that he would inherit her fortune if she died before him. Amazingly, the sister, Lady Dormer, died at approximately the same time as her brother. The time of her death is known. But the time of the Fentiman's passing can only be estimated. 

Lord Peter takes on the chore to pinning down Fentiman's movements the day before he died and the day he died. Talking to everyone at the club who might have seen him the day before or the next day, patrons and employees, all he can discover is that no one saw Fentiman arrive at the club the morning of his death. So the body is exhumed and an autopsy done which might help establish the death time. What is does reveal is poison, in the form of a drug that can cause a person's heart to stop beating. Clearly it is not a case of natural causes but is a murder. And clearly it is all about the money. One of  Lady Dormer's heirs is a greedy killer. Lord Peter is on the case.

This was a pretty good read. At one point in the story, Lord Peter gets punched in the face, which he probably deserved. Also, the author includes a domestic spat that reads so true to life, it's amazing. 

This book dates from 1928. It is now old enough now that it is in the public domain (in the USA). It is free to read online at Project Gutenberg.

What's a Girl Gotta Do?

 

By Sparkle Hayter

Book One in the Robin Hudson series

Robin Hudson works in the news department of a large New York network. So far, her career and life have been less than stellar. Her work life due to a couple of embarrassing incidents on camera and her personal life due to her soon-to-be ex-husband's infidelity. 

New Year's Eve and Robin gets a phone call from an unknown person who reveals that he knows a lot of intimate details about her life, including Red Knobby. He instructs her to meet him at the networks New Year's Eve party that night if she wants to know more. 

She was thinking she wouldn't go before she got the phone call because she was concerned her cheating spouse would be there with his new lover, who also works of the same network. But curiosity about this mysterious call makes her change her mind.

Once there, she has to witness the painful scene of watching the hubby and his jezebel canoodling on the dance floor. Plus the false and the sincere sympathy she has to endure from coworkers at the party. Finally, she is passed a note instructing her to go to a room in the hotel at exactly 11 PM. Meanwhile, the reader gets to meet the cast of hundreds that fill the novel. So many characters and so many introductions. 

Anyway, Robin does as instructed and knocks on the door and no one answers. She waits a decent amount of time, but no one shows up and no one ever answers. She only encounters one other person, one of her coworkers in the hallway where the room is located.

Naturally, the guy she was supposed to meet is dead in the hotel room and naturally Robin is the prime suspect. We know she didn't do it and it doesn't take much talking on her part to convince the police that she is an unlikely suspect. So being a reporter and having her freedom on the line, she does a little investigating of her own. It doesn't take her long to discover that she was not the only target of the dead man, Jerry Spurdle, a P.I. with a nasty reputation. A few other women at the network have also been blackmailed by him and certainly had reason to want him dead. Did they have the time and the opportunity though, while attending a New Year's party, to beat his head in until he was very much dead?

This was an OK read. Too many characters to keep track of though. I also didn't find the plot that engaging. Or the main characters that interesting. 

Here are reviews by Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.

Family Reunion

 

By Caroline B. Cooney

Shelley is a young teen who is on summer vacation with her father, her younger brother Angus and her step-mother Annette. Her mom has moved to France, a move that Shelley has been having a hard time accepting. She feels that her mother abandoned her children to be with her lover in France, across the ocean from her children in the US.

Shelley's family spends their summers at a vacation home in rural Vermont. Her father, Charlie, commutes between there and the city. Annette, who has only been married to Charlie for a couple years, has charge of Shelley and Angus. A third child, the oldest, is spending the summer in France with the mother. 

Charlie's sister, Maggie, has invited their family and friends to a family reunion to be held at Maggie's home in the Midwestern US. Maggie is known for her perfectionism, which has earned her family the nickname of the Perfects, a play on their last name, Preffyn. She and her spouse have two kids, Brett and Carolyn. Brett in sixteen and Carolyn is the same age as Shelley, fourteen.

Shelley rather envies the Preffyns organized lifestyles. Maggie always seems to have everything organized and in control, including her kids. Whereas Shelley's family seems to be rather lost and disconnected, with the three kids giving their step-mother a bit of a hard time. Nonetheless, Shelley is looking forward to spending time with her aunt and uncle and their kids, along with her dad and Annette and Angus.

Of course, things are not quite as nice as expected when they arrive for the family reunion. Brett had an unfortunate incident while driving his vehicle and got into a big fight with his mom and has left home as a result. And it turns out the family reunion was actually supposed to be a surprise party for brother Charlie, with lots of guests from Charlie's school days. But Charlie wasn't able to come, he has to attend a mandatory work event instead. All Maggie's party plans fall apart, with no guest of honor attending.

Shelley has always been a bit intimidated by her cousin Carolyn. But the two girls have a lot of fun together and Shelley finds that Carolyn is just a teen girl like herself. As the days go by, she also realizes the Preffyns are not Perfect, but an ordinary family like her own. 

This was an OK read if rather boring. I'm not sure how I came to own it, but after finishing it, I looked it up and discovered it was intended for kids, 10 to 15, or there about. So, not surprising I found it rather dull. Also no surprise that all the family problems are resolved by the end of the story. 

However, it started out much more interesting than it ended, thanks to the little brother, Angus who is quite the mad lad. Unfortunately, most of his hijinks tapered off a bit once they were visiting the relatives in the Midwest. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Vita Nostra

 

By Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

Book One of the Vita Nostra trilogy

Sasha was a promising young high school student when she noticed a strange man is watching her whenever she is outside. Eventually the man approached her and gave her a task to perform. Every morning she had to get up early and go to the beach, strip off her clothes and go for a nude swim. If she didn't do as he said, there would be bad consequences to her family: "You will, Sasha. You will. Because the world around you is very fragile. Every day people fall down, break their bones, die under the wheels of a car, drown..." 

Sasha only has one person that she loves in her life, her mom. Sasha's dad is not a part of her life and she has no siblings. It's just Sasha and her mom. So she does what the strange man orders her to do. Of course, it doesn't end with the nude swimming. As graduation approaches, he forces her into attending a small college in a distant town, the Institute of Special Technologies.

Once she gets settled into the college, she comes to understand that all the students attending are there under the same threats she is. She gets to know one male student who stood up against the strange man. This kid, Kostya, reveals that the man is his father. Kostya did not want to attend this college either and as a consequence, his beloved grandmother died. And his father made it clear it was because Kostya was defying him. The two kids vow to kill the man, Kostya's father, if they ever are able to do so.

The texts and the rules of when and how to study them are different and strange and perplexing. But Sasha begins to absorb them and her perceptions of reality become affected. She is such a good student that she gets into trouble for reading ahead and experiencing frightening consequences. On one hand, her instructors applaud her achievements but then get angry when she gets too far ahead. She is constantly getting into trouble for that.

But outside of the studies and the feeling of oppression that envelopes the students, life there is typical of any college. Kids form cliques, kids pair up, kids test the boundaries, drink too much, smoke too much, hook up too much. Sasha is no different from the kids when it comes to college kid behavior. She gets involved with Kostya but then dumps him and finds a new boyfriend. But she and Kostya never lose their connection of their hatred of his father. 

As the college years pass and Sasha becomes an adult, she begins to understand just what the teachers are and what she is becoming. This is where the story gets even more strange. I would like to explain it but it sounds so ridiculous. All I can say is everything is words. Sasha is a word, Kostya is a word, all humans are words or parts of words. And that Kostya's father, the man who forced her into this situation, is not human. He is a text file? A program? A book disguised as a person?  It was all rather murky to me.

The book was really interesting even though the transformations the students are enduring are hard to comprehend. It's kind of a combination of Harry Potter and The Matrix. The students' understanding of the true nature of reality gives them powers, including the ability to manipulate time itself. But they don't perform spells (at least not in this book), their abilities arise from the perception of the true nature of things. Quite a start to a new series! 

The next book in the series is Assassin of Reality. 

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Sisters of the Confederacy

 

By Lauraine Snelling

Book Two of the A Secret Refuge series, a three-part series.

The story of two young women, Jesselynn Highwood, who goes by Jesse, and Louisa Highwood. Jesse, in Missouri, is passing as a teenage boy, trying to lead her people to Oregon to start a new life away from the Civil War and to freedom for the black members of her group. Louisa is in Virginia, helping her brother take care of several wounded Rebel soldiers in their home. The brother, Zachary, was gravely wounded in the war, having lost an eye and two limbs, but has recovered and has also put a stop to Louisa helping take care of the wounded at the army hospital. 

Jesse has all the weight of trying to shepherd her people and animals safely to Oregon while Louisa has all the irritation of being limited in what she is allowed to do since her brother returned home and put a stop to her work at the army hospital. Her situation is the opposite of that of Jesse's, who is overburdened, while Louisa is feeling put aside.

It takes the story quite a while to get Jesse's group headed west. Bored Louisa spends most of the story being upset at her brother but finally turns, with his help, to smuggling opium, a pain reliever that the army hospital has run out of and sorely needs but is no longer available. When Jesse finally gets her group attached to a wagon train and headed west, her masquerade as a boy is quickly discovered, not surprisingly. And back at Louisa's tale, her disabled brother has vanished without an explanation. Will it turn out ok for the two young women? The reader will have to read the third book in the series, The Long Way Home, to find out.

It's a good story although it gets off to a slow start. It has a lot of religious stuff in it though. I picked this book to read from a recommendation online and it did not mention how much of the book was about the main character's religion. I also did not notice that the publisher is Bethany House, a publisher that specializes in Christian publications. 

I'm not going to blame the book for being too religious. But most of the way through the story, it felt to me like it was a Christian tract disguised as a novel. That was before I noticed the publisher was Bethany House.

Also, the book is the second in the series of three. Probably should read the first book, Daughter of Twin Oaks, before starting on this one. I didn't and there is a lot that happens in the first book that is touched on in this story and that makes it sound much more exciting and dramatic than this one. Like how Twin Oaks burned and how Zachary nearly died. And how they got their horses away and safely hidden away from being taken by the military. 

Cold Mountain

 

By Charles Frazier

The story of Inman and Ada, two lovers separated by the US Civil War, who manage to find each other after years apart.

Inman, who fought on the Confederate side, was seriously wounded and had not yet recovered from his injury when he decided he was leaving the war and heading home. He wanted to see Ada again, even though he was not sure she cared for him. He set forth on a perilous journey from Raleigh, North Carolina to Cold Mountain, North Carolina, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a distance of about 290 miles. He has many dangerous encounters and ends up captured by a criminal gang. Things go from bad to worse for Inman.

Meanwhile, back on Cold Mountain, Ada, the only child of her wealthy and indulgent father finds herself in charge of her father's large farm due to his sudden death. Pampered all her life and all alone, as local farmhands have all gone off to the war, Ada is wallowing in depression and loneliness barely able to survive until a caring neighbor sends young Ruby to help out. Motherless and deserted by her worthless father when she was only eight, Ruby is a graduate of the school of hard knocks and has learned how to live off the land and raise crops and livestock. Together, Ruby and Ada turn the farm into a productive enterprise, in the process giving each other the companionship neither woman really wants to admit they need. 

As for Inman, Ada thinks about him occasionally. The attraction between the two was certainly felt more strongly by Inman than by Ada. But as time passes, Ada begins to think more about him and the way he touched her hair and neck that one time. If Inman makes it back to Cold Mountain, Ada won't be turning him away. If he makes it back.

This was a pretty good story. But two thirds of the way through it, I stopped reading it after I read the part where Inman beats another man's head in. The man deserved it, but I just got tired of all Inman's struggles. I had to take a break. The book sat unread for nearly three weeks before I picked it back up again. It's not a fun book to read. And I enjoyed the story of Ada and Ruby much more than I did that of poor Inman. 

The book won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1997. It was the author's first published novel. It was also made into a movie that was nominated for several awards in 2003.

Review by Kirkus Reviews.

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters

 

By Jean Shepherd

A collection of humorous short stories by Jean Shepherd, mainly based on his years growing up in an industrial town in Indiana, eight stories altogether.

• The Grandstand Passion Play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds — A large family of 'hillbillies' moves in next door to the author's family. Between the packs of angry dogs, the drunken parties, the shouting and the piles of junk and trash, the author's dad is almost at his wit's end when the Bumpus folks vanish in the night.
• County Fair! — a trip to the county fair in the 1930s which revealed to me that county fairs haven't changed much in almost 100 years. One of the best stories and the most realistic story in the collection, I think.
• Scut Farkas and the Murderous Mariah — a top battle, top as in the spinning toy. This one was a struggle for me, because I had no idea what the author was talking about, top battles? Also, basically a sports story of scant interest to  me who cares not for sports.
• Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss — loading up the family car for a trip to Clear Lake to spend a couple of weeks in a rustic cabin. An ordeal that many of us have had to endure in our lives. 
• The Star-crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski — a Polish family moves into the neighborhood and one of the kids is a teenage girl about the same age as the author and she is undeniably attractive. Author asks her out on a date finds out a lot about the girl and her family and he gets cold feet.
• Daphne Bigelow and the Spine-chilling Saga of the Snail-encrusted Tinfoil Noose — the author has a crush on his biology lab partner, Daphne, and works up the courage to ask her out on a date. He realizes he is out of his league when he arrives at Daphne's home and it is a mansion, with servants and a Cadillac and driver. 
• The Return of the Smiling Wimpy Doll — the author, now an adult and living far from his childhood home, receives a package from his mom containing his childhood toys and he has a blast rediscovering these treasures from his youth. A really sweet story that made me sad because all my childhood mementos were thrown away by my mom when she moved and it never occurred to her to ask if I wanted any of it. 
• Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories — returning to the author's childhood and it is time for his high school's Junior Prom. Time for fancy clothes and figuring out who to date and how to get there and all the fun before and after Prom. A bittersweet story, as I never attended a Prom or a high school dance. 

All these stories are fun and bring back memories on one's own childhood and teenage days. Really, things haven't changed all that much since the 1930s, in many ways! 

Here is a review of the book by Kirkus Reviews.

Lost & Found

 

By Jacqueline Sheehan

Rocky's husband died of a sudden heart attack and she is having a very hard time coping with her grief. In order to give herself a breathing space, she leaves her home and moves into a rental house on a touristy island off the coast of Maine during the off season. 

Looking to occupy her time, she takes on the part time job of animal control officer. She deals with a lot of stray cats, problem raccoons and pets abandoned by the summer people. One of the animals she deals with is a Labrador retriever who is found seriously ill and crippled by an arrow in his shoulder. 

Rocky fosters the dog, which she names Lloyd. It seems to her, as a person who is dealing with grief, that Lloyd is dealing with grief too. When it turns out that the arrow that was in the dog's shoulder was a rather rare, handmade arrow, Rocky starts trying to track down where it came from, hoping to discover more about Lloyd and what happened to him. 

Meanwhile, Rocky gets to know some of the permanent residents of the island and starts to form some good friendships. If her obsession with tracking down Lloyd's past doesn't get in the way, that is. Oddly, she decides she wants to learn archery, using the same kind of homemade arrows as the one that Lloyd was shot with. This brings her into contact with a man on the mainland who teaches archery part time, Hill, short for Hillary. Is a romance blossoming? Or will poor Hill end up with an arrow in his leg? 

I sympathized with Rocky's grief and her desire to have some time alone to adjust to her new reality. I was happy when she found a friend in poor, wounded Lloyd. I was less interested in the mystery of Lloyd's previous owner. And I was not much interested in the teenager next door who is anorexic. And I was completely uninterested in Rocky's desire to become proficient in archery. Nor was I surprised to read that Rocky's elderly friend on the island didn't have cancer and instead was risking her life by not going to see a doctor about her belly pain. Because everybody in this story is a bit different. So parts of the story I liked but other parts I really didn't.

There is a follow up book, Picture This. 

Darwin's Radio

 

By Greg Bear

A new disease has popped up. Women are having miscarriages, losing extremely deformed fetuses. Further investigation leads researchers to conclude that some ancient component of human DNA has suddenly reactivated and is causing these miscarriages. 

As scientists and the medical community try to figure out what is going wrong, a huge divide emerges, with one group claiming it is some kind of sudden evolution. And the other group claiming it is a disease that must be stopped. 

A small group of the 'it's evolution' scientists go rogue, running from the US government that is tracking pregnant women and performing abortions because they claim the offspring are just disease carriers who pose a terrible risk to human survival. Naturally, since no one seems to know what is really happening, it causes massive social upheaval and riots. 

Greg Bear loves to delve into the science. Unfortunately, a lot of it is hard to follow, especially for a person who does not have fairly high level science knowledge.  I don't need the amount of detail he goes into to understand the story. He just goes on and on about DNA and genetics. It just adds a lot of pretty unreadable bulk to the story. My paperback copy was over 500 pages long. Naturally I did what I always do when authors are suffering from word diarrhea: I skip it. Minutia doesn't interest me.

Anyway, two of the 'it's evolution'  scientists, a man and a woman, get together and have a baby. They want to prove their thesis is correct by giving birth to a new version of human. They spend the rest of the story hiding from the Feds. 

The evolutionary changes that Bear images are odd. How they are suppose to improve the human race in its struggle to cope with overpopulation and environmental degradation are not explained. One of the changes he imagines is people have squid-like skin that changes colors as a form of communication. I expect all that is explained in the sequel, Darwin's Children. Which I will not be reading.

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Right Ho, Jeeves

 

By P.G. Wodehouse

Berti and Jeeves are off to the country to visit Berti's favorite aunt, Dahlia Travers. She needs his help in a little matter of talking her spouse into a small loan, money that is vital to keeping her ladies' magazine going. Uncle Tom already gave her the money but she blew gambling in Cannes, France. She also wanted to enlist Berti as the guest speaker at a local grammar school event. He weaseled out of it by sending an old friend of his in his place, Gussie Fink-Nottle. Gussie, devoted newt fancier, has fallen in love with one Madeline Bassett, who just happens to be visiting at Brinkley Court, the country estate of Tom and Dahlia Travers. Gussie is quite happy to be going to Brinkley Court where he hopes he will be able to overcome his extreme shyness long enough to propose to Madeline. Berti neglected to mention the speech to the grammar school boys though. 

Aunt Dahlia gives Berti some news that sends him to Brinkley Court anyway. She tells him that a friend of his, Tuppy Glossop, who is also visiting at Brinkley, got into an argument with his fiancée, Angela, Dahlia's daughter and the engagement is off. The argument was about whether Angela was pestered by a shark while swimming in the ocean off Cannes. She claims it was definitely a shark but Tuppy holds that it was a submerged log or a flatfish. Angela fired back that Tuppy was a glutton and fat and out of shape. Feelings were hurt and the engagement called off. 

Bertie has a rather high opinion of himself and, instead of laying all these problems at the capable Jeeves' feet, declares he will handle it all by himself, namely Gussie's lack of a backbone, Angela and Tuppy's silly spat and Aunt Dahlia's need of more money from her tightwad husband. Because of Bertie's bungling, he ends up engaged to Madeline. Angela ends up engaged to Gussie. Tuppy, who despite Angela's slurs, is a real bruiser, is out to murder Gussie, for stealing Angela from him. And Anatole, Dahlia's fancy French chef is threatening to quit and go back to France, this also due to Bertie's bungling efforts. Finally Bertie admits the only one who can handle this mess is Jeeves, of course.

Though this plot is the same plot that make up many of Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves stories: young lovers unable to find each other or falling apart due to mistakes and misunderstandings, with the young women ending up, at some point, engaged to marry Bertie. And their jilted lovers out for Bertie's blood or a rival's blood, anxious to win back their lover. But not as anxious as Bertie is to escape his entanglements. It's the same basic plot but the complications that always crop up are hilarious and laugh out loud funny! 

Just a quick note to say that this book was first published in the early 1930s. Attitudes towards people of different races is dated compared to what we would like it to be these days. 

Also, this book can be read for free on the Project Gutenberg website. It is now in the public domain in the USA and no longer under copyright.