And That's My Final Offer!

 

By G.B. Trudeau

Doonesbury collection of daily newspaper strips from the 1970s.

I didn't enjoy this collection of cartoons as much as I have the others I have read. It's very political and too many of the strips are just talking heads. Like this:

Pretty boring. I actually started skipping the wordy ones.  Anyway, here are couple more strips from the collection:

Strong Poison

 

By Dorothy L. Sayers

Mystery writer Harriet Vane is on trial for murdering her ex-lover with arsenic, a poison she just happens to have been doing research about for a book she is working on. So she is quite knowledgeable about how to poison a person with arsenic. 

Lord Peter Wimsey, famous amateur detective, has been attending her trial and has fallen love with Harriet and has decided she must become his wife. When the jury cannot reach a decision, the trial is postponed until after the Christmas season, to resume in January. Which gives Wimsey time to do his own investigation into the murder with the goal of finding the real killer and freeing the woman he loves from prison. 

The victim was one Philip Boyes, who like Harriet was a writer, though not as successful as she was. Of course, his last movements were closely examined by the police investigators, with special attention paid to last things he ate and drank. His last meal was with a relative of his, Norman Urquhart. All the food and drink consumed at the meal were also consumed by other people, none of whom suffered any ill effects. However, Philip had stopped by Harriet's place to have a talk and had while there he consumed a cup of coffee. Thus the police concluded he must have been poisoned by Harriet. Now Wimsey has taken it upon himself to prove the police have arrested the wrong person.

This was an OK read. I thought it was kind of odd that Wimsey fell so hard for someone he had never actually met, beyond observing her in the courtroom. It just seemed so out of character for him, judging from what I know of him from previous books. Another problem I had was I already knew that people can build up resistance to arsenic by ingesting small amounts of it over a period of time. So it was pretty clear how the killer managed it. 

Another thing is that we really don't get to know Harriet very well or come to an understanding about what Wimsey finds so irresistible about her. It was certainly an abrupt introduction to an important new person in Wimsey's life. 

Best Friends Forever

 

By Jennifer Weiner

Young Addie Downs is lonely. She doesn't know how to make friends. She's kind of an outsider at school. Then a new family moves in across the street and that's how she meets the girl who will become her one and only and her best friend: Valerie Adler. Valerie is tall and thin and her mother doesn't pay much attention to her only child. 

Things are good until high school. Because Addie is overweight and Valerie has changed from being a gawky kid to graceful, attractive young woman. She becomes a cheerleader and forms new friendships and starts going to parties and school events. While Addie is still just an outsider and is becoming lonely again. Then Valerie is sexually assaulted by the star football player and she asks Addie not to tell anyone. But Addie doesn't listen and tells her parents. Which causes a big upset which is made even worse when Valerie denies it ever happened. 

Addie and Valerie go their separate ways. Valerie moves away but Addie stayed home and inherited her parents' house when they died. Addie gets her weight under control and even has a lover but when the high school reunion comes around, she doesn't attend. Too many bad memories and virtually no good memories of her time in high school. What she doesn't know is that Valerie did attend the reunion and she took revenge on the football player who had raped her back then. She left him naked and bleeding in the venue parking lot after she hit him with her car. Now she is at Addie's front door, begging her for help out of the fix she has gotten herself in.

This was an OK read. Addie is remarkably passive, annoyingly so. She lets people abuse her and take advantage and she never fights back. She lets Valerie back into her life and goes along with her whacky plan, which includes robbing a bank and running off together. I really didn't care much for either character.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Cotillion

 

By Georgette Heyer

Kitty always fancied her guardian's nephew, Jack Westruther. Handsome, athletic, charming, Jack was the epitome of a young girl's idea of a hero in the early 1800s.

Her guardian came up with the stupid idea of forcing one of his nephews into marrying Kitty by promising to leave his fortune to her. But if none of them came forward, she would be left penniless and his money would be left to some charity. Truth be told, he favored Jack as much as Kitty did but declared he wanted to treat all his nephews fairly. 

He has several nephews, including Jack, of course. But only three others could be possible suitors to Kitty other than Jack. There is Hugh, who is a member of the clergy. And Freddy, who is the only nephew who doesn't need their uncle's money as he has plenty of his own. There is Lord Dolpinton, a peer of a large Irish estate, which sounds pretty nice. But Dolphinton is mentally challenged and his estate is heavily encumbered with debt. All four have been invited to their uncle's estate to make their offers for Kitty. But the favorite of both Kitty and her guardian, Jack, refuses to show up, not liking to have his hand forced.

Of course Kitty and the old man are disappointed by Jack's failure to show. But Hugh, Dolphinton and Freddie all make their appearance. However Freddie did not know about the stipulations involving the old man's will and did not arrive intending to ask Kitty to marry him. As for Hugh and Dolphinton, Kitty has no romantic feelings for either man. Despite his lack of attendance, her heart is set on Jack. So she hatches a plot to get Jack's attention. If Jack will not come to Kitty, then Kitty will go to Jack. And she finagles Freddy into fake proposing and then getting her guardian to allow her to go to London with Freddy to be introduced to her "fiancé's" family. 

Kitty gets to go to London with Freddy. Which means pretty new clothes, stylish new hairdo, parties and fun and getting to know and form new friends. Some of these friends are not really the kind of people a young society maiden should be going around with. There's the beautiful Olivia, whose mother is willing to sell her daughter's maidenhood to the highest bidder. And there's Hannah, a plain speaking, working class woman who needs Kitty's help to free Dolphinton from the cruel clutches of his greedy, manipulative mother who has her sights set on acquiring Kitty as wife for her dim son. Kitty suddenly has a lot going on in her life after years spent on her guardian's quiet, rural estate. But the one thing missing is Jack who is keeping his distance, once again because he doesn't like having his hand forced and has easily seen through Kitty and Freddy's fake engagement. 

I guess the thing I liked best about this story is Freddy, who turns out to be a real gentleman with a kind and loving heart. He is always there to help Kitty whenever she needs him and doesn't try to squash her kind impulses and scold her for the mistakes she makes. Kitty wasn't all the that interesting to me and Jack barely makes an appearance in the story. I didn't really care about the Olivia story although I found the Dolphinton and Hannah story rather charming. 

It's an interesting story but I have never found it as entertaining as many of Heyer's other novels.

Here is a review by Alexa Adams on Austenprose.

Monk's Hood

 

By Ellis Peters

Back in the 1100s in Britain, sometimes people would retire to a monastery, giving their property to the church in exchange for food, clothing, housing and care for the rest of their lives. The Benedictine abbey in Shrewsbury has acquired such a resident in the person of Gervase Bonel and his wife, Richildis and two of their servants, Aelfric and Aldith. Gervase was a wealthy man and had agreed to give his estate to the abbey. Richildis has a teenage son from an earlier marriage, Edwin Gurney. She had married Gervase upon the promise that her son would inherit his estate. But after the marriage, Edwin and Gervase did not get along and in anger, Gervase disinherited Edwin. So there's two people who might want to see Gervase dead. Turns out, though, that there are more than those two who had a reason to be angry at Gervase. So it is not so surprising when Gervase ends up dying from poison placed in a dish of fowl meant just for him. 

Enter Cadfael, resident monk amateur detective of the abbey. Because it was one of his medicinal concoctions that was used to murder Gervase. So naturally he has a strong interest in tracking down the killer. Plus Richildis is an old sweetheart of Brother Cadfael's back before he was a monk, thus making him a suspect, although an unlikely one, given Cadfael and Richildis are in their sixties. And haven't seen each other for more than forty years. 

This was a pretty good mystery story. No politics or warring factions involved, which was nice. I figured out who the killer probably was and who the red herrings all were pretty quickly. Cadfael takes the law into his own hands in dealing with the killer, which I felt was not justified. That was disappointing.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Listening Woman

 

By Tony Hillerman

This was the third Joe Leaphorn  novel, published in about1970.

An old unsolved bank robbery by a militant First Nations group is somehow connected to the deaths of two innocent people: an old man dying of what is probably cancer and young teen girl, neither of whom has any apparent connection to either dissidents or bank robbers. But Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn's investigation of the two murders at a lonely Navajo hogan leads him to thinking that somehow that old bank robbery is connected to these two people. 

But the murders are not the only crime in Leaphorn's sights. There's the man who tried to run Leaphorn over during a traffic stop. And there's kidnapping of a group of boy scouts who were on a campout. Not to mention that old bank robbery and the disappearance of a helicopter at about the same time. 

An enjoyable mystery despite the  beating that Leaphorn once again takes in his efforts to solve the various crimes. I hope in the later novels the author lets up on abusing Leaphorn and has him solve a crime without being shot, drowned, smothered, burned, falling off a cliff, poisoned, drugged or bitten by animals. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.