The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

 

By Alan Bradley

Flavia is a precocious preteen child who loves chemistry, who is in a perpetual war with her two teenage sisters, who lives in an ancient mansion in Britain and who discovers a dying man laying in the cucumber patch in the family garden, the same man whom she overheard arguing with her father the night before. Naturally, she takes it upon herself to figure out what really happened to the mysterious stranger, an investigation that will that take her clear back to the schoolboy days of her aloof and austere and only parent, her father. 

This was a fairly good mystery story, set in the early (?) 1950s. I guess my main problem with it was I don't really enjoy stories about genius-level children. They just don't seem realistic. Are there people like that? I suppose so, but I have no experience of them. 

In stories, precocious children often come off as brats and Flavia certainly seems to fit that description. The cop uses the letter P as code for Flavia in his notes but refuses tell her what the P stands for. I am guessing Pest or possibly Pill or perhaps Pain-in-the-ass.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Duplicate Death

 

By Georgette Heyer

Mrs Haddington has finagled an introduction to London society through her association with Lady Nest Poulton.  Lady Nest is one of the leading figures of London society, the perfect person to introduce Mrs Haddington's stunningly beautiful teenage daughter, Cynthia to the world.

Mrs. Haddington's desire is to see her daughter established in London society by marriage to a man of wealth and breeding. Unfortunately, Cynthia is smitten by Lord Guisborough, who, though he is a member of the peerage, is not wealthy and is a Communist besides. Mrs. Haddington's sights are set on Timothy Harte, a wealthy, personable young barrister. What Mrs. Haddington doesn't know is that Timothy has fallen in love with her secretary, Beulah Birtley, a young woman with a mysterious past.

In order to throw Cynthia and Timothy together, Mrs. Haddington holds a bridge party, inviting as many upper class bridge players to her home as its rooms will hold. But during the course of the party, one of her guests ends up dead, strangled with a length of wire while taking a phone call in another room. 

The victim, Dan Seaton-Carew, had close connections to Lady Nest and to Cynthia Haddington. His position in society is strange but it becomes more understandable when the police discover he was a drug dealer, providing illegal drugs to people like Lady Nest.

Some of Mrs. Haddington's guests may have had reasons to murder Seaton-Carew. There's Mr. Poulton, Lady Nest's husband, who may have discovered his wife is an addict. There's Sidney Butterwick, who desperately loves Seaton-Carew and who had a heated argument with him at the bridge party. And there is Beulah, whose mysterious past may have given Seaton-Carew some kind of hold over her.

Georgette Heyer was better known for her historical romances. But she also wrote several mystery novels. Her mystery novels were not as popular as her romances though. I have read a few of the mystery stories and they just don't seem to have that light humorous touch found in most of her romances. Another thing is that the characters are generally more crass, more unpleasant, more unappealing than those in the romances. That is certainly true of this story, starting with the heroine, Beulah, who spent time in prison for forgery. 

This book was written in the early 1950s and the language used concerning Stanley Butterwick may be quite unpleasant for modern readers. However, it is how people thought and spoke back then. 

Lots of times, when I am reading a novel, I will just skip over passages of boring descriptions or of speeches that seem to be filler. But with Heyer's books, I virtually never do that. Every word is worth reading, every word builds the story and never feel like a chore to wade through. So even though I don't enjoy her mystery stories as much as I do her romances, I still found this one engrossing and worth reading.

Lady of Quality

 

Georgette Heyer

A Regency Romance.

Annis is fortunate in that she is young, beautiful and wealthy. She is also very independent for a woman of her time and station and, at the age of twenty-nine, is living in a home of her own with an older female relative as a companion. 

Since she has enough money to live as she chooses, Annis never felt the desire to get married. She had plenty of suitors and offers of marriage but turned them all down. So Annis and her companion live on their own in the resort town of Bath. That is until Annis encountered a young couple in trouble on the side of the road after their gig lost a wheel. 

Lucy and her good friend Ninian are escaping from their families who are putting pressure on the two to get married. Lucy is very young, pretty, and wealthy and she and Ninian, who lives next door, grew  up together and have no romantic inclinations toward each other. Lucy's parents are dead and she has been living with her aunt, but her guardian is Oliver Carleton, a notorious member of London society. 

After Annis rescued Lucy and Ninian, she felt sorry for Lucy's situation and invited her to stay with her at her home in Bath. And that is how Oliver Carleton entered Annis' life and turned everything upside down for her.

I have read this novel three or four times in the past and it was never one of my favorites. But that was when I was a lot younger. When I read it again this time, I enjoyed it more than I did previously. It's the humor that I probably didn't notice so much when I was younger. Oliver Carleton is not mealy mouthed and his pursuit of Annis is quite enjoyable and often amusing. 

Here is a review by Elizabeth Hanbury on Austenprose.

Sylvester or the Wicked Uncle

 

By Georgette Heyer

A Regency Romance

Phoebe Marlow's mother died when she was quite young. Her father remarried and he and his new wife had several more children. Phoebe did not enjoy a close or loving relationship with her stepmother, who was an overbearing and stern parent to Phoebe. After years of bullying by her stepmother, Phoebe lived in fear of displeasing her in any way and yearned to escape from the woman's oppressive control. 

Phoebe had the required coming out for a girl of her social standing in London, but it hadn't been successful. She was too thin, too shy, too awkward to gain any admirers. But she did have a keen eye and her observations of society ended up in a thinly-disguised novel about a cruel man trying to deprive his infant nephew of the nephew's rightful inheritance. And once her novel was published, it was an instant success, as members of the upper class recognized their fellows in the caricatures in the pages of the novel.

The villain of the piece was based on Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, whom Phoebe had meet a couple times at parties when in London. He did not make a favorable impression on her, as she judged him to be cold and arrogant. And he had a very recognizable face because of his rather unusual eyebrows, which, of course, she included in her novel. 

In the novel, the heroine struggles to save her child from his uncle's evil machinations. What Phoebe didn't know when she based her villain on Sylvester was that he was also the guardian of a young boy and that Sylvester was at odds with the boy's mother because she was trying to remove her child from Sylvester's guardianship. 

In Phoebe's novel, the mother frees her son from the wicked uncle's captivity and they flee together to freedom. So the mother of Sylvester's nephew, upon reading the book and seeing the wicked uncle based (loosely) on her brother-in-law Sylvester, views it as a roadmap to freeing her child from his guardianship. So she kidnaps her son and takes him to France.

Phoebe, the anonymous author of the novel that has high society talking and wondering who wrote the book, has meanwhile come to know Sylvester and realized that her caricature of him was cruel and unjust and has caused him considerable embarrassment. They have a huge fight in public and Phoebe's reputation is ruined. So her grandmother decides to take her and travel to France to give society time to get over the scandal. But while waiting to board a ship, Phoebe encounters Sylvester's sister-in-law with her young son, Sylvester's ward, preparing to flee to France. By now, Phoebe knows that Sylvester is not the monster portrayed in her novel, but a caring and loving uncle to his young ward. And she also has come to understand that the boy's mother is selfish, shallow and irresponsible and that Sylvester is actually the better guardian for the boy. Phoebe, on board the ship, tries to reason with the mother, but ends up being taken to France when the woman's husband sneakily orders the ship to set sail.

This was a good story, spoiled by its heroine, who is probably one of the weakest and most feebleminded heroines that Heyer ever created in her romance novels. Oh, Phoebe is supposed to capture her hero's heart, but how he could ever fall for such a weakling is rather hard to understand. We are supposed to admire Phoebe, but instead we end up just wishing she would show a little gumption and stand up to her overbearing stepmother instead of trembling in fear at the mere thought of that woman's bad temper. And once Phoebe is part of London society, she shows the same lack of spine when her authorship of the notorious novel becomes widely known. Instead she agrees to run away to France and hide from the criticism and curiosity. And yet Sylvester decides this is the woman for him? Hard to believe.

Here is a review by Laurel Ann Nattress on Austenprose.

Living Witness

 

By Jane Haddam

A Gregor Demarkian Mystery

The folks of Snow Hill, a small Pennsylvania town in the foot hills of the Appalachian Mountains, are unhappy. After the recent school board election, the new members of the board are pushing a religious agenda centered around putting God back into the schools. It was a bit deceptive on the part of the new board members, who ran on a platform not of religious fundamentalism but on one of getting the new wing of the high school completed, which had been neglected for several years.  

The town is divided between the religious people and the progressive people, both sure the other side is stupid and wrong. Progressive people because they don't want religion taught to children in public schools. And religious people who believe progressives are trying to keep religion out of everything and sending the country straight to hell. 

The religious proponents want a sticker inserted in the science books that instructs readers to explore the idea of Intelligent Design by checking out a book that is available in the school library. The progressives are against the sticker being placed in science texts because Intelligent Design is not based on science or on facts. So the progressives get together and launch a lawsuit to stop the school board from putting nonscientific ideas in science text books. Things come to a head when one of the progressive plaintiffs of the lawsuit and a member of the school board, the leading and most venerable citizen of the town, ninety-one year-old Annie-Vic Hadley, is assaulted in her own home and beaten unconscious. 

Now Annie-Vic is in the hospital, unresponsive, and the town is in an uproar with progressives accusing the religious of being terrorists and murderers. And the religious accusing the progressives of trying to destroy the country with their godless agenda. Snow Hill police chief Gary Albright, who is known to be on the side of the religious crowd and thus a suspect in the assault, decides he needs outside help to investigate this crime. He calls in Gregor Demarkian, and ex-FBI agent who does freelance detective work to lead the investigation into the assault on Annie-Vic. But before Demarkian has barely got his investigation off the ground, two more progressives are attacked and beaten to death, both in Annie-Vic's vacant home, in the same place where she was assaulted. 

I enjoyed this story. The writing is quite engaging and it kept me interested even though it is much longer than I usually like reading, almost 400 pages long. I had never come across a Gregor Demarkian story before but it is a series of about 30 novels, first published in 1990 with Not a Creature Was Stirring. Living Witness was published in 2009. The author passed away in 2019. 

Publishers Weekly also has a review of this novel. As does Kirkus.

Texas Destiny

 

By Lorraine Heath

The first book in the Texas Trilogy series.

Amelia Carson used to live on a plantation with her parents and her two older sisters. But by the time the US Civil War was over, all that was gone. Left alone and desperate, she listed herself in a mail-order bride publication, and after a short correspondence, is on her way to Texas to meet and marry one Dallas Leigh.

Unfortunately, Dallas will not be a the train station to receive his fiancée. Because he recently broke his leg after falling off an untamed horse. Instead his younger brother, Houston, will be picking up Amelia. It has been arranged that they will recognize each other by Amelia wearing a hat that Dallas sent her and he would be wearing a cloth she embroidered and sent to Dallas. Instead it will be Houston with Amelia's cloth.

Houston and Dallas both accompanied their father when he went to fight for the perpetuation of slavery in America. Houston was just a young teen at the time and he was seriously wounded and their father was killed in action. Houston lost an eye and his hearing on one side of his face and is badly scarred. He tends to dip his head and he wears an eye patch and keeps his hat lowered to conceal his scars. His is not the face Amelia is expecting to see when she arrives in Texas. 

She is a bit puzzled when the man carrying her cloth does not match the description of the man she is expecting to marry. But the sight of Houston's damaged face does not shock or horrify her. The Civil War left many men with terrible wounds and damaged bodies, so it is nothing new for her to see. She takes Houston's explanation calmly and together they set out for Dallas' ranch, a trip of about three weeks. 

Of course, we know that Amelia and Houston are going to fall in love on this long and arduous trek together, alone in the wild Texas countryside. But Amelia has promised to marry Dallas. And Houston is just a mess from his experiences in the war. Will Houston man-up enough to deal with his psychological damage and claim the woman he wants? Will Amelia stand by her promise to wed Dallas and sacrifice herself on the altar of duty? 

This old-fashioned romance was really touching in many ways, a step above most modern romance novels. The two main characters have trauma that they must deal with, Amelia having the rape and murder of her two older sisters during the war and Houston losing his father in battle and himself being wounded. Really, the story is about two damaged, good-hearted people finding healing and love in each other's company. 

This is not a bodice-ripper. The main characters don't tumble into bed the first chance they get. And the sex scene at the end is not explicit. Which is what I prefer in a romance story. I don't want or need the intimate details of the characters' erogenous zones. I don't know if this hold true, though, for the other two books in the series.

The Heist

 

By Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

Book One in the Fox and O'Hare series

Kate O'Hare is a gung-ho FBI agent with a military background and a burning desire to capture wanted conman Nicolas Fox. Fox has been a thorn in her side for a long time, always managing to elude her best efforts and taunting her with Toblerone candy bars and otherwise making her look like a fool.

By stepping up her game in a drastic and dangerous way, Kate finally nails Nick and he is locked up until his trial. The day of his trial, Nick escapes while using the courthouse men's room. Imagine Kate's astonishment at Nick once again being on the loose after all the months she spent trying to capture him. Imagine her even greater astonishment when she learns his escape was engineered by her boss at the FBI and by the deputy director of the FBI.

Did Nick Fox somehow corrupt two top FBI officials? No. It is all part of a plan to track down and capture some of the worst criminals in the world, using Nick's genius at pulling off brilliant heists and complex scams. And they want Kate to be part of the operation. Which means she will be working very closely with the man who has been getting under her skin for a very long time. And it doesn't help that Nick is witty, charming and very handsome.

This book was so much fun! I thoroughly enjoyed it. The heists are complicated and wild and Kate and Nick have a spicy and uncertain relationship. I'm sorry I am just now discovering this fun and exciting series which began with this novel in 2013.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

The Skull Mantra

 

By Eliot Pattison

Shan Tao Yun is a Chinese political prisoner who is part of a forced labor gang building roads in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Before he ran afoul of a Chinese official, Shan was a top investigator known for his skill and intelligence. 

A Chinese official has been found murdered at a site not far from where Shan and his fellow prisoners have been working. The Chinese man in charge of this remote district, Colonel Tan, frees Shan from the labor camp to investigate the murder. What Tan doesn't know, but soon learns, is that Shan is not going to help him cover up the murder, but will dig for the truth to the best of his considerable ability. Complicating everything are Shan's fellow prisoners, a group of Buddhist monks who have gone on strike, refusing to continue working on the road due to their concerns about the murder which they believe involves the ghost of the murdered man and a demon who they claim is responsible. 

Shan's life among the imprisoned monks has lead him to embrace some of their Buddhist teachings. And investigating the murder leads him even deeper into understanding their teachings about balance. He becomes very interested in their view of the world and that helps him figure out exactly why and how the dead man met his end.

This was an OK read. There is a lot of Buddhist teachings which, as a non religious person, didn't appeal to me at all. Stories of demons killing people, of sorcerers, of monks flying through the air just seemed like a fantasy story to me. Oddly Shan seems to buy their tricks while still knowing it is fakery, even when he understands how the tricks were pulled off. 

Anyway, it is a really long book, takes forever to get anywhere and has a lot of Buddhist religious thought which I didn't enjoy reading.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews. Major reviewers seem to really like the book, so even though I thought it too long, too slow and too religious, I still gave it a "good" rating. 

The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie

 

By Jennifer Ashley

Beth Ackerly is a young widow in 1881 and engaged to marry another man when she meets Lord Ian while attending a show at a theater. Lord Ian warns her not to marry the man she is engaged to. According to Ian, the man is debauched and unfit to be a good woman's spouse. Instead, he asks Beth to marry him, even though this is their first time meeting. Of course she refuses. But she follows his advice and breaks up with the other man. Still, Lord Ian has captured her imagination and she decides to travel to France to give herself some time to sort herself out.

While in France, she meets Ian's sister-in-law and her estranged husband, Mac, who is Ian's brother. She also encounters the police detective Lloyd Fellows, who has decided that Ian is a murderer who is responsible for the deaths of two woman in London he was known to associate with. Fellows tries to enlist her in his investigation into Ian and his other brother, Hart, the Duke of Kilmorgan, who Fellows believes is sheltering Ian from the police. But Beth repulses Fellows because she doesn't believe the picture he has painted of Ian and his family. 

Ian also arrives in France and Fellows become even more insistent in his campaign against the Mackenzies. To protect Beth from Fellows' persecution, Ian talks her into marrying him. His brother the Duke has the political power to stifle Fellows' snooping. Ian then takes Beth to Scotland to live at the Duke's estate. But Beth is determined to discover if Fellows' accusations are true. So she heads to London, against Ian's and the Duke's wishes to find out for herself if she is married to a madman and a murderer.

This was a pretty good story. Ian has some kind of mental condition, possibly Asperger's or some other form of autism. Since the novel is set in the 1880s, no one really understands Ian's condition, including Ian himself. He has been told he is insane, told he is unfit to wed, views himself as dangerous. He is certainly confused, that is certain. Seeing Beth come to understand how different but still loveable Ian is made for good reading. Some elements of the story are a bit silly, like Beth's ability to solve the mystery that has eluded her husband, his brother the Duke and the police. And the constant diversions into sex scenes. This is one of those stories, where the lady and gentleman can't see each other without tearing each other's clothing off and going at it. Putting all that aside, I enjoyed the story and the mystery even if I found Beth's role in solving it all a bit too much.

Breathers

 

By S.G. Browne

Turns out zombies have always been around, but hiding. But now they are coming out of the closet and trying to co-exist with the living, or, as they call them, breathers. They even have support groups, such as Undead Anonymous, to help them cope with being undead among the living. 

One such is newly-turned zombie, Andy, who died in a car crash and who now resides in his parents' basement. Andy, despite seeing a therapist and attending his support group, is not coping well with being undead. Things take a turn for the better, however, when Andy gets to know Ray, a zombie who lives in an abandoned grainary along with two of his friends. Ray shares his food with Andy and Andy's friend, Rita. Ray claims the canned meat is venison but after eating it, both Andy and Rita start to feel better in small ways. 

Andy and Rita and other members of their support group also get to know Ray and partake of his jars of canned venison. And they start to enjoy improvements in their physical wellbeing. Andy, who was not able to speak because of damage caused by the car crash, regains his voice. Other zombies' wounds start to heal. And Rita's heart begins to beat again, although very slowly. Of course, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the meat Ray has been sharing with the other zombies is not actually venison. It is human meat, harvested from the living. And the more the zombies eat, the stronger and better and healthier they become. Now that they know the secret to the good "life" for zombies, they become just as voracious as depicted in all the zombie stories and movies. Their greed for human meat overpowers their common sense and they go on the rampage and give up trying to live in peace with the Breathers.

To back track a little, at the beginning of the story, zombie Andy wakes up and finds his parents' bodies stuffed into the family freezer and frig. He has no memory of killing his parents though. I mention this because it is a clue to how the story is going to end: in violence and death. In between, though, it is a charming and amusing story of a zombie guy who falls in love and who is trying to lead a normal life among people who view him as walking garbage. But the ending is not the happy-ever-after usually associated with love stories. It gruesome, bloody and very disappointing. The story sets the reader up for hearts and flowers and then pulls the rug out from underneath us. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Neuromancer

 

By William Gibson

Case used to be a hotshot "cowboy" hacker who got caught and he was punished by being changed to being physically unable to connect to cyberspace. He ends up in a city in Japan, where drugs and criminals rule the nights. 

He is approached by two people, Armitage and Molly who say they can reverse the punishment and in exchange they need him to hack into the Tessier-Ashpool computer system, which is located off of Earth on Freeside, a space station that is a luxury resort for the wealthy and the home and headquarters of the Tessier-Ashpool family. 

Armitage wants Case to use a virus to penetrate the Tessier-Ashpool computer system. Armitage is taking his orders from Wintermute, an artificial intelligence who is determined to break into Tessier-Ashpool's system. And Case doesn't care about anything but getting back into cyberspace and once again becoming a hacker cowboy.

This novel won lots of prizes but I found it very confusing. I didn't even totally understand what it was about until I read the Wikipedia page about it. Just too many characters, too much going on, too many trippy drug scenes, too much slang and jargon.  Like flipping and ice. I still don't understand what those terms are referring to.  This story just didn't compute for me.

Here is a review by John Mullan in The Guardian.

Shining Through

 

By Susan Isaacs

Story of a secretary in the 1940s who becomes a spy for the Allies in World War II. 

Linda Voss was not as lovely as her beautiful mother. But she was still quite attractive with her fluffy blonde hair and sparkling brown eyes. And unlike her rather dim mother, she was intelligent and had an inquiring mind. Due to the untimely death of her father, Linda had to get a job right out of high school to help support her mother who never got over her husband's death and turned to alcohol to ease her pain.

Because Linda's grandmother on her father's side was originally from Berlin, Germany, Linda grew up to be fluent in ordinary German, which helped her land a job at a law firm as a bilingual secretary. Her boss, lawyer John Berringer, was also fluent in German and dealt with the firm's overseas customers in Germany and Austria. 

John was the subject of many broken hearts among the female members of the staff. He was devastatingly handsome and had his pick of the ladies. But he was completely, deeply in love with his wife, Nan, who was the daughter of his boss, Edward Leland. Linda was one of the smitten ladies of the law firm.

Then Nan runs off to Las Vegas for a divorce, having decided she was in love with someone else, leaving John heartbroken. Linda saw her chance to be closer to John and did her best to comfort him. Eventually, they became lovers and she became pregnant and he married her. But she always knew Nan would be the one he held dearest. 

After she has a miscarriage, Linda came home early one day and caught John and Nan snuggled up together on the couch. And John declared he was thinking of getting back together with Nan. Linda finally admitted to herself that her marriage was over and she volunteered to be a spy in Berlin, where she was employed as a cook in a German official's villa. The official was known to bring home important papers and Linda was supposed to get hold of those papers and send any information that might be helpful to the Allies. 

In some ways I really liked this story. But in another way, it was disappointing. Because I thought it was an espionage story about a woman spy. But the spy part doesn't appear until the last quarter of the novel. Most of the book is about Linda and John and their relationship. The spying part is practically an afterthought to the rest of the story. 

But on the other hand, the love story of John and Linda is sad and complicated and interesting. As Linda explains to John's boss, Edward:

       "I was carrying on with Mr. Berringer—" 

"This really isn't necessary."

"I know, but please listen, anyway. I got pregnant, Mr. Leland." His black eyes widened, not because he was surprised; I'm sure he wasn't. He was surprised I was talking about it. "I know it's something people don't discuss in polite company—but I'm not polite company. Anyway, I'm sure you've already figured out Mr. . . .that John didn't marry me for my money or my great mind. He married me because he had to."

 

So even though this story is not really a spy story at all, I still enjoyed it a lot. 

On a side note, Linda's father has an interesting opinion on American Republicans. This book dates from the 1980s, but his opinion of Republicans applies to them today:

"Pal, there's only one group in the world richer and rottener than the Yankees—Republicans. They don't care about anything but holding on to everything they got. They don't give a damn about the little guy, and don't let anyone con you into believing different."

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly. 

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

 

By Maria Semple

Bernadette was an architect who gained a modest amount of fame early in her career. But when her daughter Bee was born with a life-threatening heart problem, Bernadette centered her life on caring for her gravely ill child.

Fortunately, Bee, after many surgeries, grew up to be an intelligent and enthusiastic student, earning an invitation to attend a exclusive East Coast boarding school in her early teenage years. Unfortunately, at the same time, Bernadette's life was falling apart and her marriage to a successful Microsoft executive was in serious trouble.

After rather sad and ridiculous clashes with a neighbor woman and rather vague threats of suicide, Bernadette's spouse decided she should be committed to a mental care facility. And that is when Bernadette vanished.

Bee refused to believe her beloved mother would just disappear and leave Bee behind. After she went off to her boarding school, she received a packet of letters and other correspondence from her mother and about her mother. After reading everything in the packet, Bee became convinced that Bernadette had taken a trip to Antarctica, a trip the whole family was planning to take as a reward for Bee for her scholastic achievements. But the trip was cancelled due to Bernadette's disappearance. 

Bee was so distracted by her search for her missing mother, that the boarding school sent her home to her father. After the father read the packet of information, he was also convinced Bernadette had traveled to Antarctica without them. Further digging revealed that although she did travel to Antarctica, she vanished somewhere off the ship on its return voyage. The cruise line assumed she was swept overboard during the rough crossing. But Bee absolutely refused to believe that was the case. So her father, in order to give her closure, booked them passage on another cruise to Antarctica.

This was a fairly good story. Tad disappointing, though. As per usual, the blurbs gushed about what a funny story it was: "Divinely funny" "Delightful" "Uproarious" "Fresh and funny" "Comic caper". But it wasn't funny. At most it was mildly amusing. I also don't care for stories told in bits and pieces. I skipped a some of the more boring items. 

We are told over and over what a genius Bernadette is. But she acts like a total airhead, getting into pointless disagreements with the neighbors and giving her private information to some stranger online. Really, all the characters are pretty annoying, with the exception of Bee, who never loses faith in her mother. 

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Wicked Intentions

 

By Elizabeth Hoyt

Temperance Dews works in her family's orphanage, situated in one of the worst, most dangerous areas of London in the mid 1700s. A young, beautiful widow, she carries massive guilt surrounding the death of her husband. 

Lord Caire is a nobleman of sleasy repute who has come to Mrs. Dews seeking a guide to the area, offering to pay her for her help, money that the orphanage dearly needs since it lost its major patron, who died. Lord Caire is looking to find out who murdered his mistress who lived in the area. 

But the woman's murder was just one of a several murders of young women, mostly prostitutes, in the area. This is a bad neighborhood, but not to the degree that locals will accept a serial killer. So Lord Caire and Temperance canvas the neighborhood, trying to get a bead on the mad killer behind these brutal murders. And since this is a romance novel, of course they fall in love in the process. 

The idea that Lord Caire would choose a young chaste woman as his guide to a dangerous part of town is silly plot device, a lazy way to bring the two main characters together.

 I was pretty sure the story would have lots of scenes of passionate sex between Caire and Dews and it did, but most of that was in the last quarter of the book. Which suited me because I skip the sex scenes because I find them boring and rather ridiculous. As far as the plot goes, it was pretty interesting if a tad unbelievable, especially the identity of the killer. 

Here is a review of the novel by Publishers Weekly.

Discount Armageddon

 

By Seanan McGuire

Cryptid:  an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist. 

Cryptozoologist: a person who studies cryptids.

Like Verity Price. Who lives in New York City and works as a waitress but whose true profession is studying and discovering and helping all the cryptids (and there are a lot) who make the city their home. Indeed, most of the girls who work are her job at Dave's Fish and Strips are cryptids. There's Carol, the gorgon. Candy the dragon princess. Marcy the oread, some kind of mineral-based stony girl. And Istas the waheela, a sort of werebear. All of these girls disguise themselves to pass as human. And some, like Istas, are shapeshifters. 

Cryptozoology is Verity's family's vocation, one she was raised to become from childhood. But she would much rather be a professional ballroom dancer and she dances under the name of Valerie Pryor and she moved to New York to be closer to the ballroom dancing scene. But she still works in the family business as a cryptozoologist, tracking and studying all the cryptids in the city. 

Her family has a long history as cryptozoologists, going back generations. At one point they were part of an organization, the Covenant, whose main goal is locating and exterminating cryptids they view as dangerous. Like dragons, which they managed to wipe out. But Verity's ancestors realized that many cryptids are intelligent beings that, if left alone, are harmless. And so they left the Covenant, which put them on the Covenant's hit list as traitors to the grand cause. 

Between waitressing, dancing and training to keep her fighting skills topnotch, Verity has come to realize that someone is causing many cryptid people to disappear. She soon stumbles upon who she thinks is the cause, a Covenant agent newly arrived in New York, Dominic De Luca. But as he explains, he has only killed a few non-sapient cryptid animals. Further inquires reveal that the cryptids who have gone missing are all young, female virgin-type creatures. And further investigation seems to point to a snake cult sacrificing these girls to a dragon who is living under New York City. 

So Verity has her work cut out for her: she has to protect and warn the local cryptid girls, stop the snake cult from killing people, locate the dragon without turning it lose on the city, as in Godzilla time, and keep the Covenant agent from killing all her cryptid friends and coworkers and from killing the last surviving dragon left in the world. 

This was a fun read, exciting and a bit silly with lots of whacky characters, the whackiest being Verity herself. She hurls herself into danger like a daredevil and shares her apartment with a tribe of sentient mice who have formed a religion around the mundane aspects of her life.  And she works with a group of cryptids who know about her family's past association with the Covenant, which causes them to view her as a possible danger to their very lives, which makes for some tension at her job. 

Oh, and of course, she falls for the Covenant agent and they end up in bed together. Naturally.

Here is a review of the novel by Publishers Weekly.

Caveman's Valentine

 

By George Dawes Green

Romulus Ledbetter lives in a cave in a park in New York City. He could have had a career as a talented pianist but instead mental illness rules his life. His daughter Lulu and his wife Sheila know where he is but he resists their efforts to bring him in out of the cold, preferring to remain in his cave where his delusions keep him well entertained. He is an independent and stubborn person. 

But then someone dumps a dead body near his cave. When he learns a fellow homeless man was distraught over the death of the dead man, Romulus fantasies begin to center on solving the dead man's murder. Which leads him on a journey to the estate of a wealthy and famous photographer that Romulus believes was responsible for the man's death. 

This was an okay read. The idea of a mentally ill amateur detective is different, true. But I found Romulus to be a sad character and his delusions rather boring. I skipped most of his insane rants against his big bugbear, Stuyvesant, a creature he blames for pretty much all the ills of the modern world. Which he thinks are being caused by Y-rays Stuyvesant broadcasts from the Chrysler Building. Yeah.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

The Manual of Detection

 

By Jedediah Berry

Charles Unwin is a clerk at the Agency, a detective agency. He writes up the case files for one detective, Travis Sivart. He prides himself on the work he does but lately he has been entertaining a fantasy of just getting on the train and leaving his job and the city behind. 

We are never told the name of the city, but it is large gloomy place where the rain never seems to end.  In addition to his fantasy of walking away from the city and his job at the Agency, Unwin has become obsessed with a young woman he has noticed at the train station. She is there every day, seemingly waiting for someone to arrive who never does. 

Unwin has also had a dream in which he comes home to find Travis Sivart taking a bath in Unwin's bathtub. Sivart tells Unwin to remember two things, Chapter Eighteen and that Sivart was wrong about the girl. He doesn't say what girl, just that he was wrong about her.

Unwin arrives at work to find he has been promoted from clerk to detective. But he doesn't want to be a detective and believes the promotion to be a mistake. So he goes to see the man in charge of the detectives to inform him about the error but finds the man is dead in the man's office. And Unwin is now in charge of discovering the killer while being suspected of being the killer and of finding where Sivart has gone. He also has to figure out who all these mysterious women are who have suddenly entered his life, including the woman at the train station; his new assistant, Emily Doppel; and infamous criminal Cleopatra Greenwood; and one Hilda Palsgrave. Palsgrave used be one of the main attractions at Caligari's Carnival until Caligari's disappearance left the carnival in the hands of organized crime gang led by Enoch Hoffman, a biloquist, and twin brothers Jasper and Josiah Rook. 

As Unwin's unwanted investigation continues, he finds that Sivart wasn't just wrong about the "girl." He was wrong about almost all the crimes he solved. And that someone at the top knows that and wants it to stay that way. And the rain continues to fall, making everything and everyone wet and cold. 

This was a fairly good read. I think I am not the right audience for this book though. I found it rather slow and I found the constant rain, which is like one of the main characters in the story, depressing. Just too cold, wet and gloomy for my taste. But I think a lot of readers would enjoy this mysterious, damp story.

Check out the review by Michael Moorcock in The Guardian.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

 

By Jerome K. Jerome

Published in 1889, this is story of three friends taking a boat trip on the Thames River in Britain. 

One evening, while sitting around, three friends decided they needed a break from everyday life in the big city (London). And a relaxing trip on the river with outdoor life and camping and visiting historic places seemed like the very thing required. So George, Harry and the author, who is only referred to as J, gather all the essentials (mostly food) vital for three healthy young fellows on holiday and they rent a boat and set off for a carefree river trip. Of course, it is never quite as carefree as one might wish, due to their own ineptitude, the weather, and the vagaries of the big river. And the dog, Montmorency. The author includes various humorous stories and some history of the locales they pass through and mentions particular inns and taverns that can be visited today, over one hundred years later.

Quite a charming and amusing story with a bit of British history thrown in, I very much enjoyed this account of Jerome's trip on the river with his two friends and the dog, a fox terrier of typical terrier temperament.

Here is a review in The Guardian by Robert McCrum.

Mr. Mercedes

 

By Stephen King

Bill Hodges is a retired police detective. But he can't forget about the biggest crime he was unable to solve. A person drove a Mercedes Benz into a crowd of people gathered at a job fair, killing several. The police found the car and its owner but the woman who owned the car was not the person who committed the crime. She was pretty much hounded by the police and eventually killed herself. 

Then Bill gets a letter in the mail from someone claiming to be the killer. Instead of turning the matter over to the police, Bill starts an online correspondence with this person, hoping it will lead him to the one who got away.

This was an OK read. I sort of felt a bit sorry for the killer who had not had a happy life. Just a young person, but a lot of misfortune has left them twisted inside, full of anger at the world. 

There were parts of the story I didn't care for like the gruesome scene where the killer's mom accidentally ingests poison meant for someone else. And the death of Bill's new found love interest. That seemed unnecessarily cruel to me. 

I also felt the story was way too long. Over four hundred pages is too long. I swear writers these days all have word diarrhea. Or else editors have given up trying to rein in authors, especially successful authors like King.

For another opinion, check out this review by Publishers Weekly.

One to Watch

 

By Kate Stayman-London

Bea is a plus-size fashion blogger who enjoys watching a reality show, Main Squeeze, where a person looking for love is given a line-up of attractive possible matches from which to choose. But one evening Bea is rather struck by how similar all the candidates are, slim, attractive and hard to distinguish from one another. So she writes a blog about it causing a backlash against the show and a serious drop in its ratings. 

The show undergoes a change of management and the new producer comes to Bea and proposes she should be the next candidate looking for love. Bea only agrees if they provide a range of men who are more representative of average folks, not the perfect paragons the show usually features. They promise and Bea goes into seclusion as the show starts filming, which is the usual procedure for those kind of game/reality shows. 

But filming the first show, where Bea is introduced to the group of young men she is supposed to date and get to know over several weeks, she is displeased to see that all the men are the typical gorgeous hunks that Main Squeeze is known for, except for one pudgy fellow. The men were not told that they would be wooing a plus-size woman and the show producer failed to tell Bea that the men wouldn't know she wasn't the typical model-thin female the men would be expecting. But all of the men stay, except one man who quits in disgust. It later turns out that he instructed to do so by the producer, for the shock value and for ratings.

Bea suffers through it all, going on group dates where she overhears some of the men laughing at the idea of them dating a fat woman. Eventually, though, the candidates are whittled down to five men who seem really fond of and interested in having a relationship with Bea. What no one knows though is that Bea is still madly in love with a man she has known and loved for a very long time, a man who bedded her once then left her to marry someone else. How can Bea find a new love when she can't stop thinking about the old love?

This was an OK read. It's in the modern style where the story includes website chats, blog excerpts, podcasts and emails inserted into it. This is something I've encountered in the past and I've decided I don't much care for it. It adds very little to the flow of the story, I think. And I also found Bea's final choice to be kind of a jerk and a cold fish. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.