Good morning! It’s beautiful weather in northern Ohio, temperatures in the 60s and 70s with sunshine. As I mentioned on Tuesday, I’m at Mom’s to celebrate her 90th birthday on Sunday. Thanks to my sisters for all the work they put into getting ready for the party. What about you? What are you doing this week? What are you reading?
I’ve just started Tim Sullivan’s new DS George Cross mystery, The Bookseller. It’s the seventh in the series. Detective Sergeant George Cross has a knack for dismissing red herrings: He goes by the cold hard facts, and nothing else. But with a concerning development in his personal life, Cross is hopelessly distracted. He needs to rely on those around him: an entirely foreign concept.
When the body of a bookseller is discovered lying in a pool of blood in his Bristol bookshop, the police have one question: How did the man meet such a violent, murderous end in this peaceful place?
Bookselling may be a quiet profession, but it’s full of ambitious characters who know the value of a rare book and the importance of careful plotting. With their extensive reading, they might know enough to get away with murder. But will book learning be enough to fool the tenacious DS George Cross?
I always enjoy these books, but from the opening chapters, I knew this was going to be a tough time for George.There’s just too much happening for him to easily handle his life.
Are you reading something fun? Let us know what you’re doing this week, please.
Happy Birthday to Lesa’s Mom. I hope you all have a wonderful time!
I finished four books this week including one of the three nonfiction books I’ve been juggling for a while – THE EVOLUTION UNDERGROUND: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet. Full of fascinating facts in story format from ancient underground cities in Turkey to how pocket gophers were responsible for the regeneration on Mount St. Helens after the 1980 eruption. Entertaining & educational.
On to the fiction world – a British Library Crime Classic reprint, MR. POTTERMACK’S OVERSIGHT. The author, Richard Austin Freeman, is credited with creating the “inverted mystery” where the reader knows the crime & criminal from the start. The series employs the forensic investigator Dr. John Thorndyke. The author was noted for “scrupulous attention to detail,” and the 1932 novel was longer than the current standard.
FINLAY DONOVAN CROSSES THE LINE, the sixth in Elle Cosimano’s witty, fast-paced contemporary mystery series. It stretches the crime solving imagination, but it’s a fun buddy comedy. The lovable recurring characters make the series so enjoyable.
And I just finished James Comey’s RED VERDICT, the fourth in the Nora Carleton series. A high-stakes counterintelligence case. It’s evident throughout the book how much Comey loves the lawyering stuff “the jury was spellbound as Caulfield taught them Russian intel”
Tomorrow, all these books will go back to their home at the library after I make a stop at the quarterly Friends of the Library sale. Hoping to find some good reads & renew my membership.
MM, I’m going to tell David about The Evolution Underground and Red Verdict; I think he’ll be very interested in both of them!
Wishing your mom the happiest of birthdays Lesa. I hope you all have a fabulous day together.
Nothing much to report from here; it’s been a quiet week. All the forecasts are predicting that it will be one of the hottest summers on record here this year. Combined with that and the utter absence of any sort of snow pack to melt, come Monday Stage 3 water restrictions will begin. That’s the earliest in the year Stage 3 has ever started. In fact, we don’t normally even get to Stage 3. No watering of grass, trees, or flowers unless it’s by hand. No sprinklers or soaker hoses. No window washing or washing one’s car unless it’s at a commercial carwash. No filling of little backyard pools for children. They’re expecting a shortage of drinking water unless drastic steps are taken.
(Jennifer, if you happen to check in at Lesa’s this week, I hope your family is coping and able to find anything, no matter how small, that will help all of you through.)
Books I read this week:
MURDER AT GULLS NEST by Jess Kidd
This is a book that was reviewed here a year or so ago I think, and I’ve just gotten round to reading it; probably because I know the second book in the series is being released soon and thought it was time for me to read the first one so there’d be at least one series I wouldn’t get behind on.
Nora has been a nun for three decades or so. But when Frieda, a former novice who became a friend of hers, leaves the order Nora feels a bit unsettled and less certain of her vocation. She enjoys the weekly letters Frieda sends but becomes concerned when the letters suddenly stop coming. She needs to know what, if anything, has happened to Frieda, so she decides to give up her vows. She leaves the monastery and the only life she’s known in order to find out about Frieda.
Nora heads to Gulls Nest, an old boarding house where Frieda’s letters were posted from. When she gets there not only is she learning to deal with life away from the monastery, but also some decidedly odd people at the boarding house – a truly unfriendly housekeeper, the landlady’s frequent debilitating headaches, tension amongst the other residents, and a young girl apparently left to her own devices who never utters a word.
Then one of the residents is found dead; officially by accident or by suicide but Nora thinks it’s murder. Now she has two mysteries to apply her fledgling amateur sleuthing skills to. And every single person in the house, be they a resident or a staff member has some sort of secret they aren’t keen to divulge – Nora herself included.
I wasn’t sure about the book for almost the entire first half; it seemed to move along slowly and not much happened, but I imagine most of it was laying the groundwork because for me the book redeemed itself in the second half.
Although I had some trouble relating to Nora, I did think her interactions with long-suffering Inspector Rideout were a highlight, and that the mystery was interesting, the descriptions of places and people were memorably written, the seaside setting and the boarding house itself were characters in their own right, and the story had some emotional depth.
Based on the second half of the book I’m looking forward to giving the next in the series a shot when it comes out later in June, called Murder at the Spirit Lounge.
THE GOLDEN BOY by Patricia Finn
I thought this was a fabulous book! It was nothing like I’d imagined it would be, and was all the better for it.
Stafford Hopkins is nearing the age of sixty. He’s had a very successful and lucrative career in the television business, where he had an unerring eye for what people wanted to watch and why; and was in that way instrumental in one hit series after another. His wife Agnes can be a lot to deal with due to her tendency to get anxious about everything, but they seem to still politely get on alright together. They’ve moved from LA to Maui, Hawaii, into a huge home with state-of-the-art everything, glamorous ‘friends’ and all the trappings of rich, successful people and yet neither of them can say they’re perfectly content with their lives. Up to this point I didn’t particularly like either of them but I grew to realize that was because I didn’t know them.
Everything is upended when Stafford receives a letter informing him that he is the guardian of the four grandchildren of his best and only friend from childhood, Bobby Shepherd. Bobby is long dead, Bobby’s son and daughter-in-law have just died in a car accident, and now there are four children with apparently no one in their lives now except Stafford. But he’s having none of it; he’s willing to go back to Canada to the farming town of his youth to meet with the solicitor and set up trust funds for the children so they’ll never want for money, but that’s as far as he’s willing to go. At his and Agnes’s age, how could they possibly take on four children; not to mention they completely mishandled their shot at parenthood with their daughter Callie and they haven’t even spoken with her in many, many years.
So … I thought the story was going to be a fairly light, maybe amusing story about Stafford and Agnes ‘inheriting’ these children, and getting to read all about the ensuing trials and tribulations. But that’s not what happened. In fact, it was more than two thirds of the way through the book before the children even entered it. Instead, we got a story with emotion, spare yet excellent revealing dialogue, and a deeply moving portrait of two families and all the ways that turned the characters into the people they ultimately became. It all went anecdotally back and forth in time and I very quickly gave up on what I’d expected and just happily let the author take me wherever she led – all perfectly paced – and ended up feeling so emotionally attached to the characters that I could have read on and on about their lives and not regretted a single second. A truly affecting book about two characters getting their ‘shot at redemption’. I loved this book.