Let’s talk about weather for a minute. We’ve been much better off since this past weekend. In fact, today was beautiful, in the 70s. But, Saturday night, I spent 45 minutes sitting in the closet since we were under a tornado warning until 11:30 PM. My brother-in-law had to take two dogs to the basement, including carrying one big one who already hates the basement. We were all lucky because nothing hit here.
You already know I was up at Mom’s and went to a family reunion. One of my aunts is part of an enormous family who owns cottages at the lake. So, once a year while their family is there, she invites the family to come, enjoy the company, and eat good food in a lakeside cottage. Linda and I drove up to Mom’s, and then we met everyone there the next day. I’m back, with no plans to go anyplace until mid-September.
I’m reading an Agatha Christie mystery I never heard of until last week. I was watching a Poisoned Pen Bookstore video that featured Kemper Donovan. Donovan has been doing the podcast “All About Agatha” for ten years. He said he and his late podcast partner had ranked all of Christie’s mysteries. They ranked And Then There Were None as number two for writing, plot, story. Their #1 pick was Five Little Pigs. Since I never even heard of it, I picked that up.
Five Little Pigs is a Hercule Poirot mystery. I’ll admit Poirot was never one of my favorite sleuths, but this book is addicting. It’s a cold case. I’m no Christie expert, but I don’t remember Poirot taking on a cold case. This one is sixteen years old. A woman was convicted of killing her husband. She died a year later, but sent her daughter a letter that she was given as an adult, saying she was innocent. Now, the daughter wants Poirot to find the truth. I have one hundred pages to go in this excellent story.
What about you? Tell us about your week, please. What did you do? How was your weather? Most important, what are you reading?
I read a lot of Agatha Christie’s books when I was a teenager and can’t remember if I read that one or not. Maybe I should pick it up if the Agatha Christie podcaster rates it so highly. I’m actually reading an older book this week too. I picked up Lilian Jackson Braun’s book The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts at a used bookstore over the weekend. I’ve heard plenty about Braun’s books but never read one and decided it was time to remedy that. So far it’s very charming, and I’m finding it nice to read a slightly older mystery that was written back when people still had longer attention spans. There’s still a murder in the first chapter, but something about the pace of the book and the characters’ conversations feels a bit more leisurely than more current books do.