Before The Fall by Noah Hawley

Before The Fall by Noah Hawley
Published May 2016 by Grand Central Publishing
Source: bought my copy

Publisher’s Summary:
On a foggy summer night, eleven people—ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter—depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable happens: the plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are Scott Burroughs—the painter—and a four-year-old boy, who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul's family.

With chapters weaving between the aftermath of the crash and the back stories of the passengers and crew members—including a Wall Street titan and his wife, a Texan-born party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot—the mystery surrounding the tragedy heightens. As the passengers' intrigues unravel, odd coincidences point to a conspiracy. Was it merely by dumb chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something far more sinister at work? Events soon threaten to spiral out of control in an escalating storm of media outrage and accusations. And while Scott struggles to cope with fame that borders on notoriety, the authorities scramble to salvage the truth from the wreckage. Amid pulse-quickening suspense, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, human nature, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.

My Thoughts:
So, Hawley is an award-winning television producer and screenwriter. He was one of the writers on the show Fargo. The hubby and I thought the writing on that show was terrific so it would make sense that I'd enjoy a book written by the same author. That also explains why I can so easily see this book playing out on the small screen; it very much has the feel of a limited series television show. In Before The Fall, though, Hawley is taking advantage of the print medium to flesh out his characters and explore deeper ideas, to find the truth behind what caused the accident, behind his characters, and  behind the forces at play.

In a mystery novel, I feel like it's important to always be giving readers material that is propelling the book forward, even when we're getting those back stories. Occasionally here I felt like Hawley lost some of that forward momentum as he explored the past lives of his characters and the things that drive them. Some of that was, of course, to cast doubt on all of the cast. Like any good mystery, everyone here is suspect and there are plenty of motives to question. What's also suspect is the role the media plays in situations like plane crashes, the ways personalities can influence things to turn one way or another, and the way the various government entities work, or don't work, together.

Hawley has created some really interesting characters. Scott Burroughs is a character readers will want to rout for but will also question.  He's a guy who's squandered his life and his talents but seems finally to have found his path; he's the hero who saves a young boy but who struggles with his new found fame, not always making what appear to be the best choices. But too many of Hawley's characters also felt like caricatures to me - the over-the-top newscaster who has become so lost in his own persona that he can't see the truth for the story he wants to tell, the a-hole investigator who smirks his way through the book and the good guy investigator whose only flaw seems to be that he's too analytical, the ne'er do well brother-in-law of the media mogul who you can practically see rubbing his hands together in glee as he contemplates the riches he thinks he's come into. Truth be told, though, sometimes you really do want the bad guy to just be a bad guy - you really don't want to find a grain of pity in your heart for him and Hawley gave me just that with some of these characters.

Still, even though this book didn't work for me on all levels (I often felt like Hawley went to far afield in exploring some of his themes), I did enjoy it and raced to find out the truth about the crash.

On a side note, because I was struggling to put my thoughts about this book together, I browsed through some other reviews. Sometimes doing this helps, sometimes it just leaves me wondering what I missed. This time it left me wondering if the reviewer for The Guardian had actually read the book because he refers to one of the major characters by the wrong name and says that this character was on the plane, which he was not. It certainly made me question whether this happens in other reviews.

The Trespasser by Tana French

The Trespasser by Tana French
Read by Hilda Fay
Published October 2016 by Penguin Publishing
Source: audiobook checked out from my library

Publisher's Summary:
Being on the Murder Squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. Her partner, Stephen Moran, is the only person who seems glad she’s there. The rest of her working life is a stream of thankless cases, vicious pranks, and harassment. Antoinette is savagely tough, but she’s getting close to the breaking point.

Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers’ quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed-to-a-shine, and dead in her catalog-perfect living room, next to a table set for a romantic dinner. There’s nothing unusual about her—except that Antoinette’s seen her somewhere before.

And that her death won’t stay in its neat by-numbers box. Other detectives are trying to push Antoinette and Steve into arresting Aislinn’s boyfriend, fast. There’s a shadowy figure at the end of Antoinetteʼs road. Aislinnʼs friend is hinting that she knew Aislinn was in danger. And everything they find out about Aislinn takes her further from the glossy, passive doll she seemed to be.

Antoinette knows the harassment has turned her paranoid, but she can’t tell just how far gone she is. Is this case another step in the campaign to force her off the squad, or are there darker currents flowing beneath its polished surface?

My Thoughts:
First of all, if you get a chance to listen to this one, do it. If you are not absolutely sucked into the book by the Irish accent alone, I'm not sure we can be friends any more. And not only do we get the accent, but Fay does a terrific job of reading the book and a great job with finding voices for the multiple characters.

As for the book itself, Tana French has never disappointed me yet. The Trespasser is no exception. This is the sixth book in French's Dublin Murder Squad "series." Here, French has, unusually, brought back two detectives from the last book; this time, however, Antoinette takes center stage and Moran plays a supporting role.

Antoinette might be my favorite French character. A loner with a temper by nature, Conway is even more isolated in the murder squad, the only woman, the only person of color.  She's forced to work the night shift, she's never given the big cases.The good old boys do not make it easy on her and make it clear they want her out. They spit in her coffee if she leaves it on her desk when she leaves the room, they urinate in her locker, they abscond with reports and evidence. This is not  a woman who can't get along with people, though. She did just fine when she was working in the missing persons division and she does have mates. And this is a woman who calls her mum after her shift every day. French does a great job of making this porcupine of a character someone readers can cheer for.

Like all of French's Dublin Murder Squad books, you'd better be paying attention because even though there's not a lot of evidence or suspects in this one, French keeps her readers guessing. Knowing that French's books generally don't end tidily, I wasn't surprised that things got very twisted toward the end. On the other hand, I still didn't have any idea where she was going. I rarely do with her books which is part of what makes me keep coming back.

A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear
Published:
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability—and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now, all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England; her aging father Frankie Dobbs is not getting any younger.

But on a ship bound for England, Maisie realizes she isn’t ready to return. Against the wishes of the captain who warns her, “You will be alone in a most dangerous place,” she disembarks in Gibraltar. Though she is on her own, Maisie is far from alone: the British garrison town is teeming with refugees fleeing a brutal civil war across the border in Spain.

Yet the danger is very real. Days after Maisie’s arrival, a photographer and member of Gibraltar’s Sephardic Jewish community, Sebastian Babayoff, is murdered, and Maisie becomes entangled in the case, drawing the attention of the British Secret Service. Under the suspicious eye of a British agent, Maisie is pulled deeper into political intrigue on “the Rock”—arguably Britain’s most important strategic territory—and renews an uneasy acquaintance in the process. At a crossroads between her past and her future, Maisie must choose a direction, knowing that England is, for her, an equally dangerous place, but in quite a different way.

My Thoughts:
If you're a reader of the Maisie Dobbs books, you'll know that Winspear has spent quite a lot of time building up Maisie's relationship with James Compton. Winspear never resorted to the easy to exploit rich-family-looks-down-on-son's-relationship-with-the-help's-daughter scheme. Neither did she rush Maisie down the aisle; instead, making the relationship between James and Maisie more complicated and interesting in a time when young women were more likely to be looking to get married rather than to become career women. The problem, of course, is that, eventually, something had to happen, given that James wanted to be married. In A Dangerous Place, Winspear finally had to make the decision about how she was going to work around that. But Winspear never wanted to write that kind of book. Hence, "the deepest tragedy," which felt rushed to me, although I understood dwelling on it was not the book Maisie Dobbs fans want to read nor, perhaps, the kind of book Winspear wants to write. It doesn't, however, simply disappear.

In A Dangerous Place, we meet a deeply wounded Maisie, struggling to find a way to move forward and unsure if she even wants to do that. But when she, literally, stumbles across a murdered man, Maisie finds herself drawn into solving a case that the police already consider solved. More and more, as she digs deeper into the man's history, Maisie finds herself again. When news arrives about the slaughter in Guernica, that tragedy begins to help Maisie deal with her own grief. But it also brings to the fore all of the political elements at play and throws a new light onto Maisie's investigation.

Pablo Picasso's iconic "Guernica"

A Dangerous Place gives Maisie Dobbs fans exactly what they want from one of Winspear's novels - a murder mystery with a deeper context (here the Spanish Civil War), an intelligent heroine with a full life, and a balance of light and dark. Sometimes that lightness gets in the way for me (I don't really need to know what outfit Maisie selected to wear each day), but I always appreciate Winspear's ability to use events of the past to address problems we still struggle with today.

The best part of this book? Getting back to Maisie, may just have broken me out of the reading rut I've been in for weeks. Thanks, Jacqueline Winspear! And thanks to the ladies of TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For other reviews about the Maisie Dobbs books, including the latest In This Grave Hour, check out the full tour.

About Jacqueline Winspear Jacqueline 

Winspear is the author of the New York Times bestselling Maisie Dobbs series, which includes In This Grave Hour, Journey to Munich, A Dangerous Place, Leaving Everything Most Loved, Elegy for Eddie, and eight other novels. Her standalone novel, The Care and Management of Lies, was also a New York Times bestseller and a Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist. Originally from the United Kingdom, she now lives in California.

Find out more about Jacqueline at her website, www.jacquelinewinspear.com, and find her on Facebook.

Elegy for Eddie: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear

Elegy for Eddie: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
Published: March 27, 2012 by HarperCollins Publishing
Source: this copy courtesy of the publisher for TLC Book Tours

In this ninth book in the Maisie Dobbs series, Maisie and her team are hired by a group of costmongers (fruit and vegetable street venders) to investigate the suspicious death of Eddie Pettit. Maise grew up in the same neighbor hood as Eddie and knew him to be a kind, gentle, if somewhat slow person who was what we would now call a horse whisperer. The police refuse to investigate what appears to be merely an accident but these men Maisie has known all of her life are convinced that Eddie's death was no accident. As Maisie and her team begin to investigate, they quickly discover that there is much more to this case than simply the death of a common man. Set in 1933, Winspear brings the behind the scenes build up to the coming Second World War right into Maisie's life as her probing leads her to question a friend and brings the press and a certain Mr. Winston Churchill into the fray.

As with The Mapping of Love and Death, Elegy for Eddie is as much about Maisie as a person as it is about her as an investigator. In this book, Maisie, who appears to have a propensity for introspection, begins to question the motives behind her acts of kindness, her feelings about her new wealth and, above all, her feelings for Viscount James Compton.

Both of the Maisie Dobbs books I've read this month, could very easily be books about Maisie and her circle of friends that happen to have a mystery included as mystery stories that happen to rely heavily on the characters involved. For me, this is both a great asset to the books and a deterrent. Any time you write a series with recurring characters you have to make a choice - will the reader absolutely need to start at the beginning if they want to know what's going on with the characters or will you figure out a way to get new readers up to speed in each book. Winspear has made the latter choice, a choice I very much appreciated when I read The Mapping of Love and Death but here I did find it to be a bit in my way as I read. Still, easy enough to skim over those bits and get on with the lives of Billy, Sandra, Priscilla, James, Frankie, and, Maisie as they move forward with their lives, loves, and difficulties.

For other opinions about this book, check out Word Lily's review, Ryan's review at Wordsmithsonia, and Leeswammes' review. Thanks to TLC Book Tours for letting me help celebrate "March is Maisie Month!"

The Mapping of Love and Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear

The Mapping of Love and Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
Published February 2011 by HarperCollins Publishing
Source: the copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours

Well, this is embarrassing! As you may have noticed from the icon on my sidebar, March is Maisie Month and in honor of that bloggers on the tour for the latest Maisie Dobbs novel, Elegy for Eddie, aren't reading just that novel but one or more of the previous eight Maisie novels. I committed to two, the new one and the seventh, The Mapping of Love and Death. And then I promptly wrote down the wrong dates for the reviews of each book. So this weekend I was happily reading Elegy for Eddie in preparation for my review of it today. Oops - for some reason late yesterday I finally actually looked at the tour information and realized I had read the books out of order. I promptly switched books and I'm about half way through The Mapping of Love and Death this morning. I'll be finishing the book today and will have my full review up this evening.

**My Review**

In The Mapping of Love and Death, private investigator Maisie Dobbs has been hired to investigate a mystery involving an American cartographer killed during World War I. Wealthy son of British ex-patriot Edward Clifton, Michael Clifton has only just bought some land in California with the certainty that oil will be found there when Britain announces war with Germany. Feeling a duty to his father's homeland, Michael immediately leaves for England leaving behind the truth behind his land purchase.

Sixteen years after he went missing, his body has been discovered, along with some letters from a woman who his parents would like Maisie to find.But there is more to the story that even his mother isn't aware of; Michael's father is convinced that Michael was murdered. When Maisie's clients are brutally assaulted in their hotel room, Maisie's investigation takes on a much greater sense of urgency.

Jacqueline Winspear fills her Maisie Dobbs books with a wonderful supporting cast including her devoted father, her beloved mentor, her employee, Billy, and her best friend Priscilla. Clearly these characters have developed throughout the series but Winspear does a fine job of giving the reader enough information to get up to speed with the relationships but doesn't burden readers with background that could take away from the story line.

I'm sure these mysteries fall into the "cozy" mystery genre but I feel like there is more depth to the Maisie books that I typically find in so-called cozy mysteries. These characters carry a lot of very palpable pain. But Winspear doesn't let her stories get bogged down in that pain or the mystery, bringing plenty of humor to the books as well. I was also impressed with the way Winspear managed to keep the investigative portion of the book moving forward while retaining the real life stories of the characters. There is also much to be learned about the time period, and in this case cartography, without getting weighed down in her research.

I'm sorry to have started so late in the series. I'll definitely pick up the next book but I'm not sure I can go back to the beginning knowing so much already about what will happen to the characters. I will, however, be looking forward to the tenth book!

The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk: Nancy Drew Mystery Stories by Carolyn Keene

The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk: Nancy Drew Mystery Stories
220 pages
Published February 1940 by Grosset Dunlap
Source: I have no idea--this one just appeared on my daughter's bookshelf. It has my sister's name in it so clearly it was hers at some point but I don't know how it got to my house. Or how an edition actually published in 1940 ended up in the hands of a child of the 1960's.

Teen sleuth Nancy Drew is preparing for a trip to South America. She and her friends Bess & George (a girl--this was the 1940's after all) are planning on traveling with a group from a private girls' school.  But just before she leaves a number of things happen that begin the mystery wheels turning. A cat gets left on Nancy's doorstep. A mother of one of the girls from the school stops by and demands that Nancy not go on the ship (again--it's the 1940's; no airplane for these girls), and a young man runs into Nancy's car. Unrelated? You might well think so unless you've read a Nancy Drew book before. Then you'll know that all of these things will sooner or later tie together.

The girls decide that even though they won't go with the group from the school, they will not be deprived of their trip Suddenly Nancy figures out where the cat from and it just so happens that the woman who sent the cat has gone off to South America; she then agrees to act as a chaperon once the girls arrive and the girls are off and running. A mishap with a trunk that Mr. Drew has bought Nancy for the trip causes the girls to have to leave earlier than planned leaving them plenty of time for more odd things to happen. The stepfather of the girl who was to have nothing to do with Nancy comes into the picture, a girl Nancy is supposed to befriend at the behest of her father seems to want nothing to do with her, and that pesky trunk continues to cause problems. Things really heat up once the girls arrive in Buenos Aires with more and more mysterious characters and danger.

Of course, this being Nancy Drew and a book written for girls ages 8-12, you know that there is no real danger and that in the end, Nancy will solve the mystery. I was pleasantly surprised to discover, however, that even though a lot of the clues were available to me, I really wasn't able to put all of the pieces together and figure out how all of the mysteries tied together. The language was a bit stilted by today's standards, the kids were a bit too clean cut, and a lot of things clearly date the book. But the story itself holds up, with plenty to think about and a lot of action.

I quite enjoyed the juxtaposition between Nancy and Stephanie Plum which I finished just before this one. You could hardly find two more diverse characters or two more beloved characters!

School Days by Robert B. Parker

School Days by Robert B. Parker
304 pages
Published October 2006 by Penguin Group
Source: my parents

Lily Ellsworth, wealthy matriarch and devoted grandmother, has hired Spenser, private detective, to prove her grandson, Jared Clark, innocent in a recent school shooting.  No one else, however, seems to think the boy is innocent, not even his own parents.  In fact, no one else, including Jared himself, seems to want to fight the charge at all despite the fact that there is no physical proof that Jared was involved, only the word of the one boy that was caught still in the school.

For Spenser, the question soon becomes not "if" Jared was involved in the shooting that killed seven people but "why." Why would a boy that had never caused any trouble suddenly decide to start shooting classmates? Where would the two boys have gotten the guns and the experience to shoot so accurately? And why is Jared so willing to go to prison without a fight?

This is the 33rd Spenser novel Parker wrote and it didn't take long to figure out how Spenser came to be so popular with readers.  He's walking testosterone with an eye for the ladies but faithful to his beloved.  He's a well-read tough guy. Spenser has a charm that's irresistible for men and women alike.  The case of Jared Clark is interesting with some surprising twists and turns, but this book is really all about Spenser. It's fast-paced, dialogue heavy with plenty of action and I couldn't put it down.

My parents are big fans of Parker's books, both his Spenser books and his westerns, so I've got no shortage of his books to choose from next and I'm looking forward to it!

Update: My dad wrote to remind me that Parker's books were not limited to the Spenser series or the westerns. The man was prolific!

Not only Spenser and the westerns;  there’s also the Sheriff Jesse Stone books (which CBS has turned into such excellent TV movies with Tom Selleck as Jesse) and those featuring female detective Sonny Randle (who sometimes collaborates with Spenser).  The westerns are my favorites, but I enjoy them all.

Murder Takes The Cake by Gayle Trent

Murder Takes The Cake by Gayle Trent
288 pages
Published March 2011 by Simon & Schuster Adult
Source: the publisher

Daphne Martin's just moved back to her hometown after an ugly divorce and she's trying to get her cake decorating business up and running.  But finding the dead body of town busybody Yodel Watson when she delivers a cake to Yodel's house is not the best way to get your name out, particularly when someone begins spreading rumors that Yodel may have been poisoned.

When Yodel's daughter, who lives out of town, contacts Daphne and asks her to go back into Yodel's house to get a diary out for her, a diary that the murderer may have been after, Daphne agrees.  But once the book is in her hands, she can't resist the opportunity to find out just what's in the book that makes it so interesting.  What she finds in throws her for a loop--gossip about her mother that Daphne is just as eager to learn more about as she is to find out who murdered Yodel and clear her own name.

In the process, Daphne will meet up with an old beau, a wealthy woman with an entire wing of her house devoted to her prize-winning guinea pigs, and a whole assortment of the usual/unusual small town inhabitants you'd expect to find.

Trent has the makings of an interesting story here and has set up the characters nicely for future titles in the Daphne Martin Cake Mystery series.  Unfortunately, even a cozy mystery needs more tension than Martin was able to build, particularly in light of the fact that she kicked the book right off with the discovery of a body.Although there seemed to be any number of people with a reason to dislike Yodel, none of them seemed to have enough reason to want her dead. 

It may now be official; while I adore cozy mysteries, it appears that foodie mysteries may just not be my thing.  Every time I came to a part of the story where the cake decorating business became the focus of the story, my interest really started to flag.  Just as it seemed to in Joanne Fluke's Cream Puff Murder, the food scenes seem to detract from the story line for me, making the book feel like two different stories.  The emphasis in this one did seem to be more about the murder than the food than did Fluke's book and I did enjoy the plot line focusing on Daphne's relationship with her mother.  For fans of foodie mysteries, I do recommend giving this one a try.

The Night Season by Chelsea Cain

The Night Season by Chelsea Cain
336 pages
Published March 2011 by St Martin's Press
Source: the publisher and FSB Associates

Memorial Day, 1948: the railroad town of Vanport Oregon is washed away when a dike breaks and the warning to evacuate is received late. Afterward, fifteen bodies are recovered and fourteen people are never found.

Present day: Rain has been coming down for days and warm temperatures are causing massive snow melt to wash into the Willamette River.  Portland, Oregon is bracing itself for a major flood. Thousands are down on the waterfront filling sandbags but otherwise the city is quiet. As the waterways fill and wash away land, a skeleton is uncovered by a jogger.  Reporter Susan Ward believes it may be related to the Vanport flood sixty years earlier.

Detective Archie Sheridan is called in to investigate a body found in an amusement park. The police immediately recognize the body as that of a woman presumed to have drowned.  But how did she get from the river on to the carousel?  Hours later a bigger question emerges when a brown puncture wound is discovered on the woman's palm.  The cause of death has now been changed to poisoning and Sheridan is put in charge of a task force to investigate when two more deaths previously presumed to be drownings also turn out to be cases of poison.  Who is murdering the citizens of Portland and why?  The clues? A most unusual method of delivering the poison, the token left by the murder with each victim, and a young boy rescued from the raging river by Sheridan.

When I was approached about this book, I jumped at the chance to read it remembering rave reviews of Cain's previous Archie Sheridan stories, involving Beauty Killer Gretchen Lowell.  Gretchen remains a presence, albeit off-stage, in this novel as Archie, in particular, and his team continue to deal with the aftermath of what she did.  Cain does a good job of bringing the new reader up to speed without interrupting the flow of this story.  It felt less like I was picking up the fourth book in a series about Archie Sheridan and more like I was getting the background story I would expect to get in any good novel.

I powered my way through this book in what might be record time for me.  I picked it up on Sunday afternoon and when I got home from work on Monday, I knew I would not be going to bed until I was finished.  I didn't even have to miss the ten o'clock news.  The story moves along at a quick pace and alternates periodically from what Susan's investigation into the skeleton and Archie's investigation into the serial killer.  With a little over 100 pages left, the action really took off and the climax did not disappoint. Often this type of book feels like it spends entirely too much time wrapping things up but Cain was surprising me right up to the end of the book. The city, the flood and the rain play a major role in this book providing the perfect dark atmosphere and tension.

It is clear, from the details of Archie's background, that this book is not as extreme as the previous books.I must admit, I was grateful.  I'm not a fan of very explicit torture and murder and I'm not sure I'll be able to make myself go back and read the previous books. But for those of you who were fans, you'll be glad to know that Gretchen does make an appearance in this one and makes it clear that we haven't heard the last of her.

Mystery March - Cream Puff Murder by Joanne Fluke

Cream Puff Murder by Joanne Fluke
333 pages
Published February 2009 by Kensington Publishing
Source: borrowed this one from a friend


Bakery owner Hannah Swensen's mother is publishing a book and Hannah needs to be able to fit into a Regency dress for the book launch so her sister convinces her to begin dieting and exercising with her at the local mall's health club.  Even though Hannah is used to waking up early and hitting the ground running, she's not used to hitting the treadmill running and she's not enjoying it a bit. Finding the body of the town hussy dead in the jacuzzi one morning doesn't help matters.  Neither does the fact that her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Detective Mike Kingston, has been pulled off the case because of his "relationship" with the deceased.  When her brother-in-law and other sister's boyfriend are also pulled from the case for the same reason, the three women team up to solve the mystery.  Hannah's other on-again, off-again boyfriend, Norman, also pitches in to help, as do Hannah and Norman's mothers. With most of the women in town bearing a grudge against the deceased for her flirting ways or meanness as a fitness instructor and a slew of potential jilted lovers, there are a lot of suspects to rule out and not a lot of clues.

I've heard great things about the Hannah Swensen mysteries and Joanne Fluke so when my coworker offered me this book for for what I've designated as Mystery March, I was quick to say "yes."  This is Fluke's 11th cozy mystery feature Hannah and it's obvious right from the beginning that Fluke is working hard to bring first time readers up to speed with the cast of characters in Lake Eden, Minnesota.  The problem for me was that there were just too many characters and it took a lot of pages to finally get to the point where a story could really build.  Not that Fluke wasted any time in letting the reader know who the murder victim was going to be in this book.  Already on page three, the reader knows that village vamp, Ronni Ward is going to get hers.  But it's not until page 119 that Hannah finally finds Ronni's body.

Much is made throughout the book of Hannah's cat, Moishe and the gift of a multi-day feeder she receives for him.  At first I was just getting annoyed with all this talk about the cat and how much he was eating .Once Mike suggested that Hannah put in a surveillance camera to try to figure out what was happening to all of the food that was disappearing in hours, not days, it became obvious that the camera was going to become key to solving the mystery.  But even understanding why the story line had been included didn't stop me from feeling like it had taken up entirely too many pages.

There is also a lot of discussion about the baked goods that Hannah and her shop are creating.  The details were distracting from the story for me but the good news is that recipes for all of these goodies are included in the book.  So even though I finished the book quickly, it's not going to be back in my co-worker's hands until I have time to copy down several of them!

Sunday Salon - January 30

It's been a slow reading week for me.  My parents were with us one night and my son was in town another; I had the idea that perhaps it would be rude for me to ignore them and read while they were here!  This weekend has been busy: Friday was The Big Guy's birthday, Saturday Miss H and I had to head out of town for a baby shower and today The Big Guy and I headed back out of town to go usher at the Community Playhouse with my parents.  Yesterday Mini-him was here again and so we had an impromptu family movie night and all watched "Inception."  Then Miss H and I watched "Eat, Pray, Love."

I did finally finish The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks.  It's the story of living with schizophrenia and to say that it scared the wits out of me would be an understatement.  It's actually been one of my "mom fears" that one of my children would develop schizophrenia but it was really my boys that I was the most worried about.  Now I've got to worry about my daughter, too!

I've got absolutely no books I "have" to read for review for February.  I'm hoping to use the month to read books for challenges and the goals I've set for the year.  I'm putting together the stack of books I want to read for March, a month I've designated as Mystery March.  I've managed to talk The Big Guy into reading one or two mysteries with me as well.  Hmm, it's just occurred to me that my parents both enjoy mysteries/thrillers so I'll bet I can talk them into reading and reviewing a couple of books as well.  Right, Mom and Dad?