Middle Sister's October Reads

 It's time to start holiday reading! Continuing from last month, I read a holiday book and a book that would make a great gift for the dog lover in your life. 

Christmas Candy Corpse by Rosemarie Ross The popularity of reality shows has resulted in several mystery series that revolve around reality TV shows, some more successfully than others. This was a new series to me, although this is the third in the Courtney Archer series. Courtney is a chef and cooking show hostess whose network has tapped her and her co-host to record a holiday-themed cooking contest. This is a great boost for her show and career as well as for the contestants, but from the start, things go off the rails. One of the judges, Shannon, keeps disappearing from the set, and one of the contestants is refusing to wear the aprons supplied by the show because they are part of a line of products developed by Shannon. Tempers flare and everyone is on edge with a condensed shooting schedule. But things take a serious turn when the assistant director is murdered, and Courtney finds herself trying to film two shows while figuring out whodunnit before they strike again. The book is well written overall, although there are some glaring grammatical mistakes and weird word choices and typos, and the pace is fast. But this is apparently the third murder in just a few months involving the same crew and show at the same resort, and I cannot believe that the network would not have cancelled this program as fast as possible. Ms. Ross really needs to move the show and introduce characters not related to it as suspects because the resort as the setting for yet another murder involving the exact same group of people is mentioned several times, which underscores that this is either lazy writing or unimaginative writing. Why not send them on location? Why not have Courtney stumble on a murder while on a publicity tour for her show? Why not have Courtney involved with publishing a book of the show's recipes, and someone is killed who is unrelated to the show--a bookstore owner, a restauranteur in another city, an editor, or a network executive is murdered  when she's visiting HQ? How about a murder while she's on vacation? There was also a major story line that irritated me--Shannion's multiple disappearances throughout the day. Several times Courtney sees Shannon in a place she shouldn't be, many times Courtney talks to her coworkers or herself about how Shannon is not acting like herself, yet it takes the entire book for her to just ask her what the heck is going on? Shannon is supposed to be her good friend, yet Courtney treats her like a stranger and avoids trying to help her. Very irritating. Fans of cooking shows and baking contests will enjoy the book, but I won't read another unless the book jacket assures me it doesn't take place at the resort and on set. Recommended. (Net Galley) 

Adventure Dogs by Fern West Dog lovers will enjoy this book that celebrates a variety of activities that Fido and their human can enjoy together. Full disclosure: I work part time as a dog trainer and am heavily involved with Pet Partners, the oldest therapy dog registry in the world, and used to volunteer with a breed rescue. So I love dogs. And I love doing things with my dogs. I'd love to receive this book as a gift. It's lavishly illustrated, with the author's own dog starring in some of the adventures. The book is broken down into categories of activities, with guest essays accompanying many of them. Places to visit and stay, activities to try, advice for beginners and those already expert at a sport will all find some fun new things to try with their canine companion. And if all the reader wants to do with their dog is snuggle on the couch while looking at the photos, that's covered here, too! This would be a great holiday gift for the dog lover in your life. Highly recommended. (Net Galley)

Murder Most Fowl by Donna Andrews Meg's husband Michael, the drama professor, is staging the Scottish play, and their family home is overrun with actors and drama and history department professors, while a group off medieval re-enactors has camped in the woods. Someone is disgruntled and has been playing nasty jokes on people, nasty jokes that are increasing in ugliness. And then someone is murdered, and the underlying tensions crisscrossing the actors, the re-enactors, and the academics explodes. The cast of characters is much larger than usual in a Meg Langslow mystery, but Ms. Andrews keeps the list of possible suspects small enough in number to be tracked but disparate enough to have these different groups under suspicion. There is always a lot of humor in the series. and this one is no different. I'm sorry that Meg's parents, who are two of my favorites characters, make barely an appearance, but we do get to spend more time than usual with Rose Noire and meet another nephew, Kevin, who takes on the role of tech geek that Meg's brother usually fills. I'd love to be part of Meg's huge and lovable and eccentric family, and that is high praise indeed. Highly recommended (Net Galley)

The Secret Staircase by Sheila Connolly Ms. Connolly writes five series, and this is book three in the Victorian Village series. The premise is intriguing, but the execution leaves much to be desired. Kate Hamilton has left her job and returned to her hometown because her childhood friend has convinced her to help resurrect the dying town. Asheboro had only one real industry, and when that folded, a long, slow economic decline began. But because no other industry was present, the Victorian houses that were built during the town's heyday are still intact, if in need of remodeling. Kate's idea is to start with a remodel of the home of the town magnate who'd become a recluse in his home for years, and create a living history village that would attract tourists. After finally finding a contractor who shares her vision of remodeling the mansion, the murder of a sub-contractor and the discovery of a skeleton hidden behind a wall threaten to derail the project before it has even begun. Full disclosure--I've worked in an industry that includes historic preservation, and Kate getting a huge grant to finance this, without any background in historic preservation or conservation, is, frankly, not realistic, but I try to suspend my disbelief when reading mysteries. But even someone without any background in preservation would recognize instantly that the timeline Kate sets is utterly fantastical, and she is a terrible project manager. There are a thousand things to do, the reader is told, yet she spends hours reading a diary because she feels an intense connection with and fascination about the late owner. And that is part of the rub of why I didn't enjoy this book as much as I would have liked: Kate is in love with the idea of the project and the romance of the project, but she (and the author) have no idea of how such a project would be actually unfold, and so therefore neither does the reader become invested in this project. Perhaps the author has too many series that she's responsible for, and the quality may be suffering from her scattered attention. But I doubt I'll return to Asheboro to see what happens with this project. The title reminded me of Nancy Drew books, which I loved as a girl, but I can only recommend it with the caveat that it's not dreadful, it's just not great. Recommended (Net Galley)

Middle Sister's January Reads

Welcome, 2021! The only good things about 2020 were some really good books I read, the leap year tea that is only available every four years, and the pandemic puppy I bought. Hopefully 2021 will be a general improvement over what the world just went through.

A Murder Between the Pages by Amy Lillard Book store setting, small town, eccentric characters--it all sounded great. But I hated this book. I wrote 75 notes to myself on my Kindle, which is a record. Most concern the idiotic and very unrealistic behavior of the characters. Does that sound too strong? It's not. The story centers on a bookstore in a small Mississippi town, where a group of eccentric and very elderly ladies form the core of a book group, a bookstore owned by the adopted daughter of one of them. Arlo co-owns the bookstore, yet is able to just dash off following the eccentric older ladies at the drop of a pin, heedless of whether anyone can watch the store for her. Having worked in a bookstore and other small, privately-owned companies with just a few employees, that would quickly lead to a shuttered business and bankruptcy. Why Arlo felt responsible for these women, and why she couldn't corral them, is mentioned again and again and again and...to the point where I started yelling at the book "Just let them go alone, Arlo! Let them get arrested!" I had trouble understanding how the older ladies that comprise the book club were able to leap from the fictionalized account in their current selection to the real-life disappearance of a former town resident that is the plot. It just seemed very forced and not natural enough to be the basis for the plot. Their behavior was untenable. No police chief, no matter how small the town, no matter his personal relationship to the bookstore owner, would let people barge in to his office, contaminate crime scenes, and make off with evidence without repercussions. And the stealing of medical records by the old ladies, when the author is well aware of HIPAA? I really lost all interest in finding something to like about this book at this point. I disliked all of the old ladies and Arlo, and even the police chief in his complacence and the hunky Sam who indulged the ladies in their mischief. If the mystery had been well plotted, the book might have been salvageable. But there were so many ridiculous, unrealistic scenarios Who thinks a movie producer is going to call the Chief of Police in a small town not to discuss security details but to make the police chief make hotel reservations and act as project manager/major domo? A large, man-made lake is completely drained to look for a stolen necklace. No divers sent in to search; nope, completely drained. Where did the water go? No mention of where the pumps and hoses let the water out, and this was a lake deep enough to hide a Volkswagon for decades. A small town has the budget and equipment to do this? Borrowing a couple of divers from another county would have been realistic. It boggles the mind that the author thought these were reasonable ways to force the connections she needed to in order to advance her story. I could go on and on (see last month), but I'm stopping here and considering changing my Kindle settings so all those notes would be available to anyone who wanted to read them. This is not the first in the series, but I'm going to actively avoid the rest and suggest you do, too, Gentle Reader. Instead, read the next book.

Tea and Treachery by Vicki Delaney Cape Cod, a tea room, a Victorian mansion converted to a bed-and-breakfast--that's the setting for Tea and Treachery. Lily runs the tea room, while her grandmother, Rose, runs the B&B. When someone hoping to develop the property next door is found dead, they find themselves under suspicion from what may be a crooked cop trying to hide the truth. This was a fun read. Lily is a normal woman with normal problems--too little sleep, a grandmother she can't control but worries about, no time for romance and real business problems like not enough employees and a strawberry delivery that never arrives--this is a much more accurate portrayal of a small business than that in the previous book. And the ploy that ensnares our amateur detectives into the murder is realistic--the dead body is found on their property. Last but certainly not least, when Lily does stumble onto clues, she contacts the detectives, instead of assuming that she is smarter than them and keeping it from them. The hint of romance (yea, the gardener is swoon worthy), the just-enough mentions of tea and food Lily prepares to set the scenes in the tea room, the pace and setting on Cape Cod--all make for a very enjoyable and well written mystery. The comic relief of Bernie was a tad overdone. I hope she is relegated a bit to the back in the next book in the series, or matures a little with her possible new romance with a real author, because I found her character to be the one discordant element. She started off as a potentially interesting character, but her flightiness soon grew beyond quirky to annoying. Tea by the Sea is a series to which I'll return. Recommended.

Middle Sister's January Reads

January 2018 started with a newly published book reviewed in the New York Times and followed that with the first in a highly successful series. 2018 looks to be a good year for reading!

The Written World by Martin Puchner Smoothly written summary of how reading (not writing) has changed human civilization. While the effect of writing on human culture is a given. reading has perhaps not been studied as much, and reading, just like writing, can be subversive, clandestine, and rebellious. While the New York Times made this sound like an academic treatise, I found that while much historical research had been done by the author, it doesn't fall within my definition of academic. There are chapter notes, but without footnotes, it was painstaking to check interesting facts or anecdotes. Nicely illustrated, with good examples from around the world and through time.

Tombstone Courage by J. A. Jance It's pretty much impossible to live in Arizona, be a mystery lover, and not have read J. A. Jance. And while I have read several, I hd never read the first Joanna Brady mystery. My library recently acquired audiobooks of the series, so I went completely against my natural inclination to jump willy-nilly into a series, and listened to the first. It's easy to see why the series has been a hit from the beginning, but I must protest the narrator. She used a riff on a faux Southern accent for the Arizonans, and I can assure after having lived here 30 years, native Arizonans do not sound southern. And she mispronounced Chiricahua, but I guess I can't hold that against 'foreigners."

The Cat of the Baskervilles by Vicki Delaney Cute idea for a series--an expatriate Londoner operates a Cape Cod bookstore dedicated to all things Sherlock Holmes (clearly riding the wave of the popularity of the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock). So many things that I would love--the location on Cape Cod, the setting in a mystery bookstore, and I wouldn't call myself an Anglophile but I've been to England and I love old English mystery series. But yet again, the author has the amateur detective snatch a piece of evidence from the crime scene and not tell the police about it--argh! I absolutely hate it when authors do this, give the main character the snobbish presumption that they know better than the professionals. Our Heroine, Gemma, makes several comments throughout the story that were a tad arrogant and put me off the character. In fact, Our Heroine actually muses, with regard to the detective investigating the murder, "She didn't like me and she didn't trust me, and I didn't fully understand why." Hello? You stole evidence from a crime scene, and I'll bet it's not the first time you have done that, Gemma; why would she like you? And when the police detective Gemma is romantically attracted to tell her that Det. Estrada is a a good police officer, Gemma muses that "I had yet to be convinced of that." Hmm, second-guessing the love interest? Not a good start for a romance. The dog trainer in my cringed when reading about her friend's "rambunctious six-week-old cocker spaniel;" puppies are generally only just getting weaned completely by 7-8 weeks, so a 6-week-old pup shouldn't be in its new home. Slipshod facts like that, so easy to check on the Internet, bother me. I found myself only tolerating Gemma for the sake of the bookstore on the Cape, and frankly that's not enough for me to pursue the series. I'd give this one a C--the setting on Cape Cod and in the bookstore is promising, the mystery and the whodunnit were solid enough (although the reason for the murder was a little unrealistic in my opinion, but that's not too much of an issue for me), but the main character grew more and more grating.