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Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

Review: First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen Follow On to Garden Spells

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This is a hard review to write.  I cannot do justice to this book.

Sarah Addison Allen came to prominence with her novel Garden Spells, about a family in a small southern town that is blessed with unusual gifts. Claire includes flowers from her garden in her catered meals, pansies to make children thoughtful, rose to remember one’s first love.  Claire’s sister Sydney left home immediately after high school and returns with a small child. Garden Spells ends with hope for both sisters.

First Frost takes place 10 years later.  Sydney owns a successful beauty salon, is happily married to Henry.  Daughter Bay is now a freshman in high school with the gift of knowing where everything is supposed to be.  Sometimes she knows where people are meant to be, and this gift is on overdrive the first day of high school when she sees Josh Matteson and knows immediately she belongs with him.

Claire began making candy infused with her garden flowers, at first for family, then neighbors with sick kids, then she got noticed by Southern Living and now cannot keep up with the candy demand.  She is married to Tyler and has a small daughter.

All the Waverly women and their families are facing the usual problems.

  • Bay’s should-be Josh is popular and a senior, and his father is the Matteson who broke Sydney’s heart.
  • Sydney’s receptionist Violet takes gross advantage of her kindness and doesn’t do  her job.  She also brings her darling baby Charlie to work where he stole Sydney’s heart.
  • Sydney wants another child, a boy for Henry.
  • Claire wants to quit the candy business and go back to catering, but worries about finances.

Enter a silver-haired older gentleman, Russell Zahler, a heartless ex-carnival performer and con man.  Russell is 80 nowbroke and looking for the easier scores, the fast in and out.  He knew Claire and Sydney’s mother years before and kept a photo of her with the children and another couple.

Russell tells Claire that she is really not a Waverly but the daughter of the couple in the photo and asks for a pay off to keep quiet.  Being a Waverly matters to Claire because she believes her skills and gifts are based on her family.

All Set Up for Resolution

Sarah Addison Allen’s genius is in how she builds out real people as she resolves these problems.  The characters do what they do best, act as they would every day and things just work out.

True, Sydney must help Josh and Bay but all she does is build a bridge, she doesn’t even put a sign up saying it is there.  Sydney’s relationship with Violet and Charlie works to its inevitable end, again based completely on Violet’s character and personality.

Claire works out what to do about candy vs. catering and handles Russell the same way she does everything.  She talks to Tyler and her cousin Evanelle and her sister and the decision suddenly is easy.

I am on Sarah Addison Allen’s email list for a reason.  I love her books.  They are hard to describe.  Southern?  Yes, but that’s trivial.  Romance?  A little, sure.  Suspense?  A tiny bit.  Normal contemporary fiction?  Yes it’s contemporary but there is no angst, no divorce, no miserable sins and lies.  Fantasy?  Nope.  Her books are all of these but so much more.  Truly excellent, well done characters you want to see be happy, interesting plots and a touch of magic.

Suspense and Romance, Deceived by Irene Hannon

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Deceived is the first novel I’ve read by Irene Hannon but it won’t be the last.  The library had Deceived on an end cap where it caught my eye.  I almost didn’t read it because the blurb sounded melodramatic.

Synopsis

Kate Marshall lost her husband and 4 year old son in a boating accident three years ago.  Police on the scene found her husband’s body floating without a life jacket but never found the small boy’s body.  Kate was especially distraught because she asked her husband to always use the life jackets.

Three years later Kate is going down the escalator in the mall when she sees a 7 year old blond boy going up.  Despite believing her son is dead, Kate feels certain the boy could be her son, Kevin, because she hears him ask for a poppeysicle, the same thing her Kevin used to say.

Kate enlists a private detective who finds the boy with his supposed adoptive father.  One thing leads to another and we finally have a happy ending.

Suspenseful

Hannon could have taken this story several different directions and we aren’t quite sure whether Kate is on the right track until about halfway through.   She lets the suspense build gradually.  Will the boy be Kate’s missing son?  Is Kate dreaming or going insane?  Will the supposed dad bolt?  Or kill his almost-girlfriend?

The suspense is mild in some ways.  We don’t have a mad killer or terrorist plot, just a man desperate to have a son back, a mother grieving and hoping, a growing love affair.  Once we see that Kate is not nuts and her son could be alive, the questions then become how and why.  And for investigator Conner Sullivan, how to prove enough plausibility that he can get DNA testing.

Characters

Deceived is not a coming of age story or a deep character study.  The three main characters, Kate, Conner and supposed dad Greg Sanders are convincing three dimensional people.  Kate and Greg were the most fleshed out.  The other characters are believable and done well enough to be more than backdrops.

Summary

Another point is the book has minimal violence or gore and no sex scenes.  I found both refreshing.

The full title of this novel is Deceived: A Novel (Private Justice) (Volume 3), telling me there are more books by Irene Hannon to seek out.   Our library has several, next on my list to check out.

Excellent! Faith, Love, Sacrifice With A Football Background – A Life Intercepted

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The blurb on A Life Intercepted: A Novel caught my eye, “Matthew “The Rocket” Rising had it all.  Falsely accused of a heinous crime with irrefutable evidence…all was lost.”  Matthew Rising won the Heisman trophy for best college football player twice, led his team to the national championship three times and was the number 1 draft pick in the NFL.  In Matthew’s mind all these were nothing compared to his marriage to Audrey.

Matthew was convicted of sexual assault and deviant sex with a minor based on a video of sex acts that did not show his face plus testimony of the three women who woke up with him in their bed.  He never made it to training camp, never made any money, and worst, his wife disappeared.

Paroled after 12 years he is forbidden to approach a minor, to work or live within half a mile of a daycare or school, completely broke, homeless and with no job prospects.  Matthew went back to his hometown to find his wife.  His oldest friend lets him stay in his cabin, which is just far enough from the Catholic convent and high school.   He has no intention to violate his parole, just to find Audrey and peace.

 

Matthew finds Audrey is living at the convent, where she planted a flower garden that memorializes Matthew’s final play in his last college football game.   Dee Dalton, 17 years old and a wanna be football quarterback, approaches Matthew to ask for his help.  Dee had been a fine young player but his throwing mechanics are messed up and he needs to learn from someone besides his high school coach.   Matthew initially says no, since that would violate his parole and land him back in prison, this time for life.

 

Audrey comes to Matthew and tells him that he owes it to her to coach Dee, that he cheated her of a family and a life and further that no one would ever know.  Matthew knows that it is all too likely that his nemesis, the person who framed him for the sexual assault, will in fact be watching him, looking for evidence he broke parole.  Nonetheless Matthew agrees to coach Dee as a sacrifice to show Audrey what she means to him.

 

Of course his nemesis videotapes the coaching sessions.  Each individual parole violation means 10 years in prison and Matthew and Dee meet over 70 times.  Matthew is arrested but only after demonstrating to the football loving world that both he and Dee are ready to play, Matthew at the NFL and Dee at high school, then college.

Tight Plot with a Unique Setting

We know all through the book that Matthew is innocent although we don’t know the details nor how – or whether – he will somehow win through.  Author Charles Martin keeps us in suspense until near the end.  He unfolds the plot through Matthew’s memories offset with the events as they occur.  We see Matthew willingly sacrifice his life to help Dee, initially for Audrey’s sake then for Dee’s, and through the memories of Matthew’s life with Audrey.

The novel is set behind the scenes of football, not the games themselves but the practices and the events after the games.  You do not have to understand or like football to enjoy the book because the game is the setting, not the purpose.

There were a few weak points, mostly in the trial that found Matthew guilty.  I thought of a couple points his lawyer could have made, such as whether the DNA evidence against Matthew included semen, whether his fingerprints were on the video camera, the fact it was dark, all of which could have cast some doubt in the jurors’ minds.  But the story is not about the trial.

Charles Martin’s  purpose isn’t to debate the merits of the case, but to show that it happened, that the evidence was overwhelming, that even Matthew’s lawyer and his wife believed him guilty.  This is the set up for the real meat of the novel, how Martin deals with gross injustice.

The resolution with Ginger, Matthew’s supposed victim was wonderful, but it required the woman to completely forego everything she had for something she had never wanted.  It was great to read but a bit far fetched.  Let’s hope that people are like that.

Characters

Matthew and Dee are well done.  Matthew remains loving and determined.  He knows exactly the value of the worldly success and the happy marriage he thought he had, and he has a fine perspective on which matters.

Wood and Ray, Matthew’s two friends, steal the show.  They are courageous, caring, willing to help Matthew, willing to more-or-less believe him.  The character I found the weakest was Audrey.  I understand she was incredibly hurt, wounded to near death by her husband’s betrayal, but it was incredible to me that she insisted he coach Dee even knowing it meant life imprisonment if caught.  She clearly did not expect the vindictive Ginger to spy on Matthew and videotape his movements, and why should she.  She believed Matthew guilty.

A Life Intercepted is a coming of age novel that brings four characters to adulthood, Matthew and Dee of course, and Audrey and Ginger too.  Matthew’s coming of age isn’t when he’s in his teens or college, but as he works with Dee and earlier, in some of his prison memories where he loses the hate and grows his way to redemption.

Thoughts on Redemption

A Life Intercepted: A Novel is one of the finest books I’ve read in a long time.  I read this concurrently with Memory by Lois Bujold, which gave a unique flavor to the experience. Both novels are about redemption and both have exotic settings, football with A Life Intercepted and the planet Barrayar in Memory.

The primary difference is in the nature of redemption.  Memory is all about Miles’ self-redemption after an act he did commit.  A Life Intercepted is about the redemption Matthew offers to his wife, his supposed victim, his fans, the young Mac for acts they committed, not what he had done.  Reading the two books together helped me see the difference and realized that A Life Intercepted first shows Matthew accepting the injustice, coming to peace internally, then offering that peace to the others who judged and rejected him.  It is a Christ-like redemption, not a private personal redemption.

The underlying themes of love, faith, redemption and sacrifice are timeless.  Combine those with excellent characters you care about, intense plot and good writing and you have a real winner.  Five stars.

Short Stories From a Favorite Children’s Author – Disconcerting Tales for Adults

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One of my favorite authors as a kid was Elizabeth Enright.  I read her books about the Melendy family, The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Five and Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze, over and over. I identified with Randy and felt Rush was just like my brother Bob. Thimble Summer and Newberry winner Gone-Away Lake  were favorites too, although I read each of them only a half dozen times or so.

I recently ordered the Melendy books for our granddaughter to read when she visits and came across a book of collected short stories she wrote for adults, Borrowed Summer.  Had I not seen the author’s name I would not have guessed these were by the same author as the serious but oh-so-much-fun children’s books.  All the stories are set in the late 1930s to mid 1940s.

The title story sets the tone.  Raymond Lantry is a clerk, living at a mean boardinghouse in the city who has no money, no family and no prospect of ever having anything more than a dreary life all alone.  He has one radiant memory, of a week in the country so long ago, visiting his aunt.

One day Raymond decides to abscond with one of the firm’s payments instead of depositing it as he should.  He goes west, leaves the train on a whim somewhere in rural Wisconsin.  Raymond tells everyone he is Raymond Beemond, looking for a quiet place to write a book, and takes a room with Mrs. Meinhardt at her farm.  Raymond spends the golden summer building memories.  Helping with the harvest, spending time fishing with little Marvel, eating with the family.  There is growing interest with widowed Mrs. Meinhardt.

It ends when Mrs. Meinhardt’s son, Earl, is wounded in the Pacific war and is coming home.  Raymond says good-bye, leaves all the rest of his embezzled money in an oriole’s nest in Earl’s room and goes back east to face the music.  The story makes you question what you would do if you had no memories, no summers of joy to recall and no hope.  It’s excellent.

Another very good one is Home to Grandma’s, where we see Fenella traveling south on the train with her mother to visit her grandmother.  Fenella is precocious, smart, polite, and six years old.  She is also African-American and bewildered by the strange way people treat her mother and her, especially when they reach their destination.  As her mother says “I forgot where I was.”  All Fenella wants to do is go home where things are normal again.

Most of the characters in the other stories are not good people.  Olivia in The Maple Tree is desperate to live in a ghostly fantasy.  In The Bureau of Lost and Found Mrs. Persin tries to confess her terrible cruelty and trouble-making to her dying brother-in-law.  She tells him how she made it look like her sister had an affair (which in the end caused her sister to commit suicide), but her brother-in-law is too busy dying to even listen.  Another character tells fortunes for a living and decides to frighten everyone, for no better reason than she fears her lover is casting her aside.

One of the recurring themes is the daughter (or daughter-in-law) caring for an invalid mother.  The one of these I liked best was A Ton of Pitchblende where the daughter-in-law takes comfort in a night flower which is ready to bloom its once-a-year blossom.

If you read this book you will remember the stories.  Not all of them of course, some did not resonate with me.  But the tales of women deciding to take revenge for some slight or hurt by grossly hurting everyone they can, or caring for an elderly mother or getting the news of a son’s death in war all have strong emotions.  The characters all try to solve the problem of alone-ness, alienation, whether by taking revenge or finding joy and storing memories.

I got this on inter library loan from Wayne State University.  Amazon has a different book of Elizabeth Enright’s short stories, The Riddle of the Fly & Other Stories, which I did not read.

 

 

Wild Horses – Dick Francis – Movie Making, Racing and Danger!

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If you like Dick Francis you’ll love his Wild Horses, a novel featuring film director Thomas Lyon who is making a movie loosely based on a true life unsolved hanging death that scandalized the English racing world 25 years before. If you haven’t found Dick Francis then this is a great introduction to his novels.

All of Francis’s novels are linked somehow to the English horse racing world, whether the main character is a jockey or trainer, or a chef with a fine restaurant in the racing countryside or a financier who backed the syndication of a prime stallion for stud. Wild Horses is one of two where the characters are making a movie.  (The other is Smokescreen set in South Africa.)

Synopsis

The novel starts with Thomas Lyon visiting an old family friend, Valentine, who is nearly dead of cancer.  Delirious with pain, Valentine mistakes Thomas for a priest and confesses to killing “the Cornish boy”.  Valentine is rambling and Thomas has no idea what he is talking about.  Thomas befriends Valentine’s widowed sister, Dorothea, and helps her with her overbearing and pompous son, Paul.  He also inherits all of Valentine’s books and papers.

Thomas’s movie, Unstable Times, is made from a successful novel that is rather dreamy and amorphous.  Thomas forces the stuck up author to revise the story to make it more intense, adds in steamy scenes and paints Cibber as the villain who killed the girl and is trying his best to frame the husband for murder. Thomas’s movie is completely untrue to the novel or the historical situation.  The author has a fit and so does the family of the real-life “Cibber”.

Thomas nearly loses his job as director, which would have finished his career, but by using the smarts that all of Francis’s heroes share, manages to keep his job.   Someone attacks Dorothea and nearly knifes her, attacks the star of the movie, and finally attacks Thomas himself.  Thomas figures out that the real life hanging so long ago and the fact he inherited the papers somehow are behind all the attacks.

Characters

Francis always does a great job with the primary male characters in his novels.  They are smart, resourceful, not too constrained by rules, and driven to succeed.  Our hero here, Thomas Lyon, fits the mold.  He is climbing the Hollywood ladder with Unstable Times, and is working with a top sletar, top cinematographer, producer and several excellent supporting people.  He brings his own vision of the story and adds elements that raise it from Hollywood schlock to a memorable film.  For example, he wants the woman who ends up hung to have a dream sequence with wild horses on the beach.  He manages to import horses from Norway and films a spectacular sequence with the stunt man standing on the wild horses as they stream out of the sunrise.

The side characters are also excellent, especially leading male actor Nash Rourke and doctor Robbie Gill.  Dorothea Pannier also is well drawn.  Even minor characters feel real.

Setting

Dick Francis always did thorough research and created realistic settings and back stories.  No doubt he talked to several real life directors and producers to get the movie backdrop just right. It’s one of the traits that make his books so memorable.  All his characters are a bit alike but we can separate them by the deep background and easily match each to the right book.

Writing

Overall Francis’s style is easy to follow, crisp with strong dialogue.  What always impresses me from a technical perspective is how he slides in the back story / setting and does it so well that you end up feeling like an expert on the subject without ever being lectured.

I wish science fiction and fantasy authors would develop back story /setting skills like Dick Francis.  (Don’t you get tired of all the techno mumble jumble about hyper this and gravity that?  I do and it’s also a glaring weakness in almost all the books with a military setting.)

I’m a big Dick Francis fan and can only praise Wild Horses. Read it. It’s good.

You’ve Heard of Virginia Woolf, How About Her Sister?

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Vanessa and Her Sister: A Novel by Priya Parmar follows the early days of the London Bloomsbury Group through the eyes of Virginia Stephen Bell, a painter and the sister of Virginia Woolf. The book does an excellent job fictionalizing the lives of well-known literary figures of the early 1900s.  Vanessa Stephen’s family was intellectual and produced successful upper class writers including Vanessa’s father and sister.

Priya Parmar used a fictional diary interspersed with notes, telegrams and tickets to tell the story of Vanessa Stephen Bell, her sister Virginia Woolf and their friends in the intellectual Bloomsbury circle.  The daily notes are full of dialogue and action plus Vanessa’s observations about her friends and her thoughts about how and whether she fits in.  This method was a perfect fit for people who lived in the now and in in the world of ideas and words.

The novel begins shortly after Vanessa’s father dies and she, her sister Virginia and brothers Thorpy and Adrian move to a house in an unfashionable part of London, Bloomsbury.

Vanessa’s younger brother, Thopy, started Thursday evenings At Home (informal gatherings on a set day), that brought a wide range of younger people, all active on the literary or art scene.  Eventually the circle expanded to those who married or in love with one of the friends, regardless whether they themselves wrote or painted.

We see the group evolve, split into smaller sub groups yet always remaining part of a larger set of friends, through Vanessa. She was raised to view her own gifts, art and painting, as lesser than the literary gifts of her sister.  She commented that she was less valuable than Virginia as after all, Virginia was a rare intellect.  Yet the  circle of friends connected through Vanessa after Thoby died, not with Virginia.  Today Vanessa is recognized as a fine artist in her own right and her paintings hang in museums.

I enjoyed the characters and the contrast of seeing the self-consciously avant-garde Bloomsbury group through Vanessa, portrayed in the novel as someone who loved family life and stability as much as she loved being part of something new.  Virginia Stephen Woolf, Vanessa’s sister, was the second main character.  Vanessa is shown as a loving sister who nonetheless was no fool and recognized Virginia as demanding, self-centered, difficult and greedy.

Vanessa and Her Sister shows Virginia so jealous and in love with her sister that she wanted everything Vanessa had.  She wanted her friends, she wanted her husband.  Yet Virginia did not want Vanessa’s life.  Not for her to be the quiet hub; she sought attention and to be first and primary.  The fictionalized Virginia is altogether unattractive.

Other characters are Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, Lytton Strachey, Thoby’s and Vanessa’s dear friend, and their extended circle.  Clive was a womanizer.  When Vanessa confronted him about his first affair Clive was surprised; didn’t she know he wanted a modern marriage?  Vanessa found nothing modern about infidelity.  In real life the couple stayed married but both had extended affairs and lived with other people as well as together.  According to the author’s note, Vanessa never forgave Virginia for her liaison with Clive; in the novel she couldn’t forgive either Virginia or Clive.

The setting was late Edwardian London up to about 1911.  Priya Parmar wrote about serious people.  The Bloomsbury group sought the new, the different, the experimental; not for them conventions in manners or in art or in literature.

Vanessa shocked her much older brother George Duckworth by attending Thoby’s At Home as the only female and unmarried at that.  Roger Fry, with whom Vanessa later had a 3 year affair, organized the first Post-Impressionist art showing in London, a show that Vanessa felt would change everything.  E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf were novelists; Lytton Strachey a noted biographer.   These were interesting people.

Priya Parmar wrote an interesting novel about interesting people.  Her diary technique was excellent, very well done.  The evolution of Vanessa from a hesitant girl, unsure of her own worth, to a confident woman who could put her sister aside and relish the Post-Impressionist work and her own success.  The dialogue and actions felt real and provided enough realist tension to make a readable, enjoyable novel.

Good News, Criminals are Not Fun Guys – The Fifth Man

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On the good side, The Fifth Man by James Lapore did not try to glamorize or whitewash criminals. The main characters are the leader of a crime family and his son, with other side characters like the Russians, Chechen spies, Greeks, American friends and family. None of them comes across as anyone you would want to spend time with or trust for a moment to do anything that does not benefit their long term goals.

On the bad side, it was not clear what those long term goals were for any of the characters. We get a hint that Chris Massi, the family leader, had government connections and backing, and his side kick Max Green could connect with unnamed intelligence sources. Chris’ children, Matt and Tess, were both smart and physically appealing, highly educated, aware but not involved in their father’s “business”.

The Fifth Man is short enough that I read it in an evening. That was a good thing.

Matt and Chris were aware that murder is wrong, aware that they were making pivotal choices, but that was it. There was no ambivalence about immorality, no care for their souls nor the harm they did to themselves and others.

I thought several times about putting it down since the characters were so unappealing, but I was curious exactly who was doing what and why. Unfortunately we don’t learn the real motivations or even the full plot(s). Some characters ended up dead whom I thought were helpers and the back story didn’t make a ton of sense.

Supposedly Chris saw the face of a Russian intelligence leader, the Wolf, and thus the Wolf wanted him dead. OK, that’s clear. Bu the convoluted plot and set up didn’t match that simple goal. The Wolf wanted Chris dead and apparently all his works and family with him.

The ending sums up the overall flavor of the book: People died and no one gained.

Nowhere But Home – Coming of Age In Your 30s – Liza Palmer

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This was the first novel by Liza Palmer I have read but it won’t be the last. In Nowhere but Home: A Novel the main character, Queen Elizabeth Wake, decides to come home to North Star Texas, the town she left to escape. For 15 years since she has moved from one chef job to another, one city to another, one non-home to another. Each time she lets herself get fired, usually for a bad attitude that isn’t leavened enough by her cooking skills.

Nowhere but Home is not a romance, more a coming of age story.

The story opens with Queenie getting fired from her chef job in New York (for objecting to a customer using ketchup on his eggs) and deciding to come home to North Star, at least for a while to visit her sister and nephew. The story is complicated by Queenie’s mother, the town ne’er do well and tramp, who was murdered while committing adultery in her lover’s bed about 15 years before the story opens.

The shadow of the mother, and several generations of mothers before, unwed, ill-educated, greedy and selfish, taints every memory Queenie has. Since North Star is a small town, the diapproval follows Queenie and her sister Merry Carole, despite the fact both women lead blameless lives.

My one problem with Nowhere but Home is that the town gossips still care enough about Queenie and Merry Carole to fabricate stories and make their lives miserable, and both ladies allow it. It’s frightening to think that bad high school memories could be this strong, this deadly, but ask anyone who has an upcoming reunion and most will have something like this hanging over them. We all continue to grow up, even after we are nominally adults, and putting bad teen memories and cruel gossip where it belongs takes maturity.

Liza Palmer is an excellent writer with a gift for making her small town setting come to life and for making us care about Queenie, mixed up though she is. There isn’t a lot of action here and Queenie does a lot of cooking. I found the gossiping women of North Star hard to believe but otherwise the characters are strong and well done. I already reserved a second Liza Palmer book from the library.

Three Not to Finish – Two Mysteries One Fantasy

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Normally I give a novel at least a few pages before deciding it’s not for me. Two of these I read about half but the other fell off my lap after about 20 pages. All three of these books had great reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble but they just did not work for me.

Pies and Prejudice (A Charmed Pie Shoppe Mystery) felt like a rerun. Heroine Ella Mae runs from her cheating husband back home to a small Georgia town and starts a pie shoppe. Of course her arch enemy from kindergarten on through high school shows up, her former crush shows up and she is suspected in a murder. With me so far?

Ella Mae makes pies to fit her mood and the person and bakes a bit of enchantment into each one. It’s a little like Garden Spells but without the charming eccentric characters and real-feeling fantasy element.

Despite Pies and Prejudice having 4 1/3 stars on Amazon I simply could not finish. Characters, setting, plot, dialogue were flat, uninteresting.

I got further with Mark of the Mage (The Scribes of Medeisia), over half way through. I was not particularly enjoying the story but it wasn’t so bad that it made me get up off the couch to read something else. At least not until my tea mug ran out and I needed a refill!

Mark of the Mage (The Scribes of Medeisia) isn’t a bad book, it just didn’t have enough oomph to keep me reading. This one also has 5 stars on Amazon so my blah feeling might have been me not the novel.

The second murder mystery, Leave No Stone Unturned (A Lexie Starr Mystery, Book 1), was the best of the lot, good enough that I could have finished had there not been something else to read. The story is a cute combination of suspense and romance, with late 40s widowed Lexie Starr concerned about her daughter’s new husband, Clay. Lexie doesn’t like the guy but is determined to put a happy face until she stumbles across a newspaper article that he is the prime suspect in his first wife’s murder. Lexie’s daughter doesn’t even know Clay had been married before.

Lexie makes up a story for her daughter about meeting up with a jeweler she met online and takes off for Schenectady to research the murder. This is where Leave No Stone Unturned lost me. Lexie tells the police detective she’s writing a novel about the case and that she could help. Really. No police detective who ever saw a single episode of Murder She Wrote or any of its imitators is going to be too excited about that and a clever woman like Lexie could surely come up with a better reason to talk to him.

The romance is sweet without being maudlin and is the best part of the story. It just was’t good enough to keep me reading the rest. Leave No Stone Unturned has 4 1/3 stars on Amazon too, so once again my opinion is the minority. I’d give it 3 stars.

Have You Ever Read a Book Where You Didn’t Like ANY of the Characters?

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Normally I have to like at least one character or else the book ends up in the did-not-finish pile. Somehow I got interested enough to actually finish Bear is Broken (Leo Maxwell Mystery) despite the fact every single character was an immoral sleaze.

The scary thing is the (Leo Maxwell Mystery) part of the title. Does this mean we get more books starring this clueless, inept, morally bereft lawyer wannabe? Can you tell I was not impressed with character Leo? Let’s see. He falls for a girl whom he thinks might have shot his brother, or who might be shielding her brother. He drinks and drives while drunk, smokes dope, stumbles around looking for clues, and lusts after his brother’s ex-wife. Definitely not someone you want to spend time with.

So why did I even finish it? Good question. In a way it was well written. Dialogue was good, characters were consistent (repugnant but consistently repugnant), setting well drawn.  On his Amazon page author Lachlan Smith, who is also a lawyer, says the realistic part of his book is “the drama of idealism colliding with the moral ambiguity of criminal law”.  Maybe that’s why the book is compelling.  The characters are nasty but we can also see hints there is far more going on than sex, booze, murder and drugs.  Those are just the setting and the real story is the way Leo must come to grips with the fact he is now an adult – always hard – and that there is no pure black and pure white in his chosen profession.

On the other hand the plot was overly complex with at least three murder cases all circling around each other and with clueless Leo in the middle. I never learned what the title meant nor do we have any idea how the characters will play out their next acts, other than they will be miserable. And so will I be if I spend any more time thinking about this sad novel. Well done as it is, I shan’t be looking for more about Leo.