Second 1st To Read completed!
Evans Above
By Rhys BowenI learned of Rhys Bowen from The Lady Killers Blog - highly recommended! Last summer I devoured Bowen's Her Royal Spyness, 1st in the new series featuring Georgie, Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, cousin of King George V of England. Had I not already read this book, I would have listed it first for this challenge. Honesty - perhaps learned from my mystery obsession, the criminal is always found out - prevented my cheating with it. But it certainly inspired me to try the Evan Evans series, and am I glad I did!
As noted in my O'Artful Death post, The Arthurian Legend is one of my passions. Arthur has many Welsh ties. The Constable Evans series is set in Wales so that in itself is one of my delights with Evans Above. The mountains of Wales are associated with mystery and play a major role in this book:
Up on the mountain the sun sank, plunging the cliffs into deep shadow so that it was hard to discern what it was that lay among the rocks. a chill wind sprang up, howling through the crevices and drowning a cry that nobody heard.
The mountain watched as two climbers fell or were pushed to their deaths. Were they murdered? And were their deaths associated with a long ago death of a young soldier who froze during training exercises? How were they connected to a missing apple pie and trampled tomato plants? And then a third body is found, at the back of a cave. What if any is the connection? What is happening to the peaceful Welsh village of Llanfair? Would Evan Evans succumb to the charms of the buxom barmaid, Betsy; or would the ethereal Bronwyn win his heart? Join Constable Evan Evans as he defies the order of his DI and solves the mystery of death on the mountain by looking to the past for answers to present day questions.
Four delights with a dollop of whipped cream!!!!^
I have accepted two more reading challenges!
100+ Reading Challenge:Read 100 (Or More) books during the calendar year of 2008-2009.
Should be a cinch - right? We shall see!
Nineteenth Century Women Writers Reading Challenge:
Read 4-6 books written by women authors between 1801-1900 - something that I have mentally challenged myself to do for years! Maybe putting my acceptance of this challenge out into cyberspace will inspire me to actually read them! My list is on the sidebar. I am researching a 6th entry to add later.
Becky of Becky’s Book Reviews is hosting this challenge. If you want to see what a truly dedicated reader can accomplish, look at the challenges on her sidebar!Read on, bibliophiles, read on!
First 1st To Read completed!
O’Artful Death
by Sarah Stewart Taylor
An 2003 Agatha Award Finalist for Best First Novel
What a great find! After accepting this challenge, I searched Amazon for new series, and this is one of my discoveries. My postlady bravely delivered my package from Amazon on a snowy day. Yes, my south Mississippi town had an actual snow day, and I snuggled up and read Death in one sitting as the beautiful flakes slowly drifted down turning my yard into work of art itself. What a great memory!
Possession by A. S. Byatt is one of my favorite novels, and the movie based on this work is one of my favorite films - one that I rewatch from time to time. O’Artful Death is reminiscent of Possession - there is a love from a past century with a mysterious allusion to that long past relationship. Sweeney St. George, the protagonist of Death, is a professor in the Art Department whose specialty is funerary art - gravestones.
Shortly before Christmas break, Sweeney finds a photo of an intriguing gravestone/monument left on her desk. In her words, it was “weirdly anomalous”. It did not fit in with the accepted grave art of its time. It featured a death figure, a death figure with the hint of a real man’s face gazing lovingly at the figure of a beautiful young girl. According to Sweeney, by the late Victorian period grave art featured more innocent figures such as sweet cherubim not death figures. She couldn’t resist an invitation to spend Christmas in the town where this monument stood, to spend time searching for an answer to this mystery.
Death had me almost from hello. There are references to my favorite things - Edgar Allan Poe, the Arthurian Legend, even Nancy Drew and secret codes! Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” is quoted liberally which could be a reference to Christie’s The Mirror Crack'd, another favorite.
I am going to call Death a modern gothic complex cozy mystery. Its setting is a genteel rural domestic with an amateur detective. But it has elements of the gothic - darkness, isolation, hints of past sins being visited on the present. And it is complex. It made me think and sent me to researching gravestone art. I have to admit I have always been fascinated by the idea of gravestone rubbings even though I have not actually tried this craft. But here was this strange reaper, his figure so much more accomplished than those of his brethren on other stones. This death was a man, with a man's face somehow suggested in the familiar skull. He gazed down at the girl lying beneath him, his eyes soft, a dreamy smile playing at his bony lips. There was something familiar about the way he looked down at his prey, Sweeney realized, something loving.
Suddenly, she was afraid.. The wind had come up and the woods surrounding the house seemed sinister, full of evil. The night was so dark she could barely see the path her boots had stamped in the snow. As she turned and started for the house it was all she could do not to break into a run, and when she was finally inside, she closed the back door and locked it before it struck her that the person who'd been watching her was inside, and not outside.
4 big Delights !!!!
I just ordered the next three Sweeney St. George mysteries!
Oh, what a glorious weekend - I inhaled books. I needed to read!
On Friday I treated myself to a trip to the bookstore - I was desperate for an afternoon of reading mysteries! I bought four and read two of them almost without stopping.
First was a surprising delight.
The Case of the Missing Marquess: An Enola Holmes Mystery
By Nancy Springer
A 2007 nominee for the Edgar Best Juvenile Mystery
Read my post here.
Second wasOpen Season: A Joe Pickett Novel
By C. J. Box
2001 Edgar Award Nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author
I have seen C. J. Box recommended on several mystery lists I visit but had never read one of his titles. This one had a glowing recommendation on its cover by Tony Hillerman, one of my favorite authors. So I bought it. Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries contain gorgeous imagery of the landscape, so I can understand his attraction to Box whose imagery of Wyoming is equally beautiful. When the canyon walls finally opened, the bowl in the mountains was even more lush and untrammeled than Joe had imagined it could be. It was a beautiful, remarkable place. Around the rim of the bowl in all directions were sheer, red rock cliffs, which provided both protection and a windbreak. Thin rivulets of water that looked like old lace streamed down the rock walls from above.
I have to say that more and more I avoid mysteries that graphically describe the crimes involved and that use language that Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV describes as colorful metaphors. This one did both. However, the characters became very real to me from the first pages. And the plot was fantastic. It sent me to the internet to learn more about endangered species and the laws that protect them. In my opinion, that is what good writers do. Their research when well done is so much a part of the action that readers don’t know that they are learning. Drawing from my long ago college days, I cling to the belief that literature - including mysteries - should instruct as well as entertain.
Open Season happens to be a 1st in a series title (but not on my challenge list). However, though I thoroughly enjoyed it and read it in one sitting and would really like to follow the development of Game Warden Joe Pickett, I don’t think that I can - that pesky language and those crime descriptions.
Joe Pickett is new to his beat as game warden. He is not totally trusted because he is replacing a much loved warden. Trusted or not, he is soon drawn into a tangled web of deceit, murder, and mysterious hints to a animal species long thought extinct that if it resurfaces could change the lives of everyone in power around Joe. If found to still exist, the government would move in and the economy of the entire area would suffer. 'Do you realize what would happen to this valley if it got out that there might be something in the mountains? . . . They'd [logging truck drivers, cowboys, outfitters, fishing guides] be unemployed while the Feds roped off the entire valley for the future. Environmentalists from all over the country would move in with their little round glasses and sandals and start giving press conferences on how they're here to protect the innocent little creatures from the ignorant locals.'
Pickett has a very interesting philosophy concerning communication. Joe had always considered individual words as finite units of currency, and he believed in savings. He never wanted to waste or unnecessarily expend words. To Joe, words meant things. They should be spent wisely. Joe sometimes paused for a long time until he could come up with the right words to express exactly what he wanted to say.
And I will waste no currency of communication to hint what the "innocent little creatures" might be. But Joe's solution made the read worthwhile.
4 Delights!!!!
My second finished book of 2008:Murder Shoots The Bull
A Southern Sisters Mystery
by Anne GeorgeI have enjoyed the southern sisters several times on audio books - I always have an audio book in my car - but this is the first print version by George for me. One of my favorite bloggers awards her reads bookmarks from 1-5 as a grading system. I love bookmarks; but I honor her great blog; I do not want to plagiarize, so I am experimenting. I am trying out delights first of all - delights 1-5. My idea of delight is a good book with a good cup of coffee within easy reach; thus my symbol for delight is:
Murder Shoots The Bull gets 4 delights. Again, I am experimenting here. I think that I will only award a book 5 delights if in addition to being a great, delightful read, it has more depth and is more complex than a traditional cozy mystery. Cozy mysteries are gentle mysteries typically set in genteel settings like English country houses or villages. They have very little violence other than the murder. The victim doesn’t suffer. Usually death is instantaneous with no prolonged suffering. Usually the mystery is solved by an amateur sleuth, all loose ends are tied up, and the villain caught and punished by the novel’s end - again with no graphic description. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple Novels typify this mystery subgenre. (Definition derived mainly from that of Erin Martin of Cozy Mystery Dot Com and from that of About Dot Com)In Murder Shoots The Breeze, Patricia Anne and Mary Alice have to solve a convoluted mystery involving blackmail, family issues, an investment club, strange women, old love affairs, and, of course, the murder. The cozy setting is a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. The amateur sleuths are 60 year old Patricia Anne, a retired English teacher, and her 65 year old sister Mary Alice, a wealthy widow many times over. The fun of this series is the relationship between these feisty, funny, southern sisters. The way my sister Mary Alice got us arrested was simple enough; she hit the president of the bank over the head with my umbrella. Grabbed it right away from me and 'thunk' let him have it. I think he was more surprised than hurt. There was hardly any blood, and everyone knows how much head wounds bleed. There wasn't even a very big knot. Probably wouldn't have been one at all if he'd had any hair. But he screeched like she'd killed him and the security guard came rushing in, saw Mr. Jones staggering around holding his head, and pulled a gun on us. He looked like Barney Fife, the guard did, and chances were the bullet was in his pocket, but you just don't take a chance on things like that. At least I don't. Sister said later that she might have hit the guard, too, at least knocked the gun out of his hand, if he hadn't looked so pitiful standing there shaking like a leaf.
4 Delights!!!!
- * - My first entry for a new blog and the first time I have written 2008 - * -
It is such a cliché to say that I still had trouble writing 2007, but it is sadly true. I have always said that the hardest thing to accept about growing up is to accept that what your mother always told you is true. Time does go faster the older you get!At any rate, in keeping with the first stated purpose of this blog, I record my first finished book of 2008:
All The Crazy Winters
by Deborah AdamsA Jesus Creek Mystery
This was a thoroughly enjoyable read - light, entertaining, but with some very interesting points. Two of the characters are very eccentric librarians; and since I am a librarian, I thoroughly enjoyed them - even though one of them was already dead when the book began. I might become an eccentric librarian as well!
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
The second stated purpose of this blog is to track the reading challenges that I accept. My first challenge of this year is Who: hosted by JoyWhat: read 12 books that are the 1st in any series
When: between January and December 2008
I am very picky about my reading choices. My genre of choice is the mystery; I prefer women authors and a female protagonist; and I am compulsive about reading all entries in a series starting with the first if possible. Therefore, it was difficult to locate and then pick choices for this challenge. I spent a very long time researching which titles to select - many, many pages of Amazon’s “those who bought this book might also like . . . ”. I reserve the right to change my mind if I don’t like the title I am reading and to pick my alternates at a later date.
With that said, listed below are my initial choices for the 1st In a Series Challenge:
1. Evans Above by Rhys Bowen
(The Constable Evans Series)
2. Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn
(The Daisy Dalrymple Mysteries)
3. A Share in Death by Deborah Crombie
(The Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James Series)
4. O’ Artful Death by Sarah Stewart Taylor
(The Sweeney St. George Series)
5. Blood Ties by Lori G. Armstrong
(The Julie Collins Series)
6. Consigned to Death by Jane K. Cleland
(The Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries Series)
7. The Xibalban Mystery by Lyn Hamilton
(The Lara McClintoch Series)
8. Generous Death by Nancy Pickard
(The Jenny Cain Series)
9. The Whole Truth by Nancy Pickard
(The Marie Lightfoot Series)
10. Death at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
(The Albert Campion Series)
11. Haunted Ground by Erin Hart
(The Nora Gavin, Pathologist, Series)
12. Miss Zukas and the Library Murders by Jo Dereske
(The Helma Zukas Series)
Let the reading begin!
