Lowcountry Boomerang (Liz Talbot Mystery, #8)

Lowcountry Boomerang
by Susan M. Boyer
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 1635115434
Series: Liz Talbot Mystery #8
Publication Date: September 1, 2019
Pages: 256
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Henery Press

I continue to really enjoy this series; Boyer doesn’t overplay the ghost, and keeps the mysteries solvable by strictly corporeal measures.

The plots are always well done, though this one’s solution sort of felt like it came out of left field. Looking back at the end, I can see where the author placed the ‘clues’ (though they wren’t really clues) but I’m not sure really works, and it left questions for me. Still, I really enjoyed watching Liz and Nate go about solving the crime, absolving their client of a false accusation. And the Talbot family had a few moments in the spotlight to let their crazy flag fly, which I always enjoy.

The inside flap of my book says there’s already a ninth book out, so maybe I won’t have to wait longer than the slower than usual post before I can jump back in.

Penny for Your Secrets (Verity Kent, #3)

Penny for Your Secrets
by Anna Lee Huber
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 1496713192
Series: Verity Kent #3
Publication Date: October 29, 2019
Pages: 326
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Kensington

Each time after reading the first two books, I told myself I wasn’t going to read the next one, because I really dislike the way she setup the characters. To explain more would be a plot spoiler for book 1, sorry. But yet, I keep on picking up the next book and reading it.

Characters’ lives aside, Anna Lee Huber writes a good mystery. The plots are generally intricate and mostly avoid the trite or well-worn paths of the genre. This one was no different, except that it’s setting up a multi book arc with a nemesis, and I’m pretty wishy-washy about nemeses. I also got a little bit tired of the constant references to Verity’s spy career during the war. I suspect this is a Kensington editorial thing as it’s the type of over-reference I find a lot in their books, making me wonder if they underestimate their readers’ abilities to reading comprehension.

Generally an enjoyable read, but once again, I find myself thinking I might not buy the next one, though of course, I probably will anyway.

The Man that Got Away (Constable Twitten Mystery, #2)

The Man That Got Away
by Lynne Truss
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 1408890534
Series: Constable Twitten Mystery #2
Publication Date: September 17, 2019
Pages: 304
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

I’m not an expert, but to me this book and its predecessor is just quintessentially English. I’ve been a fan of Truss’ non-fiction for years, and always found her writing and wit excellent, and I genuinely enjoyed her first Constable Twitten book A Shot in the Dark. So I snapped up this sequel as soon as I heard about it.

If you’ve ever watched Yes, Minster, or Black Adder, or even Benny Hill, and laughed, you may enjoy this mystery series. But you absolutely have to suspend disbelief because there’s a lot of silliness and dry mockery; the reward is not only the chance to be amused in a time of little amusement, but an impressive, intricately plotted mystery. There were so many balls in the air, and Truss kept them all up there without any apparent effort or stumbling. It started slow for me, but it gained momentum as this complexity revealed itself.

A lot of fun and I remain a big fan of Truss.

The Bookshop of Yesterdays

The Bookshop of Yesterdays
by Amy Meyerson
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 0778369080
Publication Date: May 21, 2018
Pages: 384
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Park Row

I didn’t much like this book, although the story itself isn’t bad. I’m assuming the author was going for a massive plot reveal, built up from the scavenger hunt the main character is sent on after the death of her uncle. But that plot twist was obvious to me from the very first part of the book, which made the rest rather anti-climatic, although I still enjoyed the scavenger hunt aspect.

The characters themselves didn’t much work for me either; Meyerson’s attempt to build complicated, layered characters just resulted in an attitude of indifference; the main character’s waffling over the confrontation with her mother; her mother’s complete indifference to her daughter’s obvious distress; the father’s complete check-out of the whole thing; the romantic interest … totally uninterested in romance.

It just didn’t work for me.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January

The Ten Thousand Doors of January
by Alix E. Harrow
ISBN: 9780356512440
Published by Orbit on September 10, 2019
Genres: Fiction, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Historical
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover
four-half-stars

In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut. In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place. Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

Things that attracted me to this book: the title (I first saw it in January, around my birthday); the cover; and the blurb mentioning a book. I picked it up because the only books appealing to me right now are fluffy, preferably magical realism plots.

This book was both and neither. I have no idea how to describe it. A grown-up fairy tale sounds too trite and too superficial, though its roots are firmly in myth and legend. The writing is lyrical, the tense is fourth-wall-breaking second person. It’s a happy story, a heart-wrenching one, and a magical one all at once. It’s both predictable and surprising; cynical and fantastically idealistic. It genuinely shocked the hell out of me because it wasn’t at all what I expected.

As the ward of the wealthy Mr Locke, January Scaller feels little different from the artefacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored and utterly out of place.

But her quiet existence is shattered when she stumbles across a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page reveals more impossible truths about the world…

It’s both a perfect and perfectly inadequate description. The closest I can come is a story with very faint shades of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, only for grown-ups.

The Bookshop on the Shore

The Bookshop on the Shore
by Jenny Colgan
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0062850180
Publication Date: June 11, 2019
Pages: 416
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks

This one was an average chick-lit/romance that was only marginally about books, though they sounded like heavenly books in a library out of my dreams. The setting was the same as The Bookshop on the Corner, and a couple of characters from the first book play minor roles in this one, but otherwise the story is completely stand alone.

And it’s ok. It’s saved from complete mediocrity by a plot twist that was unexpected – at least by me; with my limited backlist of books in this genre, it’s probably not hard to surprise me.

It was a diverting read, though not as good as The Book Charmer, whose strong sense of place kept interfering in my mind with the weaker one here; Perhaps I might have enjoyed this one more if it hadn’t come on the tails of that more vividly written and charming book.

The Book Charmer

The Book Charmer
by Karen Hawkins
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 1982105542
Publication Date: July 30, 2019
Pages: 344
Publisher: Gallery Books

I’m still fighting a book slump, and I need fluff. Industrial grade fluff. This fit the bill pretty perfectly.

Small town America, seventh daughter of the town’s founding family, all of whom have ‘gifts’, is the town librarian and the books talk to her. And nobody tries to medicate her, because it’s magical realism. A newcomer with a boulder on her shoulder comes to town and the books tell Sarah that miss-cranky pants is going to save the town.

I’m being a little snarky, which isn’t fair to the book. Even though the story is entirely predictable, it’s well written. Once I started it I was sucked into the magical little town of Dove Pond, and the characters all felt more real and well-adjusted than most of reality at the moment, so while it wasn’t high literature, it was an absolutely perfect antidote to current events.

Executive Orders re-read

Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 0399142185
Series: Jack Ryan #9
Publication Date: July 1, 1996
Pages: 875
Genre: Political Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Putnam

Given my current country of residence’s complete incompetence and the news that my native land is trying to be the world leader in everything including incompetence, I needed to escape to a world where real problems are met and dealt with by leaders with integrity and the skills to think through issues rationally with a view towards the long-term.

In other words, a fantasy.

I have always been and will always be, an unapologetic fan of Clancy’s works – the ones he wrote himself – so falling back into Jack Ryan’s world was, if not a comfort, at least familiar and comfortable. It’s been 2 decades since I last read this, and it generally holds up perfectly. The first half of the book is a bit overly idealistic, but what struck me about it is that Tom Clancy showed a startling degree of prescience not just in some of his major plot lines, but in his story arc.

Executive Orders is the story about a non-politician ending up as President of the United States, vowing to eject the political riff-raff out of Washington, and appointing business sector executives to the cabinet to get things done.

Sound familiar? Of course, Jack Ryan wasn’t a paranoid narcissist and he was highly educated and qualified regardless of his lack of political savvy. He also had more integrity than your garden variety black widow spider. But Clancy imagined the world we live in today twenty years ago, with startling accuracy, albeit in the most idealistic light.

His idealism extended to America’s response (and only America because his plot extended no further) to the epidemic that grips the country in Executive Orders; his national lockdown works flawlessly; almost nobody ignores the mandate, there are no rushes on grocery stores, and there’s no general panic. Of course, I’d like to think that any country’s population would react to an epidemic of ebola exponentially better than they’re reacting (or not) to the corona pandemic, so maybe my faith in humanity hasn’t been completely snuffed out.

Either way, it was good to revisit a world that works, even when everything is pear-shaped.

Small Magics

Small Magics
by Illona Andrews
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781596069619
Publication Date: December 1, 2019
Pages: 455
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Subterranean Press

An anthology of short stories in the Kate Daniels universe.

When I saw here on BookLikes that Sweep with Me was out, I went to Ilona Andrew’s website to find out more, and noticed the release of a new anthology, published by Subterranean Press. Yes please!

This is a compilation of the short stories Ilona Andrews has written, all previously published elsewhere, and for the first time in print, all the Curren POV’s Gordon Andrews has written and posted on their website. Interspersed are 3? full color illustrations.

It’s a nice book – not the most impressive I’ve seen put out by Subterranean, but a good solid book. I’d read some of the stories before, but enough of them were new to me to make me appreciate having bought it.

My only gripe with the book is with the Curran POVs. As a character, these stories don’t always flatter Curran, but that’s trivial. What is really disappointing, though, is the poor copy-editing of the Curran stories. On the website, they’re clear to state that the stories were written for fun, not edited, yada yada. And that’s totally understandable. But I’d have though when it comes to publishing a limited release, numbered, signed, illustrated edition, the publisher, if not the authors themselves, would have wanted to take the time and make the effort to correct, at the very least, the most glaring omissions and errors (lots of the, a, an articles missing, or misplaced).

Ah well, a good collection that might have been great, but still welcome on my shelves.

Sweep with Me (Innkeeper Chronicles Novella)

Sweep with Me
by Illona Andrews
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9781660140022
Series: Innkeeper Chronicles #3.5
Publication Date: January 14, 2020
Pages: 136
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: NYLA Publishing

"Thank you for joining us at Gertrude Hunt, the nicest bed-and-breakfast in Red Deer, Texas, during the Treaty Stay. As you know, we are honor-bound to accept all guests during this oldest of innkeeper holidays, and we are expecting a dangerous guest. Or several. But have no fear. Your safety and comfort is our first priority. The inn and your hosts - Dina Demille and Sean Evans - will defend you at all costs. But we hope we don't have to."

Every winter, the innkeepers look forward to celebrating their own special holiday, commemorating the ancient treaty that united the very first inns and established the rules that protect them, their intergalactic guests, and the very unaware/oblivious people of planet Earth. By tradition, the innkeepers welcomed three guests: a warrior, a sage, and a pilgrim, but during the holiday, the innkeepers must open their doors to anyone who seeks lodging. Anyone.

All Dina hopes is that the guests and conduct themselves in a polite manner. But what's a holiday without at least one disaster?

Fun; brief, but it packs a punch at the end. This one is for those who’ve already read the other Innkeeper Chronicle books, though there’s enough ‘tell’ sprinkled throughout that a first-timer wouldn’t be totally confused. They would be totally spoiled for the others though, as there are spoilers to previous plots in the text.

A lot of the secondary cast are ‘away’ for this story, so Orro gets a bit more attention, and it appears Dina is making new friends. Not sure if we’ll see them again, as this novella has a pretty tidy HEA ending, but they’ll be welcome additions to any future Innkeeper books.