It’s too bad Hamish MacBeth loves his village of Luchdubh in Scotland so much. He is good at finding criminals but doesn’t want the promotion so everyone thinks he’s lazy. In this book he uses his unorthodox ways of detecting and finds the murderer. He also proposes to one of his former girlfriends. Anyone who reads this series knows how that will turn out. You feel sorry for him but yet he really wouldn’t be happy any where else.
Another delightful book with 11 year old genius amateur detective Flavia de Luce. She discovers a dead body in the local church and her scientific curiosity is peaked. With a large laboratory full of books and chemicals at her disposal she again helps find the solution.
Another thriller by Preston & Child. Gideon is again asked to help with a eminent national disaster. He does it reluctantly but realizes he is made for this type of work.
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.
Book 1 of the new children’s series, All the Wrong Questions, by Lemony Snicket. The main character is a young Lemony Snicket relating his adventures. Instead of heading off to a boarding school Lemony has found himself an apprenticeship with an unusual secret organization. He thinks his first adventure will be assisting a friend of his but instead he is sent to an isolated town separated from everyone else by an inland sea that is now dry. He starts by asking questions that shouldn’t have even been on his mind. Will he think of the right questions in time to find the real answers?
Detective Lindsay Boxer and the Women’s Murder Club make a courageous return for the fourth adventure. I like these books, even though they aren’t particularly deep, they are fun.
Sixeen year-old George Carole, uncommonly gifted at the piano, falls in with a strange troupe — and under the watchful eye of the enigmatic figure of Silenus, George comes to realize that the members of the troupe are more than they appear to be.
This book was very confusing or maybe it was just I’m not use to reading fantasy. It started out interesting following a troupe of vaudeville performers. I skipped a bit of the fantasy part.
The team of Preston and Child always has a good thriller story. The first in the Gideon books. Action packed and technology based story. Loved it.
Hit man Keller is a serious stamp collector. His hit man job finances his stamp collecting. Since he collects expensive stamps he needs a lot of money. He’s not really a bad guy, the people he is hired to kill are usually not very nice. Does that make it right, he figures somebody else will eventually do it so it might as well be him. You also learn a lot about stamps in this book.
Always fun to read a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. He has so many friends to help him solve crimes. In this book he helps a mystery writer, Harriet Vane, who is accused of poisoning her ex boyfriend with arsenic. Unfortunately she has just written a novel that involves poisoning. But Peter is convinced she didn’t do it and he also falls in love with her.
Kate Morton really knows how to tell a story. This one was hard to put down. So many twists and turns. World War II in London with all the bombs falling and young people falling in love is a perfect setting for this novel. It’s hard to describe but it keeps you on the edge til the last chapter. Secrets and second chances. You have to read it, I don’t want to give anything away.
It is a satisfying ending to this exciting and action packed trilogy about FBI Special Agent Pendergast’s search for his wife Helen.
This is the first V.I. Warshawski book I have finished. I started one years ago but lost interest. This one held it longer but it was full of too much detail and too many characters. It’s the typical female PI with a cop as a boy friend. She is trying to help people but everyone is telling her she needs to let everyone help her so she won’t get hurt. I got tired of hearing that so I skipped a lot and read the ending to find out who the murderer was.
Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, both well known mystery writers, have written this interesting detective novel. The two main characters live in San Francisco in the 1890′s and own a detective agency. Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon have been hired to find a pickpocket and a burglar. They are a team but work separately since they both have their own way of doing things. During the investigations they meet a man who claims to be Sherlock Holmes although he supposedly died in a waterfall accident in Europe. John takes an instant dislike in him but it’s mostly about competition. I liked this setting in San Francisco and it wasn’t a long complicated story so it was easy to follow. Hope they do another one.
I really enjoyed this ghost story. I learned a lot of folklore superstitions about spirits and how to keep them away. This book is told by five different women. Their lives have all been effected by Hobbs Pritchard an evil man who lives on Black Mountain. It begins during the Depression and continues til modern times. It’s also about mothers trying to protect their daughters from the wrong man.
Six shots. Five dead. One heartland city thrown into a state of terror. But within hours the cops have it solved: a slam-dunk case. Except for one thing. The accused man says: You got the wrong guy. Then he says: Get Reacher for me. And sure enough, from the world he lives in—no phone, no address, no commitments–ex–military investigator Jack Reacher is coming. In Lee Child’s astonishing new thriller, Reacher’s arrival will change everything—about a case that isn’t what it seems, about lives tangled in baffling ways, about a killer who missed one shot–and by doing so give Jack Reacher one shot at the truth.… The gunman worked from a parking structure just thirty yards away–point-blank range for a trained military sniper like James Barr. His victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But why does Barr want Reacher at his side? There are good reasons why Reacher is the last person Barr would want to see. But when Reacher hears Barr’s own words, he understands. And a slam-dunk case explodes. Soon Reacher is teamed with a young defense lawyer who is working against her D.A. father and dueling with a prosecution team that has an explosive secret of its own. Like most things Reacher has known in life, this case is a complex battlefield. But, as always, in battle, Reacher is at his best. Moving in the shadows, picking his spots, Reacher gets closer and closer to the unseen enemy who is pulling the strings. And for Reacher, the only way to take him down is to know his ruthlessness and respect his cunning–and then match him shot for shot.
This wasn’t as good as some of the other Reacher books but I enjoyed it. Always has an exciting ending and an unexpected complication. Can’t wait to read the next one.
In Lee Child’s astonishing new thriller, ex-military cop Reacher sees more than most people would…and because of that, he’s thrust into an explosive situation that’s about to blow up in his face. For the only way to find the truth-and save two innocent lives-is to do it the way Jack Reacher does it best: the hard way….
Jack Reacher was alone, the way he liked it, soaking up the hot, electric New York City night, watching a man cross the street to a parked Mercedes and drive it away. The car contained one million dollars in ransom money. And Edward Lane, the man who paid it, will pay even more to get his family back. Lane runs a highly illegal soldiers-for-hire operation. He will use any amount of money and any tool to find his beautiful wife and child. And then he’ll turn Jack Reacher loose with a vengeance-because Reacher is the best man hunter in the world.
On the trail of a vicious kidnapper, Reacher is learning the chilling secrets of his employer’s past…and of a horrific drama in the heart of a nasty little war. He’s beginning to realize that Edward Lane is hiding something. Something dirty. Something big. But Reacher also knows this: he’s already in way too deep to stop now.
Couldn’t put this one down at the end as usual. All the Jack Reacher books are about helping the victims of bad guys. If you are lucky enough to find Reacher, he has no address or bank account. He likes it that way. He admits he is missing the remorse gene from his DNA. But he grows on you.
The members of the Women’s Murder Club face an unspeakable menace in a most suspenseful hospital drama. Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer is shopping with the newest member of the Women’s Murder Club, lawyer Yuki Castellano, and Yuki’s mother, Keiko, when suddenly Keiko collapses. She’s rushed to San Francisco Medical Center where her condition stabilizes. Yet days later, the hospital calls Yuki with devastating news. Keiko was given the wrong medication and it brought on a fatal heart attack. Even more astonishing, this is not the first time SFMC has made this mistake.
I like these books, even though they aren’t particularly deep, they are fun.
When a horrifying attack leaves one of the four members of the Women’s Murder Club struggling for her life, the others fight to keep a madman behind bars before anyone else is hurt. And Lindsay Boxer and her new partner in the San Francisco police department run flat-out to stop a series of kidnappings that has electrified the city: children are being plucked off the streets together with their nannies– but the kidnappers aren’t demanding ransom.
I like these books, even though they aren’t particularly deep, they are fun.
Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
Seventh daughter SUNDAY Woodcutter, befriends an enchanted frog-prince, Grumble, in the forest. Although her kiss does Not return him to his human form right away, eventually her love for him does the trick. Unfortunately, when he awakens, he remembers that her family loathes him.
Kontis deftly weaves in narrative themes from multiple fairy tales, from Jack in the Beanstalk, to Sleeping Beauty, to Rumpelstiltskin, to Cinderella, Dancing Princesses. This is a fast-paced book, that at times fails thoroughly explain all the synchronicities. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the book. Sweet and inventive.
Yes there is at least one vampire or perhaps 2.