Started: 3/6/21
Finished: 3/13/21
Book 3 in the Maisie Dobbs series. Any pretense that she isn’t somewhat mystical is gone, and since the pretense is gone, I feel like I can relax about it. It does remove a little of my enjoyment of the mystery aspect, though. Still great characters and good stories, so I’m in the for long haul with the series.
Started: 1/22/21
Finished: 1/30/21
Book 2 of the Maisie Dobbs series. She’s still mostly perfect, but her detective work has a woo-woo element that I’m not sure I’ll like long-term. I was expecting pure investigation and deductive reasoning, with maybe some insight, but she practically has visions and gets feelings about things. I’m interested, but I’ll have to see where this goes.
Started: 1/19/21
Finished: 1/22/21
I’d heard of this series, but I didn’t start it until Jess recommended it. I LOVED this book by the time I was only 30 pages in, and I raced through it (as much as I can during the work week these days). I’m thrilled there are 15 more books so far. She’s a private investigator of sorts in England in the period between the world wars.
The only thing I’m hoping gets addressed later on is that she’s kind of perfect. Like, she has no flaws, she has lots of useful skills, and everyone loves her. I mean, I love her, but she needs to have SOMEthing to improve on, right? She did one not great thing, but a) we only find out about it at the end of the book, and b) we find out about it as she’s doing something to correct it.
Started: 8/6/20
Finished: 8/9/20
Molly recommended this book to me. She likes thrillers, I like thrillers, but I think she only recommends to me the ones she’s not sure she likes because she needs to talk about them. This is the second time I’ve read one from her that I felt I had to push through. It was interesting, and I don’t NOT recommend it, but it’s one of those where the narrator starts to make decisions that YOU know are wrong, that even HE knows are wrong, and it’s hard not to get frustrated.
Started: 7/19/20
Finished: 7/19/20
Sarah Pinsker can do no wrong. This story was a roller coaster, speeding downhill, all fun and great, and then BAM we ran into a wall and fell into pieces and then what? And no. No! Oh god no! It’s fantastic and you should read it. Except not you, Mom. Or Margaret.
Started: 5/23/20
Finished: 5/29/20
I love Sarah Gailey (they are responsible for my hippo cowboy stories), so I am so glad to say I REALLY enjoyed their first novel. Magic noir!
Started: 4/27/20
Finished: 5/2/20
Having just finished a couple of very pleasant adventure stories with likeable protagonists, I almost physically recoiled at the main character’s attitude in the first few pages. It’s an adjustment. It’s also about a murder, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Pretty much all of the male characters came across as arrogant chauvinists, including (especially) the good guys, so the book was a bit much to take. I enjoyed it, but I can’t say I liked it.
Started: 11/11/19
Gave up: 11/12/19
I found this mystery series in one of those library/book publisher magazines, too, but I couldn’t get into this one at all. It’s set in Salem, so I assume magic will come into it, but it’s starting with astrology and a dead fake astrologer’s cat named Orion (dead astrologer, live cat), except they change it to O’Ryan because I don’t know why and I quit.
Started: 11/10/19
Finished: 11/11/19
I found this mystery series in one of those library/book publisher magazines. Small town librarian, all the book titles are cute puns, so I figured it was worth trying. And it was…okay. I’m not in a hurry to continue the series, but I did enjoy it, and there was a breakup scene in chapter 3 that was so very satisfying.
Started: 10/12/19
Finished: 10/21/19
Sequel to Lock In, same issues with dialogue, but otherwise a good story and a good book.
Started: 10/2/19
Finished: 10/9/19
I like John Scalzi’s books. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read most of them, and I’ve really liked the vast majority. They’re not perfect – the problem I run into is that all of the characters sound the same way. The dialogue, while on the one hand can be pretty realistic, is basically the same book to book. It feels like every character is a stand-in for the author – smart, an essentially good person, heavy on the snark. HEAVY on the snark. It’s amusing, and his stories are all good, entertaining, fast-paced. I like that his characters tend to have healthy and happy family relationships (it’s a nice change from all the death and orphans and drama I get in nearly everything else I read), but they all talk the same.
So I get stuck on that sometimes.
Started: 5/25/19
Finished: 6/1/19
Commissario Brunetti series book 3. I think I see what Jo Walton meant when she said this series was about integrity. Brunetti solves the mystery, but the ultimate bad guy doesn’t get punished (or not for the right thing). If there’s a larger character arc, I wonder if Brunetti will go through a depression.
Started: 5/19/19
Finished: 5/24/19
Book 2 of the Brunetti mysteries. Like the first one, the mystery gets solved, but the resolution isn’t entirely satisfying, for me or for our detective. I think I like that.
Started: 4/30/19
Finished: 5/4/19
I went back and read the first of the Francis Pettigrew mysteries. If I had read this one first, I wouldn’t be interested in reading any more. First of all, Pettigrew is barely in it. Certainly not a main character. Second, the murder happens in the last 10% of the book. No exaggeration. And one of the suspects only got introduced a chapter ahead of it. I MIGHT try the third one before I decide about the series, but I’m not in a hurry.
Started: 4/26/19
Finished: 4/29/19
Because Jo Walton liked it, I gave it a try. This is the second of the Francis Pettigrew mysteries, set in England in early WWII. Pettigrew is a lawyer, everyone is pretty isolated, and the murder doesn’t actually occur until the second half of the book. Entertaining, but odd.
Started: 4/19/19
Finished: 4/24/19
I was hesitant to start this one because I kept getting hung up on the Lovecraftian parts of the book reviews, and the whole unknowable-horror-tentacled-monster thing is what keeps me away from Lovecraft. The other parts of the book reviews (the solid writing, flipping Lovecraft’s whole bigotry thing, the found family theme) are why I read it anyway. Final thoughts: good story, good characters, hardly any tentacles.
Started: 4/14/19
Finished: 4/17/19
The first in a series of mysteries set in Venice that I picked up because Jo Walton says they’re wonderful and I trust her. For some reason she recommends starting with book 2 (she’s on book 22 (!) and the author is still alive), but I started with book 1 because what kind of monster do you take me for?
I enjoyed it, even though this was one of the more disturbing motives – definitely not a cozy mystery. Maybe Jo Walton’s recommendation about starting with book 2 was a typo.
Started: 3/23/19
Finished: 3/25/19
Book 2 in the Family Skeleton series. Still fun.
Started: 3/17/19
Finished: 3/21/19
First in the Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, we have Dr. Jeckyll’s daughter teaming up with Holmes and Watson in 1890s London to find the murderous Mr. Hyde and get the monetary reward because poor Miss Jeckyll is dead broke. The book is being written by a character we don’t meet (in the narrative, anyway) until much later in the book, but we know she’s writing it right away because the other characters have conversations with her about the narrative, within the narrative. It’s loads of fun.
Update: NOPE. It started out fun and interesting, but the writing style got really irritating (although not the interruptions from characters – that was still mostly fun). It’s full of exposition, all tell and no show, and it’s all happening in the dialogue, which makes the dialogue really clunky and painful to read. It’s a pity. I really wanted to like this book.
Started: 2/22/19
Finished: 3/1/19
A cozy mystery set in present-day England with dragons. It’s cute, it’s lightly humorous, it set up a lot of background stuff so I’m hoping for a full series (there’s one sequel, Christmas-related), and even though the whodunit part wasn’t that hard to figure out, I still very much enjoyed it.