Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Mysteries’ Category

Ally Carter–The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year (2024) [audiobook 2024]

Posted in Ally Carter, Audiobooks, Funny (ha ha), Morality, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Romance, Saskia Maarleveld, Violence, Zachary Webber on December 26, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: December 2024] The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

This is probably the first romance book that I’ve listened to.  Technically it’s a romance mystery, but the format is pretty distinctively romance.

I can say that I really didn’t enjoy the more romancey parts of the book.  Not because of the romance, because heck, almost all books have a romance component.

But I found this romance to  be beating us over the head with the fact that a) Maggie HATES Ethan and b) Ethan is REALLY HOT.  Again, I’m fine with the romance angle and even these tow components of the romance, but jeez, how many times did Carter have to tell us these two things.

Every time she saw Ethan she pointed out his hot arms or his studly abs.  And every time she saw him she told us how much she hated him.

And, hey, Ally Carter, trust your reader that they can hold information for more than a few pages.

This may have seemed more obnoxious to be in an audio book format.  Saskia Maarleveld did a great job in both male and female voices.  But hearing some of those same phrases repeated over and over was annoying.  Zachary Webber did a good job as Ethan (towards the end of the book, Ethan starts getting his own POV), but I actually enjoyed Saskia’s voice more.

So a basic plot summary.  Mystery author Maggie Chase hates Ethan Wyatt, a fellow author at their publishing imprint. He’s good-looking, popular with literally everyone and the guy can NEVER get her name right. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Nina Simon–Mother-Daughter Murder Night (2023) [audiobook 2023]

Posted in Audiobooks, Funny (ha ha), Gilmore Girls, Jane Oppenheimer, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Nina Simon, Violence on January 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: December 2024] Mother-Daughter Murder Night

This was described as Gilmore Girls meets mystery novel.

And while I want to be clear that in no way was it Gilmore Girls related, it had a Gilmore Girls vibe.  Three generations of women living together (out of necessity) working together to solve a mystery.

The grandmother is Lana Rubicon (terrible name).  She has created a real estate empire.  I enjoy that she is a strong and powerful woman who had been pushed down but fought back and built her own fortune.  But she’s also cold and distant–especially to her daughter, Beth.

The plot moves on when Lana is diagnosed with cancer and has to move in with Beth and Beth’s daughter.

Like Gilmore Girls, Beth was impregnated when she was a teenager.  She decided to keep the baby and move out.  But she moved into a property that Lana owned in a waterfront community.

Lana thinks she’ll be back home pretty quickly but she winds up in worse shape and needs to be there for a a lot longer than she imagined.  Beth and Lana are quite antagonistic.  But Lana and Beth’s daughter Jack get along pretty well. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Dan Frey–The Future is Yours (2021) [audiobook 2021]

Posted in Aneesh Chaganty, Beer, Cary Hite, Catherine Ho, Dan Frey, Dion Graham, End of the World, Joshua Kane, Kyla Garcia, Marriage Trouble, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Natasha Soujek, Quantum, Ron Shapiro, Technology, Thérèse Plummer, The Future, Vikas Adam on July 31, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: July 2023] The Future is Yours

I didn’t know much about this book, but the blurb sounded good.

And wow, was it a a well-told future/time-travel story.  I also really enjoyed that whole cast that was employed for the book.  Usually a single narrator is fine, but there were so many different voices in this story that having multiple narrators was great.

I had known Cary Hite from a Mike Chen novel so his familiar voice was great.  He reads the part of Ben Boyce a young entrepreneur who has great ideas for how to get startups to work.  He is best friends with Adhi Chaudry (read by Vikas Adam).

Adhi is a once-in-a-generation genius.  He writes a thesis that postulates creating a kind of time travel machine using quantum computers.  Fortunately, there’s not a lot of hard science here, so you don’t really have to know what they’re talking about (I also have no idea if what they postulate is feasible in reality).  The thesis is so theoretical that Stanford doesn’t want him to defend it because they think it’s more philosophical than computer science based.

Adhi struggles with things a lot (he is bipolar) but Ben is always there for him.  Ben believes in him 100%.  So when Adhi gets a job at Google (and hates it) and Ben has tried a few startups (that have failed), Ben asks Adhi about that thesis.  And what they might be able to do with it. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Ed Lacy–Room to Swing (1957)

Posted in Ed Lacy, Leonard (Len) S Zinberg, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Racism, South, Taxis, Technology on July 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: July 25, 2023] Room to Swing

I receive books that are part of a series, but often I get one book and never see any other books in the series.  So this book is part of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series–reprints with wicked covers.

I’d never heard of this book even though it won the 1958 Edgar award for best novel.

Much of the reason this book is reprinted in this format is because the main character, Toussaint Moore is a Black private investigator.  Black sleuths were not common at the time, although they were not unheard of.  Indeed, white author Octavus Roy Cohen had created Florian Slappey, a caricature of a Black detective for the Saturday Evening Post.  By the 1950s, there were several Black detectives, but not many Black private detectives.

Ed Lacy (pseudonym of Leonard (Len) S Zinberg) was a white author who married a Black woman and lived in Harlem.  He created Toussaint Moore as an opportunity to capture the struggles of a Black man in the 1950s.

But the story is not a polemic about race relations.  Indeed, the mystery is pretty interesting and fun to follow.  And Touie is a charming and resourceful detective.

As the story opens, Touie is heading to Ohio from his home in New York City.  Southern Ohio is not the South (although Kentucky is only 20 miles away), but when Touie walks into a diner, they tell him he can’t eat there.  He only wanted to see a phone book and the local policeman quickly arrives to make sure that’s all he’s getting.  However, the mailman is Black and he quickly tells him what it’s safe for Touie to do.  He also has a room that Touie can stay in for a couple of days.

So why is he here?  He is here looking for clues about a murder.  However, he is also the prime suspect in the murder, so it’s possible he’s also laying low.  Although a Black man in a beautiful Jaguar (a crazy expensive import) does not lay low in Southern Ohio.

The man who was killed (in NYC) was from this small town.  And the story is that he was a heap of trouble when he was here, so maybe someone was tailing him to give him trouble in the City. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Anthony Berkeley–Jumping Jenny (1933)

Posted in Anthony Berkeley, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Sexism, Sherlock Holmes on July 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: June 6, 2023] Jumping Jenny

I tend to receive unexpected books at work.  The most recent shipment included a couple of “Classic” mysteries.

This book is from a collection called British Library Crime Classics.  I enjoyed the book and thought I’d look for more from this series although I see that there are at least 100 books in the series, so that’s gonna take awhile.

The book opens at a costume party.  The fascinating theme is “famous murderers and their victims.”  Honestly I had to wonder how anyone knew what any of these people looked like.  Can you dress like a murderer?

In celebration of this party, the host, Ronald Stratton, has erected three gallows on the roof of his house.  He has put stuffed dummies in each one.  And if you are wondering about the title:

“In times gone by, a hanged man was sometimes colloquially referred to as a ‘Jumping Jack'” -Martin Edwards in the introduction.

And as such, a hanged woman might be called a Jumping Jenny. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Peter Swanson–All the Beautiful Lies (2018) [audiobook 2018]

Posted in Drinking, Feminism, Guns, Maine, Marriage Trouble, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Peter Swanson, Sarah Mollo-Christensen, Sex, Sexism, Unlikable main character, Violence, Yuck! on June 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: June 2023] All the Beautiful Lies

I loved Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders.  I hated the characters in The Kind Worth Killing (but I loved the twists).  So I had this third book as a kind of final litmus test for if I would listen to anymore books by him.

And the answer is no.

Once again, Swanson’s twist and surprises (and the ending) are really good.  But if possible, he made main characters who are even more horrible and unlikable.  How was that possible?

There’s a few spoilers in this review, although none that reveal the twists or who the murderer(s) is/are.

I’m just going to get this over with, so yes, there’s a spoiler here.  One of the main characters is a pedophile.

It’s bad enough when, at some point in the middle of the book, we learn that he is happily going to essentially make a new life with the daughter of his second wife (step-daughter, so not incest, but Jesus Fucking Christ).  And then we find out that this guy was introduced to sex when he was a teenager by a bored housewife.  So he is basically “paying it forward.”

How did Swanson even write these words?   How did his moral compass allow these words to pass his fingers onto the page?

I mean, the blurb on Goodreads starts with this:

Harry Ackerson has always considered his stepmother Alice to be sexy and beautiful, in an “otherworldly” way. She has always been kind and attentive, if a little aloof in the last few years.

I mean, who reads that blurb and wants to read more (I go into my books totally blind, so I had no idea this was coming). (more…)

Read Full Post »

Peter Swanson–The Kind Worth Killing (2015) [audiobook 2012]

Posted in Airplanes, Drinking, Feminism, Guns, Johnny Heller, Karen White, Kathleen Early, Keith Szarabajka, Maine, Marriage Trouble, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Peter Swanson, Sex, Sexism, Unlikable main character, Violence on June 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: June 2023] The Kind Worth Killing

I had enjoyed Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders so much that I wanted to get more audio books by him.  I had heard that he was creating a sequel to one of his popular books, but I didn’t know which one.  It turns out it was this one.

So this seemed like a good one to start with.

As it opened, I absolutely hated it.  It may have been Johnny Heller’s voice, which I did not like.  Although it also sounded familiar and I wondered if I knew him from reading a children’s book and I didn’t like him in an adult role.

Why did I hate it?  Because within the first few minutes, his character, Ted Severson says something to the effect of, “My wife cheated on me.  So I have to kill her.”  I mean, who the hell thinks like that?  And who bases an entire book on that?  That is psychopathic.

Interestingly, I have read many complaints about Swanson’s bland characters, and while I’m not sure they are bland, exactly, they are certainly deadpan or flat or disinterested.  At least that’s how the narrators read them.

So when Karen White took over as narrator for Lily Kintner’s parts, I enjoyed the book more.  Lily was a flat character, but I found her dispassionate voice to be kind of interesting.  (more…)

Read Full Post »

A.A. Milne–The Red House Mystery (1922)

Posted in A.A. Milne, Eight Perfect Murders, Guns, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Sherlock Holmes on June 6, 2023| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: June 6, 2023] The Red House Mystery

In Peter Swanson’s mystery Eight Perfect Murders, his narrator makes a list of eight perfects murders in fiction–not the best books, just the perfect setup for murder.  These books are:

Agatha Christie’s A. B. C. Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Ira Levin’s Death Trap, A. A. Milne’s Red House Mystery, Anthony Berkeley Cox’s Malice Aforethought, James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, John D. Macdonald’s The Drowner, and Donna Tartt’s A Secret History.

And yes, A.A. Milne, the writer of Winnie the Pooh, is one of those authors.  Swanson’s narrator kind of dismisses the story saying that it’s a quaint mystery and that the murder is perfect (meaning the killer would never get caught), but almost with an asterisk.

What’s all that about?

Well, the story is set in an English country manor, the Red House.  The kind of place where other rich folk would come to stay for a few weeks, drinking, playing gold and generally enjoying themselves as rich English folk apparently did at the turn of the century.  The owner of the house is Mark Ablett.  He is a single man.  However, he informally adopted his younger cousin as an opportunity to pay forward a good deed that was done to him when he was a young lad with limited propsects.   The boy (who is now in his late 20s) is named Cayley and is (now that he has been formally educated) more or less Mark’s right-hand man.  Mark doesn’t seem to do anything without consulting Cayley.

Mark is generally liked (he is no snob), but he can go on a bit.  As the book opens, Mark is hosting some people: Major Rumbold, a retired soldier; Bill Beverley, a youngish man about town.  There was also Ruth Norris, an actress “who took herself seriously as an actress and, on her holidays, seriously as a golfer.”  Finally there was Betty Calladine (18 and eligible) and her widowed mother (keen to get her settled).  (more…)

Read Full Post »

David Stafford–Skelton’s Guide to Suitcase Murders (2021)

Posted in Alexei Sayle, David Stafford, Entomology, Funny (ha ha), Guinea Pigs, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Racism on March 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

[READ: December 20, 2022] Skelton’s Guide to Suitcase Murders

I admit that I thought this book was called Skeleton’s Guide… which I thought as very funny.

But it turns out that Skelton is a barrister (and this is the second book in the Skelton series).  David Stafford is a British writer who has written largely for TV and theatre until he started writing novels.  He has written plays with Alexei Sayle (for fans of The Young Ones).

This mystery is set in 1929.  That setting allows Stafford to avoid any kind of contemporary details that might help speed the case along.  But it’s written in such a way that you’re not frustrated by it–you can simply get into the nearly 100 year old technology (and lack thereof).

In November 1929, a woman’s corpse is discovered in a suitcase.  She is identified and her husband, Doctor Ibrahim Aziz becomes the prime suspect.  They find some evidence and there is a rumor that she was cheating on him.  So clearly he is guilty.  Especially since he’s not from England–he’s Egyptian.

Arthur Skelton is a barrister.  He’s not 100% successful, but he gives his all in hopeless cases.  So he is called in to represent Aziz.

Skelton is concerned for diplomatic matters if Aziz is executed here.  He is related to a wealthy and well-connected family back in Egypt.

The story, despite dealing with a gruesome murder, has some funny moments.  Skelton’s clerk Edgar is trying to lose weight and is quite miserable. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Andrea Bartz–The Herd (2020)

Posted in Andrea Bartz, Coronavirus, Feminism, Jack Ingram, Jon Randall, Marriage Trouble, Miranda Lambert, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Quarantine, Sex, Sexism, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Violence, Waxahatchee, Work on July 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: JACK INGRAM, MIRANDA LAMBERT, JON RANDALL: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #226 (June 21, 2021).

The sight of three people with guitars wearing cowboy hats meant that I wouldn’t enjoy this set.  (At least it was only ten minutes).

Having said that, while there’s something I instinctively dislike about Lambert (she always looks really smug and/or pissed off), her voice is quite nice and not terribly twangy.

I think I’ve heard of Jack Ingram, but possibly not Jon Randall.

After collaborating on “Tin Man” from Lambert’s 2016 record The Weight Of These Wings … the artists spent five days last November recording in Marfa, Texas. In this (home) concert, the trio turns its quarantine album, The Marfa Tapes, into a quarantine Tiny Desk set, complete with a well-appointed desk in the corner of the frame.

They play three mid-tempo songs with pretty guitars, pretty melodies and nice harmonies.

They start with “Waxahachie.”  But in the way that hearing an okay cover of a song makes you want to hear the original, this song made me want to listen to the band Waxahatchee instead.

“Tin Man” (“Our award-winning song,” Lambert jokes. The track won the 2018 Academy of Country Music Award for song of the year) is a fine song. I’m not sure what led it to winning an award, though.

At its conclusion, Lambert lets out a laugh and the trio exchange knowing glances before finishing the show with “In His Arms.”

“In His Arms” is one of Lambert’s favorites on the disc.  It has a pretty guitar melody from Jon Randall (I guess I’m supposed to know which guy was which since they were never introduced).  There’s some really nice harmonies on this song as well.

[READ: June 28, 2021] The Herd

Every once in a while I get to see some new books that come into work.  I saw this one and was intrigued by it.  I hadn’t heard of Bartz, but the book sounded exciting.

Then by the time I got around to reading it, I forgot that it was a thriller, and I found myself getting really invested in the characters.  The story was such a delightful book of female empowerment that I was really surprised when it turned into a mystery.

The story is about four women.  Eleanor Walsh is CEO of The Herd, an elite, women-only coworking space.  After making her fortune with a women-friendly cosmetic line, she established The HERd [capitalization intended] as a place where women could work side by side, bouncing ideas off of each other.  She became a feminist icon.  And was accordingly hated by insecure men–including an online group called the Anti-herd.

Mikki Danziger is a college friend of Eleanor’s.  She is an artist, and she creates most of the visuals for The Herd.  She’s a little annoyed that she (one of Eleanor’s oldest and best friends) isn’t on the payroll–Eleanor keeps her as an independent contractor.  But aside from that she is thrilled to share in Eleanor’s success.

As is Hana Bradley.  Hana is the third of the above trio of women who all went to Harvard together.  They have been best friends since college.  Hana is a PR specialist and she has managed to keep Eleanor out of trouble as she works to expand her business.  She is also a n independent contractor.

Hana’s younger sister Katie is also a friend of the others.  They initially took her in as a little sister.  But when Hana went to the West Coast for grad school. Katie filled in the gap and they embraced her as an equal. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »