Book Review: Little Bookshop of Murder by Maggie Blackburn

 

Little Bookshop of Murder: A Beach Reads Mystery

by Maggie Blackburn

I’m honestly not sure how this book has a 4 star average review on Amazon. I did read it on Kindle, as a free download from our library digital catalog. Was the editing of the Kindle edition so different from the editing on the hard copy? There are a good number of 1 to 3 star reviews that echo my own thinking.

The premise is an intriguing idea. Summer’s mother, Hildy, dies and Summer returns to her beach resort hometown to tie up the loose ends and decide what to do with Hildy’s book store. Hildy is an interesting character, though not even present, a free spirit and a town pillar, helping many people in her too short life. Summer has an interesting problem beyond the murder, her arachnophobia led to an unfortunate video taken of her which the faculty at her college are using to pressure her to conform to their expectations. (From what I’ve heard that can be a problem at some colleges, with or without the arachnophobia.) Summer soon begins to suspect that Hildy was murdered but she has history with the town police chief and he refuses to take her seriously.

There are some lovely descriptions of the area - “The moon lit the now deep purple-black water, sparkling silver where the light hit the surface.”

I love the relationship that evolves between Summer and the parrot, Darcy, as she learns to care for him.

There was some good interactions between characters, but there are also incredibly awkward character interactions that just don’t make sense to me. There are also a huge number of typos – missing words, poor word choices, wrong words, wrong word form or tense, and just plain missing words. Things like “She stopped when Summer’s eyes met eyes met hers.” Or, “had taken the opposite tact in her life” instead of opposite tack, which derives from the phrase about changing the position of the sail on a boat.

In the first couple chapters, we even have –

"There was the Aunt Hildy she knew and loved. Her mom's only sister, Agatha garnered no foolishness. Never had. In fact, it was one quality Sumer loved about her. She was quite the opposite from Hildy." It's obvious she changed who was Hildy at some point and didn't catch all the changes properly.

 “I just wasn’t thinking and signed the wrong papers,” Hildy said. She sat next to Summer. “The autopsy results on Hildy aren’t back yet.” I believe this is Aunt Agatha speaking.

There is a lot of repetition and things are said that are later forgotten in some way. For example, Doris tells Summer that her husband is ill and Summer says that she is story to hear about her husband. Then, three chapters later, Glads mentions it, “Doris’s husband isn’t having a good day,” and Summer asks, “Is he ill?”  

I can rarely guess who the killer is in a mystery but this one was completely obvious to me from about halfway through the book.

I think this book had a lot of potential, but it needed some good beta readers to point out the plot and characterization flaws then a good editor to catch all the mistakes.

Honestly, I’m really surprised it made it to publication with all the mistakes. My husband suggested that perhaps they had uploaded the wrong version to the Kindle, but that would be easily rectified and certainly should have been done by now if they were paying any attention at all. I downloaded this book around mid-June of 2021. If they have updated it since, then it may have improved significantly. I really hope so. I see they have another one planned, but I don't see myself reading it.

Book Review: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

I first experienced the mastery and world building of Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing when I came across A Wizard of Earthsea in my school library. I was appropriately impressed and it looms large in my memory of the many wonderful fantasy and science fiction books I discovered there.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters was published in 2017, Le Guin passed away in 2018. She was 89. These were blog entries, but more like essays, that she wrote from about 2010 to 2016.

The title appealed to me as I feel I have decidedly moved into the second half of my own life and wonder what I want to accomplish with the time I have left, whatever that may be.

The exploration of ideas is widely varied, from pondering a toddler’s perspective of the vastness of a house, that might even seem small to a grown-up, to Le Guin’s experience staring, gazes locked, with a rattlesnake.

Each essay covers a great deal of territory, evolving from one thought into a much broader span, and covering that territory gorgeously through the language she uses. In fact, one of the things I loved about this book was Le Guin’s use of language. It is incredibly rich and varied.

In comparing a food bank warehouse to Notre Dame, she says, “As there should be, there are great doors to open into the sacred space. And as a sacred space will do, the first sight took my breath away. I stood silent. I remembered what the word awe means.”

Well, I am in awe of her language. My own writing tends to be rather action oriented and doesn’t use the full breadth of the English language to its fullest potential. Work like this book inspires me to dig deeper.

The hard part about reviewing a library book, in its hard copy form is that I cannot highlight and make notes the way I do on a Kindle book. I have friends who highlight and write in the margins of books that they purchase but I have never developed that habit because I have nearly always gotten most of my books from a library. It has both saved my budget and saved space wherever I lived.

I found a few of her pronouncements confounding, but that is about perspective. She finds tree farms “one of the dreariest sights in our farmlands, almost as soul-blighting as a clear-cut.” I find them lovely and cheerful, often a family run business, providing for their family while working at making Christmas merry or providing fruit trees for long term production for a family. There’s nothing dreary or soul blighting about that to me.

There is a great deal to ponder here and I highly recommend it to anyone. A book like this makes me feel as if I have been given time and a great gift of perspective by another writer.

‘…how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day – from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

 

 

Book Review: Swamp Spook: A Miss Fortune Mystery by Jana DeLeon

 

Swamp Spook

by Jana DeLeon

This is another entry in the Miss Fortune series. The first half didn’t hold my attention very well, though it was funny enough to keep me reading.

They are somewhat formulaic, like so many series, but things did get pretty complicated in the second half, making it more interesting. The best thing about these books is the ridiculous situations that Fortune, Gertie, and Ida Belle get into.

Fortune Redding is a former CIA assassin. She’s hiding out in Sinful, Louisiana because an agency leak put a price on her head. At this point in the series, the whole town knows who she is and she has decided to start a P.I. agency, with help from her friends Ida Belle and Gertie, who were military spies in Vietnam decades ago.

Fortune is also dating the local Deputy, Carter LeBlanc.

The book starts with Fortune being cast as the chainsaw murderer in the local Halloween hay maze. The only problem? While they are on break, someone puts a real dead body in the maze, with its head cut off.

The corpse turns out to be a local prominent business man. Was he murdered? Maybe, maybe not. So how did he end up in the maze, and why? There’s a young wife, a financially burned business partner, and even a butler.

With the town busybody, Celia Arceneaux, breathing down her neck, Fortune doesn’t need this kind of trouble. Celia knows just who to complain to and soon the state police are in town, making Carter’s life miserable and investigating Fortune.

Whether Gertie is accidentally crawling through poison ivy then swelling up or the threesome are setting a treadmill on fire, it’s the absurdity that keeps this book moving along and the reader laughing.

I would definitely recommend these mysteries to anyone who likes a comedic mystery.

Book Review: Still Life by Louise Penny

 

Still Life

by Louise Penny

I was recently recommended this series by one of our Friends of the Library. I’ve heard of Louise Penny books. I’ve had readers call the library for them on many occasions. I was not disappointed.

This is book one in a long running series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec, a family man, in his mid-fifties, and the head of homicide. He is called to the village of Three Pines when a woman is found dead in the woods, possibly due to an arrow, though the arrow is gone.

“People don’t see it coming, because the murderer is a master at image, at the false front, at presenting a reasonable, even placid exterior. But it masked a horror underneath. And that’s why the expression he saw most on the faces of victims wasn’t fear, wasn’t anger. It was surprise.”

This is a police procedural and the reader is taken along for every step of the way, from Gamache sitting in the village square watching life go on around them, to meetings with his staff.

“Three Pines wasn’t on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village should have been hiding in this valley all along. Anyone fortunate enough to find it once usually found their way back.” It’s a fanciful description, but I can picture it. I’ve been through some villages like that in the Catskills of Upstate New York. The details really put me there.

The authors characterization and detail is excellent. “One of the boys laughed… not a funny laugh… It’s the sound boys make when they’re hurting something and enjoying it. Jane shivered at the recollection…”

The characters may be, to some extent, types but they seem very unique and well differentiated to me. I had no trouble keeping track of who was who and how they fit into the story.

I enjoyed the subtle humor. Gamache is called away and his wife goes to a baptism on her own. “She was almost certain she was at the right baptism, though she didn’t recognize all that many people.”

And there are wonderful bits, like when Peter is comforting his wife Clara after her friend Jane has died. “And he realized that, had he died in the woods, Clara would have had Jane to comfort her.  And Jane would have known what to do. In that instant a door opened for Peter. For the first time in his life, he asked what someone else would do. What would Jane do if she was here and he was dead? And he had his answer. Silently he lay down beside Clara and wrapped himself around her. And for the first time since getting the news, her heart and mind calmed.” I found that just beautiful. It is the author’s insight and observations that make this book so lovely to read.

I always appreciate it when characters perceptions of someone else, or a situation, change over the course of the story. They find out they were wrong about something. That plays a big part in this story.

My one criticism involves a slightly odd and one-dimensional depiction of a young female officer who seemingly can’t get over herself. Nothing is her fault and people just can’t see how brilliant she is. I suppose there are people like that out there, but I’ve seen far more people with a lack of confidence at that age than this attitude. It just didn’t ring true for me. It seemed to be an artifice, a simplistic foil for the magnificence of the great Armand Gamache, to show us how saintly he is. I really don’t think it was necessary.

For example, “Nichol pledged to keep her opinions to herself if that was the thanks she got for having the courage to say what everyone was thinking. When asked directly she’d answer in monosyllables. So there.”

The “So there” is a shade too far. It turns the character into a childish caricature instead of someone simply a little bit too egotistical. Thankfully, it only intrudes on an otherwise nearly perfect murder mystery at a few points in the story.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I’ll definitely be reading more in this series.

Book Review: Death in Avignon by Serena Kent

 

Death in Avignon

by Serena Kent

This is a murder mystery, people die, but somehow it is once of the most relaxing genres I know and this is a prime example. 

I listen to a podcast called Shedunnit, created by Caroline Crampton, and I remember her talking about how mysteries were so popular post WWI because they were predictable. You knew the resolution would arrive and the detective would win through. It was just a matter of how. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy them so much. I really enjoy a good puzzle too, like Soduku, it’s very satisfying to finish something like that.

I admit I’m not one of those people who are able to follow all the clues and arrive at the solution to the puzzle before the author reveals it. I’m just along for the ride. So I can’t evaluate it on that criteria. I can only say, I didn’t really see the resolution coming.

This is the second book in this series and I so enjoyed the first, that I bought this one as soon as it was available. The main character is Penelope Keet – a retired ex-pat from Great Britain living in France. She worked for the Home Office and assisted the Coroner.

The mystery begins when Penny goes to an art show and the painter, Don Doncaster, who Penny doesn’t really like right off, collapses. He is taken to hospital and seems to be improving. They find he was poisoned. Then he takes a nose dive and dies. He isn’t the only one to die in this book, and all the deaths seem centered around the art world that Penny has just been introduced to.

She isn’t alone in her investigation – she has her new friends, like the handsome mayor Laurent, who she never seems to manage to have a dinner alone with, and the real estate agent, Clémence, who is a truly chic French woman.

When Clémence had left, Penelope went back to her Rachmaninov. But it failed to catch fire or to calm her conflicting emotions. Much as she had come to like her, seeing Clémence still made her feel inadequate.

They are intimately involved with the mystery as one of their friends, who is an art expert, disappears. Is he under suspicion? Laurent and Clémence take significant umbrage at the suggestion.

There are new friends here too, as Penny meets people in the art world and the music world of the nearby communities. Plus, her brash old friend from Britain, Frankie, returns.

The conversations flow naturally, and the descriptions are often lovely.

As the road climbed, the curves and wind-sculpted stacks of red soil emerged from the pines like a fifties actress letting a fur slip from her bare shoulders.

There are little bits of reality that one can relate to, as well.

After all the years of marriage and motherhood, it still felt self-indulgent simply to eat what she wanted, when she wanted, with no one else to please, or cajole, or disappoint.

I think my favorite parts of this book aren’t even necessarily the puzzle, but the relationships between characters we meet, and the descriptions of the countryside and setting.

There is a large cast in this book, but they are introduced at a reasonable pace and differentiated so that one can keep track. Plus, some are familiar from the first book and some are new.

For a relaxing puzzle mystery, I highly recommend this series. It began with Death in Provence and you can read my review of that one here http://storymusing.blogspot.com/2021/04/book-review-death-in-provence-by-serena.html