The Covenant by Beverly Lewis

So it looks like the Amish book won out over the Flower Shop book in terms of which one I finished first.

I have tons of friends who read every book Ms. Lewis publishes, and I am intrigued by the Amish culture like a lot of people, so I gave this one a try. I have also read the first in another of her Amish series. This book is the first in the "Abram's Daughters" series.

Bookwise, this is a decent read. Not setting my soul afire or anything, though. It's kind of like a grown up Christian Sweet Valley High kind of thing. I could see the plot items coming a mile or two away, which was a touch annoying. Like the fact that the mother is pregnant--but she doesn't "get it" right away. She's had 4 kids. I don't buy not recognizing pregnancy. And the fact that her teen aged daughter is also pregnant--um, you both have the EXACT SAME SYMPTOMS and when it finally dawns on Mama that she's in the family way, why the heck didn't she turn to her daughter who's been sneaking out every night during Rumspringche (or however you spell it) and say, hmmm...wonder if she's also knocked up?

I guess I'll keep reading these, they're a little break from mysteries and sometimes I like that. I blew through pages 80-320 in about 2 hours minutes, it is not a real brain teaser. Definitely one-sitting books.

I will add the caveat that my personal opinions about the Amish are very strong--I don't like them. I think they're really screwed up from their theology on down to the way they treat their families. They're a glorified cult, if you ask me. The way they won't let kids be educated past 8th grade, the way that women are treated is appalling, and the fact they're discouraged from personal relationships with Jesus are all way wrong in my book. So I don't find their culture charming or romantic in spite of the nifty clothes and back to nature ways. I mean, I love the movie Witness as much as the next person, but over all, the Amish are pretty close-minded, intolerant, and cold hearted folks with the shunning and the hateful way they just slam the door on family members.

So I read the Amish books with a very different POV than some of the friends I know that like them. I do think that Lewis is honest about their lifestyle and mores, though. I didn't feel she pushed the Anabaptist life as ideal, she's just setting her story in their culture. So I see part of the conflict in these stories coming from the way the society is structured and I think that Lewis is doing the same, but I can't be totally sure. At any rate, she certainly isn't trying to convince her reader that Amish life is normal or sunshine and daisies 24-7. There is a heavy darkness that I get a feeling for when I read these books--that is a world that is super hard to function within.

The Thin Woman by Dorothy Cannell

This is the first in a series recommended to me by my friend Julie (shout out to Julie!!).

The mystery is not super fore-front here. I mean, there are mysterious happenings and whatnot, but it wasn't a cut and dried murder who-done-it.

But it was hilarious and cute and totally awesome so yay! New good series to read!

The story takes place in England where a woman named Ellie who is overweight and single decides to hire a man from Eligible Escorts to accompany her to a family reunion weekend. They pretend he's her fiance to make her feel better about her judgy relatives, and they end up in her uncle's will, living together for 6 months while she's required to lose 60 lbs and he has to write a book if they want to share an inheritance. I feel like I can't really say too much more without giving away too much more of the story in case anyone who reads this wants to read the book. It isn't complicated, so if I tell much, I tell it all!

It is obviously far-fetched that a this would all occur, but I loved it anyway. Ben, Ellie's faux fiance, is into her even before she gets skinny, and it's fun to watch for Ellie to miss that boat completely for a while until the light bulb goes off in her head.

I felt like this book was a little Bridget Jones-ish in a good way. Ellie's series is also going on my awesome list because it has nothing tense or depressing--everything is just easy. Nothing stressful like money troubles or too much conflict. Just a happy, funny, silly plot that made me chuckle and smile while I read it. I needed this book as it coincided with a very stressful, exhausting week in my real life. The Thin Woman is precisely what a book should be--an escape!

I am currently reading 2 different books, so I'm not sure which will get finished first and onto this blog...stay tuned to see if you hear about Amish people or flower shops next?

Mint Julep Murder by Carolyn Hart

Wow, I completely loved this book! I've read 6 or 7 in this Death on Demand series and some of them have been a touch dull, or at least left me a little bored. But this one was so good!

The series is about Annie Darling, a young woman who owns a book shop on a resort Island in South Carolina. She's married to the dashing, wealthy, handsome Max, who is a bit of a dilettante but he worships his Annie and is smart as a whip when it comes to helping her solve mysteries. The series regulars include Max's loopy mother, Laurel, and various customers who frequent Annie's shop.

Annie's shop, also called Death on Demand, is a mystery bookstore. She only sells mysteries, then she gets into mystery-related situations and somebody dies, etc. etc. You know the formula by now, right?

So in Mint Julep Murder, Annie is at a Southern Writer's conference in Hilton Head, where she's tasked with being an author liaison for five writers set to receive awards at the event. A publisher also in attendance says he's going to write a tell-all book about the 5 famous writers and, surprise! Someone poisons him at his own cocktail party.

This mystery was straight out of Agatha Christie in style and deftness. The 'closed set' if you will, the obvious list of suspects with good motive, the poison, and good back stories on all the suspects. It was great and even had a classic 'gather-everyone-in-a-room-and-talk-through-the-murder-till-you-point-a-finger-at-the-killer' ending. It seems most of the mysteries I've been reading in the past year or so tend to be the small town setting, which is fun, but the old fashioned weekend house party style of story was a welcome change.

Another great thing about the Hart series is that she mentions dozens of other mystery writers throughout her books. She name-drops famous literary detectives and authors numerous times throughout, making for a very fun way to beef up the old library list, at the same time!

As an aside, I finally got a good explanation of why I love mysteries so much, in case anyone ever asks me. A character in the book said that she wrote mysteries because they are a magnification of what happens when you let evil into yourself. She said that everyone in real life has fractured relationships and difficult people in their lives, but when you let evil in, you are allow yourself to hurt those people. Murder mysteries take that evil to the extreme end--the idea that these motives and reasons for killing someone come from a difficult relationship infused with evil. Mysteries aren't just about the clues and sleuthing, they're about justice and righting wrongs. Just as a reader can absorb a mystery novel and understand that hate and discontent and greed can lead the human nature to murder, he or she also has a passion for the who-done-it, the handcuffs clicking around the culprit's wrists. So mystery novels, whether the tame Nancy Drew or the grisly James Patterson, are all morality plays with a heart for justice.

Swimsuit by James Patterson

I have read literally every book this guy has published, except 3. 2 are those kids with wings series that don't make a lick of sense to me and the other is a recent one of his called Sail I think, which just annoyed and bored me so much I quit reading. In the past few years, I would say James Patterson has sharply declined in the quality of his books. His strongest, the Alex Cross and Women's Murder Club series, are getting lame and a lot of the stand-alones have started to feel like they were written on a long weekend with the TV on in the background.

There have been 3 I really enjoyed, one stand-alone called Beach Road and the first two in a new series about a widowed NYC cop with 10 adopted kids, Step on a Crack and Run for Your Life.

This all leads up to me having very low expectations for Swimsuit. The first half of the book was a very pleasant surprise because I liked it. It is a faced paced grisly thriller about a serial killer who is paid by a group of sick, twisted international millionaire perverts to make elaborate snuff films of his killings. The latest victim is a Midwestern pre-med student in Hawaii doing a magazine photo shoot. A former cop turned crime reporter from LA goes to Hawaii to cover the story and befriends the girl's parents. The portion of the book in Hawaii is really tense and tight and well-written. The pain of the parents is intense and heart breaking. Then the story moves from Hawaii to LA where the crazy killer shows up at the reporter's door demanding that the reporter tell the killer's story. He wants the reporter to write a best-seller documenting his horrific crime spree. Obviously such a cold blooded psycho is going to be done with this writer eventually and that's where the book falls apart.

The reporter is suddenly an action hero, chasing the killer around Europe, tracking down the perverts in the millionaire's club, and it got stupid, fast. I finished it because I had enjoyed the first part enough to want to know how it turned out, but the ending was almost a fantasy that didn't agree well with the original tone and texture of the story's beginning.

I hope Patterson shapes up soon, I might have to give up on him except for the Bennett series in the future. I read on his website that he's got 2 Alex Cross's coming up before the end of the year, plus a non-fiction thriller about King Tut, and a book called Witch and Wizard in December. That one intrigues me--I don't normally dig the supernatural genres, but in both this book and the most recent Women's Murder Club that came out earlier in the summer, there were some chapters of Witch and Wizard in the back. I read them and the preceding page said that "this is the book I was born to write." Hmm...I might have to read that one to see what all the drama is about!

As for what is next on the Book Geek's pile, let's just say I have 8 library books checked out and I'm 100 pages into the first of those and it is so fun I'm going to go read till my eyes won't stay open another second!

Alpine Advocate by Mary Daheim

This is the first book in the Alpine series about small town newspaper publisher Emma Lord. Mary Daheim also writes the Bed and Breakfast Murder Mystery series and I've read about 9 of those. The B&B books are kind of hit or miss for me--sometimes I love them and other times I just kind of slog through. This is actually the series Daheim wrote first, so my OCD way of reading things in order was a little messed up as far as publishing dates go!

These Alpine books take place in a tiny logging town near Seattle and the first book is about a murder in the local moneyed family. The mystery itself was pretty lame, I saw the motive for the murder after about 45 pages but nobody else figured that out in the book till the end. The killer was less obvious, in fact kind of popped out of nowhere, but it was a little frustrating to see the allegedly smart people missing the point so much. It was very heavy handed in the foreshadowing for the reader to notice that big clue, but stupid that nobody in the story was hit over the head with that same plot hammer!

I will keep reading this series though, because in my experience, in most series like these smaller, laid back niche mystery series, the first book always kind of stinks. They have too much back story to get to and too much groundwork for the town and lead characters so that the mystery part is pretty dumb.

Plus, I find it very relaxing to read these light "Murder She Wrote" type book series. They're always pleasant, have quirky townspeople, fun settings, and I like them for speedy bedtime reading. In this blog you'll see more Alpine, B&B, Tea Shop, Knitting, Needlework, Chocoholic, and numerous other series pop up quite often. Cause that's how I roll.

Stay tuned for: the new James Patterson book, Swimsuit...

2 Top Ten Lists

I think that a good way to introduce myself as a reader is to list my top 10 favorite books of all time. When thinking about this list I realized that I had really 2 categories that would apply--books for adults and books for children/young adults. I think that loving all these books, all but 3 read before I was out of high school, and most read multiple times, is a standard to which I judge most other books I read in some fashion or another. I know that no fluff mystery will hold up to the Baskervilles or the Orient Express and no Western tale is as profoundly beautiful as Lonesome Dove, but there are sparks and elements in each of these favorites that can be found in a lot of what I read day to day.



So, without further ado....



Kid/YA books: (in no particular order)



A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Anne's House of Dreams by LM Montgomery

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

Autumn Street by Lois Lowry

Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume

Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg

The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White

Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder



Adult books (again in no order):



The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk

At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

The Last Convertible by Anton Myrer

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian

This book appealed to me initially because it reminded me of my all time top 10 faves of life--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This book takes place in the 30's and 40's in a tenement slum in Albany, NY. The narrator is Jean-Luc, a boy who is 8 at the beginning and 16 at the end. He lives with his mother and younger sister in this slum. His father is a con artist who ditched the family there and the mother has some kind of lung illness so that whenever she works she gets really sick if she overdoes it. So Jean-Luc takes care of the family by supplementing the welfare checks with whatever money he can earn doing odd jobs.

The first 1/3 of this book, I really loved it, the 2nd 1/3 I thought was OK, by the end I was really annoyed and just wanted it to be over.

I am not a fan of what I term "depressing" books--I do not enjoy stories of hardship and poverty and personal disaster. I get nervous feelings in my stomach reading about people who are broke or lose jobs or drink away paychecks. I don't find them inspiring if they turn out semi-OK in the end, because getting there is just too painful. The major exception to this rule is my adoration of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because there is a spark in Francie Nolan that made me always think that she was going to get out just fine. And that book has a more happy ending than most, too. But this Pearl Street book was just too much sadness and woe at the end. The first half showed a lot of the pluck and making do stories of poverty that were kind of funny or upbeat. But then as Jean-Luc got older and his mother got more desperate, things got more depressing. Plus the mother is kind of a jerk, and he put up with WAY more than I wanted to read about in terms of her being really unkind and ungrateful toward him and others who tried to help her or her kids.

As for this one-named author, Trevanian...I'm not sure who the heck he is. I looked him up online and Trevanian is a pen name for some other guy and the jacket bio thing says Trevanian lives in the Basque country of Spain. But the bio online about the real man who wrote this book (he recently passed away) made no mention of his living abroad. But in this Pearl Street book, the Jean-Luc character reflects this entire story from the adult memory point of view and that adult lives in Europe at the end of the book--so is this a fiction within fiction kind of thing? Like, the author made up a writer named Trevanian, then he made up a life story for Trevanian to use in writing an autobiographical novel? In some ways, that's really cool but in other ways it makes my head spin just a tad. Probably because of my propensity to think too hard??

At any rate, this book had its moments, the literacy of it was fantastic--the vocabulary was really amazing and intelligent and that was a pleasure to read. But the overall feeling I had when I closed it was negative and depressing, so it didn't leave me feeling like I liked the book, even though if you had asked me the day I started it, I'd have said it was good.

C'est la vie, on to the next novel!!

Fer De Lance by Rex Stout

This is the most recent book I finished, Fer De Lance by Rex Stout. This is the first in the series of detective novels about the eccentric recluse PI, Nero Wolfe. Set in the 1930's, it pretty much follows the detective story template begun by Edgar Allen Poe with his masterful Murders at the Rue Morgue and perfected by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Holmes canon.

The template used here is the first person account of the mystery told in the eyes of the brilliant detective's sidekick. In this case, it is Archie Goodwin, Nero's right hand man and personal errand boy. Wolfe is a hermit and he never leaves his house. He's a corpulent semi-drunk who keeps an obsessive schedule, is not shy about his genius levels, and he lets Archie do all his leg work on cases.

This first Wolfe novel is about the case of a man who is killed by a poisoned dart rigged to shoot out of the end of a golf club. The title refers to the type of snake venom employed in this murderous plot. The character of Nero Wolfe is softened somewhat by the admiring terms used by Archie--would a book in the first person by someone as arrogant and insufferable as Wolfe be appealing? Or would a 3rd person account also make Wolfe more unappealing? I think the note of the sidekick POV keeps the detective and his foibles in check.

I'm a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and I love the extra tidbits in the lore of Holmesian speculation. One thing I've read in more than one place is that Nero Wolfe is sometimes considered to be the illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes. I like that idea--Wolfe is in 1930's NY so the time line works out fairly well, and it sure would account for Wolfe's addictive personality and general superiority complex.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I'll be hitting this series up again soon.