Hi everyone. I hope you are having a wonderful week so far. Thanks everyone for your dishwasher comments from my last post. It was fun to read whether you were a hand washer or a machine washer of your kitchenware.
For today's post I'm sharing last month's reading for those of you who like to read about books. As usual, I read mostly mysteries, but there's a few other genres tossed in. I actually also started a couple of other books in March, but since I didn't finish them until we were into April, they will be part of the next book post. And let me add, March was another good reading month too!
When I was cleaning out my bookshelves last month, I pulled out this book, number 7, in the Dr. Ruth Galloway mystery series. Ruth is a university lecturer and also an archaeologist who does a lot of forensic work. I have been rereading this series (one of my favorites), but I haven't actually picked up one of these mysteries since last August.
This time the story revolves around a World War 2 plane found buried in a field. The plane itself isn't a huge issue, but there is a dead man dressed in his pilot outfit who is still sitting in the pilot seat. The dental records trace this man to an American pilot who was killed in the war when his plane went down into the ocean. This man's family originally owned the land where he and the plane are found. In fact his family still live in the area. However, this man wasn't the pilot of this plane, and even more so, there is a bullet through his forehead.
This book is about finding out who killed the man in the plane. Then, when another man's remains are found, the DNA proves that he was related to the man in the plane. They are all members of a family named Blackstock who still live in the area in an old manor house that has seen better days.
These books should be read in order because characters are added to the story and everyone's life evolves as time goes on. In this story Kate (Ruth's child) starts school, and Nelson (Kate's Dad) is not only busy on this case but also trying to focus on his marriage. Ruth is sort of hoping an old flame, who is back in town for a TV show being filmed, is interested in picking up with her again. Judy and Cathbad are expecting a child. Plus there's a few more story lines going on around the murder. I know that might sound very mundane, but Griffiths creates very realistic characters that are mostly all likable. She is talented enough to follow them all through the events in the story so you see their lives moving along in parallel with the mystery. It's another thing that makes these stories much more interesting.
The book wraps up with Christmas coming on, a huge storm that creates a lot of flooding, and Ruth's life is on the line. It's an exciting ending and makes me glad I'm rereading this series.
My first listen for March was this short book by Penelope Lively called Life in the Garden. Lively is a British author known for writing both adult and children's fiction, or so I read because I haven't actually read any of her other books. But after reading this one I am quite interested in reading more by her.
This book explores gardens. It's part biography, part a look into authors who write about gardens in their books, part a look at gardens in paintings, part a look at the plants in the gardens. She discusses a bit about the history of gardens, and she mentions how what goes into gardens changes in popularity over time. She writes about plants she loves and gardens she has had. She even writes a bit about garden shows and historical gardens.
Being an author, Lively makes part of this book about how other authors use plants to create atmosphere or symbolism in their novels. A couple of names she mentions is Virginia Woolf and Daphne Du Maurier. She mentions many others, and even writes a bit about those novels. In fact, not only was I enjoying the garden information, but I had to go pick up a paperback copy of this book because there are some books (I was not familiar with) mentioned here that I think I'd like to read. Unfortunately while listening I wasn't able to get all the names down.
I enjoyed this book. It did not have practical gardening tips. It did not tell you good ways to set up a garden, and it didn't tell you about which plants you might want to buy. But it did put me into many different gardens which was a lovely 5+ hour escape from March weather.
My next book was one I found in a used book store several years ago, and since then it had been sitting in a pile on the floor in my spare room. I loved Elspeth Huxley's childhood autobiographies The Flame Trees of Thika and the Mottled Lizard when I read them years ago. This book is another autobiographical book in many ways, but this one jumps ahead into the 1930's after Huxley had been gone from Africa for over 8 years.
Because of the Great Depression, Huxley's husband has taken a job where he would be traveling continuously. To save money, the couple gave up their apartment in England, and Elspeth went home to Kenya to stay at her parent's farm. She also received an offer to write the biography of a recently deceased big wig of British-Kenyan politics, Lord Delamere. This book begins with Huxley's journey to Kenya.
This story is not only about Huxley's life at the farm, but also about the people she meets and about the history of British run Kenya during the ending days of the colonial period. It jumps back and forth a bit from the early British settlement days before the First World War into the 1930's and Great Depression. There's also a few jumps into the future, since Huxley did not write this book until the 1980's. She relies on her memory for the stories.
This wasn't a bad book. It is definitely not sentimental. Some parts I very much enjoyed, and some parts not so much. Sometimes she threw out people's names in the mix without much of a backstory to them, and at that time I asked myself why was this person (or why were these people) important? However, at other times she writes about the time and the place and people within it that is quite fascinating. This book is as much a history as an autobiography.
The parts I really enjoyed were the histories, not the governmental ones, but about how people lived and acted during those times. It's interesting how in 100 years or less the world has changed so much. (Probably people have always said that.) I would like to say I didn't care for this book as much as I did for her 2 childhood autobiographies, but since I read them so long ago, I don't think I can actually make that comparison. However, Huxley is a very good writer, and this book was worth my time.
My next listen was book #5 of this fun series by Karen Baugh Menuhin. As you can see, this story was called The Monks Hood Murders. Menuhin's main character is Heathcliff Lennox, an ex- World War One pilot who also happens to live on an old family estate that he is next in line to inherit. He is joined by his butler Greggs, his dog Mr. Fogg (better known as Foggy), a cat Mr. Tubbs, ex-Inspector Swift as well as a few other reoccurring characters. I enjoy this series. The stories are well written, told through the eyes of Lennox who is learning to be a private investigator, with characters that are believable and even a little bit quirky. Plus I like the 1920's setting. It's been a couple of years since I read book #4 (Death in Damscus), so it was time to get back to this series.
This time the story is set in April. There's a supposed black ghost in the yard, and when Lennox goes to investigate, he comes across a monk. The monk has come to find Lennox because a man he gave last rites to (and obviously died) confesses to an awful secret. There's also a couple of inheritors who claim they're entitled to this dead man's estate. The estate includes a valuable codex the church says it doesn't want to lose.
Retired Inspector Swift also is informed of this situation, and he shows up at Lennox's home while the monk is there. Together they all head off to the Monastery in York in Lennox's Bentley. When they get there and start investigating, another body turns up. This time the dead man is the lawyer that the other dead man had his latest will with.
An Italian Contessa is in town, claiming to be the dead man's wife and feels she is entitled to the estate even if her lawyer, who could back her up, is now dead. Then there is an illegitimate child of the dead man who is a local mid-wife and is connected to a local pub. Without proof that the Contessa was the deceased's wife, the now grown up child will inherit the estate. Her husband wants the house to open a sanitarium. The question is, who's the legitimate inheritor and what foul play from the past and present is involved? And as all this is going on, a Swiss man shows up, saying he has bought the codex and he wants it. He is also an expert on plant poisons. Then there is yet another death.
I particularly like the narrator of these tales, Sam Dewhurst-Phillips, and one thing I enjoy when listening to a series is that you not only get to continue on with the story, but you most often get to continue with the narrator. Plus whenever Mr. Fogg gets into something, he barks. It's a fun little quirk to this story that I enjoy. This book, like the other books I have listened to in this series, was an enjoyable tale, and there are quite a few more volumes of it to read. I will be reading/listening to more, at some point. (And these are probably also best read in order, but you might be able to read them out of order however a few backstories might be missed.)
In my quest for reading new mysteries (and trying not to read the same old series all the time 😏), I read this book, The Museum Detective by Maha Khan Phillips, set in Karachi, Pakistan. The main character is Dr. Gul Delani, who is a curator at a museum and who specialized in Egyptology.
Gul receives a call in the middle of the night from the police. At first she thinks they have found her niece who has been missing for three years. Instead, they want her to come out to a crime scene outside of the city. She is confused, until the escort the police send brings her to a cave where there is a sarcophagus and a mummy. Since she is from the museum and specializes in ancient artifacts, this mummy explains why the police want Gul to come to this crime scene in the middle of the night.
Once the mummy is safe at the museum, some corrupt police officers assigned to protect the Mummy steal it. That is when Gul decides to do some detecting on her own. Once the sarcophagus (not stolen) is cleaned, she learns that the body belonged to Princess Artunis, daughter of King Xerxes of Persis. Since she doesn't know much about this woman, Gul goes to find out about her. She learns about the legend that says Artunis was blamed for her father's murder, meant to be killed for the crime until she escaped with a lot of gold and jewels. She also learns many things about her missing niece.
Obviously someone (perhaps a gang leader who is also the drug smuggler the police were after when the Mummy was discovered) knows this legend also.
This book starts off great, takes a tiny bit of a slow down, and then really picks up again. The story takes you into the heart of Karachi with all its noises, smells, sights and customs. It also has some interesting characters, including Gul herself. Plus it was interesting to read about being a career woman in Pakistan.
Later in the book there are a couple of twists that change the whole direction of this mystery. The ending was suspenseful, and this book was a very good find. And FYI. although this isn't heavy duty reading, this is not a cozy style mystery.
Last month I read my first Robert Goddard book thanks to a recommendation from
Lisca. I very much enjoyed that novel, and so when Lisca recommended this mystery published in 2022,
This Is The Night They Come For You , I moved it up on my reading list.
This book is set in 3 places, England, France and Algeria. It ties into Algerian history (colonization under France, independence from France and some corrupt governments after that Independence). In England you meet the brother (Steven Gray) of a woman named Harriet. Gray is looking for details of his sister's death. One person Gray searches out is the man who Harriet was involved with at the time she disappeared.
That now deceased man, a British citizen who followed Harriet to France and then ended up in Algiers, has written his story. His daughter from a later marriage (after Harriet's death), Suzette Fontaine, needs to decide if this story her father wrote is true. Suzette brings part of the story to Gray to read for his opinion because Gray knew this man better than Suzette since she and her mother left and moved to France when she was still a child.
At the heart of this story is Superintendent Taleb, the only man left on the Algiers police force who originally worked on a case to capture 2 criminal assassin's. One of those 2 assassin's, Nadir Laloul, disappeared years in the past, and the other, Wassim Zarbi, has been under house arrest for a long time. Zarbi has recently disappeared. Taleb must work with the country's secret police on this case and his partner is the young (very young compared to him) Agent Hidouchie. You don't know at first how this case ties into Gray's sister or Suzette's father, but when you find out, this story becomes a richly layered story.
Wow, this was also a very good mystery and also not a cozy style story. There's a lot of suspense, unexpected twists plus a lot of action towards the end. The author conveyed what it was like being connected to a black- mailing criminal, and what it could be like if you have something the criminal wants. It was not only a good story, but I learned a lot about Algeria and Algiers. This book is not really part of a series, but there is a second volume. Perhaps in the future there will be more and this will become a series.
The other listen I finished in March was this book by Paulina Bren called The Barbizon. The subtitle, The Hotel that Sets Women Free, makes this sound like women's fiction, but it is not. It is actually a history of this famous women's hotel in New York City where many females new to the city chose to take small hotel-room style apartments. This included some who became famous women like Joan Dideon, Ali McGraw, and Sylvia Plath (among many others). This is also a women's history book, as it goes into how women's lives drastically changed after the First World War and right up through the life of this hotel. And finally, it is also a story of the times and New York City during the 80 years that this hotel was open.
The author sets up this book by decades. The story starts before the Barbizon existed and goes into the first woman's hotels that came into being not all that many years before the 1920's. The book also talks about why the Barbizon was unique. It then really picks up in the 1920's. It was interesting to read about speakeasies, the kinds of jobs women had, what life was like at the Barbizon. Then the Great Depression hit and the 1930's. There's some history of the hotel as it went bankrupt, and lots of info about life for a career or working women in the 1930's.
This continues during the 1940's and 1950's when the Red Scare was going on, when modeling was a lower paid and not so glitzy profession, a lot about Mademoiselle magazine, and even about some famous American writers who had ties to the hotel through Mademoiselle. I liked how the author focused in-depth on some people, giving their back story as well their Barbizon story. The author spent a lot of this book looking at the 1950's, and writing a lot about how women were seen and treated during this decade. I didn't mind that, and it did fit the book. But it also really wasn't reflected in the title. This book proves that times have definitely changed. (And I've already said that already in this post. Grin.)
I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed how the author didn't limit the story to just the building. I'm not sure all these women were set free, since many ended up married and back where they started from (not that any of that is necessarily a bad thing), but I did enjoy seeing how life changed for women over the course of those 80 decades. In fact, it was interesting to read about what it took to get women where they are now. It was also interesting to see what being a woman was like in my mother's and grandmother's generations, at least in general societal terms.
This next book, Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie was published in 1944. It's one I've been thinking about rereading for a while and decided with our seemingly never ending winter-ish weather, that an armchair trip back to Ancient Egypt would be a good escape.
This book is a bit off from typical Christie mysteries as it is set in Thebes in 2000 BCE. A recently widowed young woman, Renisneb returns to her childhood home. In that home are her 2 older brothers, her younger brother, her grandmother, the older brother's wives, their children, as well as a servant who has been with family forever and her father. Her father, Imhotep, is a mortuary priest, and after an extended absence, returns home with a concubine. This concubine, Nofret, is stirring up trouble. You know something bad is going to happen. And never mind the tensions that would normally happen when you have a large extended family all living together.
Then the deaths start to happen. This time there is no detective but there is the Grandmother who seems to know who the killer is. As a reader, Christie takes you on a journey and throws out lots of clues and twists. In many ways, other than the setting and characters, this book is typical Christie. I really enjoyed this story though, and I liked that there was no police or main detective. However, I had no idea who was killing people and no idea who should be trusted. All I remember from reading this book decades ago was at that time I had a hard time with the names. But not this time. Grin.
Even though I have several things on my to read list, I decided I wanted something I knew would be quick and somewhat predictable. That's why I picked up book, The Woman in Blue, #8 in the Dr. Ruth Galloway mysteries. If my memory served me right, I remembered some events from this book, but I also remembered this my least favorite book in the 15 volume series. I was curious if I would feel the same way this time through.
This book takes place in a town called Walsingham which is and has been a long time religious center. A woman from a drug and addiction center is found killed, after Cathbad sees her cleaning another woman's gravestone. When Cathbad sees her, he thinks he is seeing a vision of the Madonna, as she is wearing a white nightgown and a blue robe. Nelson is called in to be in charge of the crime investigation. Ruth also gets a letter from a long lost friend who says she needs Ruth's help. The friend is a female priest in the Church of England who happens to be in Walsingham for a class, and she has been getting threatening letters.
Then there is another death and Nelson's wife Michelle gets attacked when she comes to pick up Nelson one night after his car died. From that point onward, things hit the fan and there are all kinds of emotional and somewhat unexpected events, including another death. The ending, which takes place around the Easter holiday, is also quite exciting.
I did enjoy this book, but I still haven't changed my opinion about this being my least favorite in the series. Even though Ruth is in this story, in some ways it is more Nelson's story (and that's not a bad thing), but it seems a little too too coincidental that Ruth should have a friend that's part of the conference in this town where a woman dies. Plus I did miss the big archaeological digs you usually find in these stories. Overall, this story feels a little forced, unlike all the books in this series, but it's still a worthwhile read.
This next and final March book was one I picked up at the Book Barn used bookstore while in Connecticut a couple of weekends ago, and it looked so interesting I actually started reading it the night I came home. Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an American artist who painted, sketched and also created woodcut prints in the early to middle(ish) twentieth century. His name as the author caught my eye because I was vaguely familiar with him, mainly because years ago I had a cousin who (for awhile) dated one of his grandsons. (Or at least I think it was a grandson. It might have been a great grandson. ) When I met the grandson, I hadn't heard of Rockwell Kent so I did a bit of looking into the artist, and I liked the pieces I saw. Ever since then if I see the name somewhere I'm curious.
I didn't know that Kent was also the author of a few books, mainly travel style journals. In August of 1918, Rockwell Kent and his oldest child, then 9 year old son, Rockwell Kent III (Rocky), went and lived roughly on an island just outside of Seward, Alaska. They lived there for seven months. The only other occupant on this island was a Swede named Lars Matt Olson who let Kent and his son live in one of his cabins .
This is his journal which was first published in book form in 1920. Kent did a great job writing his entries; they are quite descriptive without using a lot of words. And even though many of the entries repeated the chores he needed to regularly do to survive in Alaska, he managed to make this journal interesting.
Beyond the journal entries, this book is also filled with woodcut illustrations and a few sketches by the author. It was always exciting to turn the page to see what image would be there. There are also some images of his original hand written journal pages inserted into the book, more for show than having to read them to get the whole story. I knew Kent was well known for illustrations in a 1930 volume of Moby Dick, but I didn't know that he did illustrations for his own books (or as I mentioned, that he even published some of his journals).
This edition came out in 1996, so I didn't find an original at the bookstore. However, I did very much enjoy reading this journal and seeing all the art too.
As you can see, it was a very good reading month for me. April has also started off with some good books, but you'll have to wait another few weeks to read about those. Grin.
