September Books

    Hi everyone. Happy mid-week  to you.  I'm back today with my books for September, and that includes one that I started in August and finished in September. 

     My first listen for September was actually one I started in August, but never quite finished in time for last month's book post. This is the latest (actually quite new since it came out in July) release by Kate Quinn. I really liked the Rose Code by this author, and this book, set in the 1950's with the Korean War and McCarthy's communist witch hunt going on sounded like a good next read. And it even started with a murder. 

       Briar House is a woman's boarding house in Washington D. C. The woman who runs the house, Mrs. Nelson/Nielsen, is rather a cranky old crone. You learn about her in the first chapter through the eyes of her son, Pete. Then in most succeeding chapters you get to meet the other women of the house. In between, the house itself has chapters. I liked chapters where the house is speaking. I also liked the chapters about each woman. They are not all sweet ladies like the 1950's stereotypical betrayal of women. 

     It did take me a bit to get into this book, but I'm not sure why. I guess I was expecting more outright history rather than making it the background of the story.  Or maybe it was just starting the book with the crotchety  Mrs. Nelson/Nielsen. (Heavens, she is certainly not my namesake-grin.) As I read I kept wondering if we were going to hear/read her story to explain why she is as nasty as she is.  In fact, all the characters in the book have things about them you may not like, but most of them become more likable as you read more and realize they are only human and flawed like we all are.

     However once I got into this story, especially for the last several hours when more secrets about the tenants came out, the book became almost hard to turn off. In fact, the book was quite suspenseful at that point. And although not a murder mystery per se, I wondered who the killer was and what the story of the murder was.  The thread of the murder runs loosely throughout the whole book. As do interconnections between characters. I ended up liking this book quite a bit. I also really enjoyed the author's notes at the end, where she talks about how and what inspired her to write each part of this book.

     After finishing book 9 in the Maggie Hope  series  at the  very end of August, I jumped right into book 10. Maggie Hope is a British-American woman who started off as Winston Churchill's secretary and then became a British spy. After several harrowing events in the last 9 books, she had a chance to go to Los Angeles with her good friend Sarah. Sarah is a ballet dancer who's been scooped up by Hollywood. Maggie's former fiance John Sterling is a British pilot who is now making propaganda films with Walt Disney in LA also . However, John's actress fiancée has recently been murdered, so even though Maggie is away from the war and her spy career, she still has some sleuthing to do. 

     I didn't know  how prominent the KKK was and how much Nazi propaganda was in LA during the Second World War. I wish the author had started with her "notes" about this book's inspiration because until I jumped ahead and read that part, I really wasn't "getting" that part of the story. I could follow the story, but I thought it was a bit far fetched. Wasn't all of America United once we got into the war? OK, I knew about people like Charles Lindbergh, but I didn't realize how common those radical "white America" beliefs were. General history  has a way of smoothing out the rough edges of the story I guess. It's even sadder that there are still lots of overtones from this story today.

     As always with these books, there are lots of twists. I love how the characters continue on (so you must read these in order) because that makes their stories more complex. The author also sets up the next book a bit, which as far as I can tell will be the last one for Maggie Hope. It's on my list.

      

    It's been a few years since I listened to books 1 and 2 of this British mystery series by Susan Hill. It's a very good series  so I decided it was time to listen to book 3.

     In this volume, Simon, who is a police detective as well as an up and coming artist, starts the story by helping another community where first one child and then a second child have gone missing. Serrailler is on the case because of a missing child in his district of Lafferton, a case not yet solved even though it was recent and was the subject of book 2 in this series. Then there is a man who has lost his second wife to CJD (after losing his first to breast cancer). This man  is very distressed and has become unhinged. One of the events he is involved in is when he takes a female priest from the local church hostage in her home.

    Both of these stories are interwoven along with Serrailler's outside of work life. In the first 2 books you get to meet his sister (he is one of a set of triplets) as well her family. You also get a glimpse into Serrailler's art life too. Plus you follow some of the characters involved in these 2 main cases. I find it a little hard to describe this book without giving too much away so you'll have to take my word  that's it's a well done suspenseful story.  There's just a lot going on. 

    This series just gets better with each book, maybe because you get to know the characters so well. It's even  rather dark in spots. Steven Pacey narrated this mystery, and he does a great job especially in some very terrifying parts of this book. I think that's because he has a great voice for dark suspense and scary moments. 

     I enjoyed this book so much that when I finished it I then went on to listen to  the next book (#4) in series.

     A year has passed in the story since the end of book 3. Simon Serrailler has taken a new job as an investigator in a special police branch. His extended family is changing, and that is causing a lot of stress not just for Simon. Plus there is a killer on the loose, shooting women about to be married or women who are new brides. 

       I enjoy the depth these stories go into as well as how characters from past books return.  The author has no issue moving life along either, whether it's good or bad. It was easy to get emotionally tied up with the characters, and one part even brought me to tears. And there is a lot of suspense.  Who is killing the brides?  The author introduces the killer, but she doesn’t give enough details so you know who it is. 

      Stephen Lacey, the narrator, really built the suspense also. He's a great reader for this type of story. And these stories are just good mysteries. I was half tempted to move into the next book in this series when I finished this one (especially since I was having a hard time getting into a few other listens I tried), but  even though I didn't do that, I don’t plan on waiting another couple of years before getting back to them. 

    This book,Around the World in 80 Trains, was a definite change of pace from the Simon Serrailer mysteries.  The author, Monisha Rajesh, had done a train journey around India solo and wrote a book about it.  Although I hadn’t read that book, her second book (this one) came up on an Audible sale earlier this year and sounded interesting. This time Monisha is doing some world wide  traveling with her fiance Jem. They are taking trains everywhere on their journey except to cross oceans where there are obviously no tracks.

     Monisha's train trip started in Europe going from London across the English Channel through the Chunnel/Channel Tunnel. However, traveling in Europe didn't make much of this book until she and Jem were finally was on their way to Moscow. From Moscow the trip continued to Mongolia, China, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and then onto Canada and the US.  I know I left out a few other stops, but these are the big destinations where the author had the most interesting stories.

     This book is an interesting mix of (mostly) train stories and adventures from places where  the couple stopped and stayed for a few days.  Since the author is a journalist,  there are stories of the people she met along the way too. Some of those stories are more memorable than others. I especially liked the story of the survivor of both atomic bombs whose daughter she tracked down in Japan. 

     The one thing I found listening to this book is that the stories in Asia seemed much more upbeat and exciting than the stories from Canada and the US. I don't know exactly why that was. It could be that those Canada and US stories were about more (although not completely) "comfortable" train trips taken by vacationers  rather than people who used the train as part of their regular routine.

       I had a couple of  hours left to listen to when I went away to Quebec. I must admit that I lost interest in picking this book back up when I got home, so I didn't actually finish the book (at least yet). I'm including it here because I did listen to most of the book, and if I hadn't been distracted by a trip, I would have finished it. It's not a bad book by any means, but it wasn't gripping or pulling at me after a 9 day break. I added the author's India train trip book to my to-read list, and one day I might check it out when I don't have a trip planned.

    

      If I was to make a list of my top ever read books, this one, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, would be on it.  It was my next read, actually maybe the fourth time (or is it the 5th time?) I've read or listened to this book in all my reading years.

       This is the story of Pip, and similar to all Dickens novels, it is full of wonderful and eccentric characters. These include Pip's sister (who brought him up by hand) and is only known as Mrs. Joe. You don't learn her actual name until almost the end of the novel. Her husband is Joe Gargery a blacksmith who truly cars for Pip but isn't a force next to his wife's character. There's also  the beautiful Estella (who Pip falls for) and of course, the woman still in her decades old wedding dress, now yellowed and practically rotting away, Miss Havisham. Estella is Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, and Miss Havisham is definitely anti-men, seeing she was left at the alter by a non-good person.  This no-good person even shows up later in the novel.  There are also escaped convicts including one named Magwitch who becomes a main character in Pip's life, and there's also  one of Pip's friends  who lives in a mini-castle and who shoots a cannon off at 9 each evening. Plus there’s graveyards, foggy marshes and also a prison ship that sits offshore in Pips’s hometown as well as many other interesting scenes too.

      Pip has expectations for his life, and he wants to be more than what life has dealt him so he’s off to London after coming into a chance to become more than Joe's blacksmith apprentice. Pip’s expectations are that he wants to be gentleman. But Pip learns a lot about people and life along the way.

    There are  boating scenes, scenes out in the marsh, London scenes and scenes in Miss Havisham's home. (And of course many others too.) I really liked the scary parts too, like the footsteps coming up the darkened stairway one night, or when Pip is taken prisoner out of the marsh paths. But this novel is not just frightening moments; it is a cleverly designed story where the characters you meet early on all come together in the end. 

      There's definitely a reason Dicken's books are still around. The man could write, even if his style is a bit wordy compared to what we mostly see today. And his stories, although set in Victorian England, are still so relatable.  But if you've read any Dickens you know all this. 😏

     If you've ever read any Erik Larson books you know he has  an easy to read style that takes you into the history of a time. His non-fiction stories usually highlight one or two people or events, but in the process, you learn a lot about the time period.  I find I always come out knowing many new things because he definitely makes the time of his story so alive.

     This book, Thunderstruck, took me back to the 1890's and into the  1910's just before the First World War. This time the main characters are Guglielmo Marconi, the man who discovered how to send information across distances without wire that led us to having radios, and Dr. Hadley Harley Crippen, who was involved in a notorious murder of his wife in England. He’s connected to Marconi as he was the first person to be captured using the wireless telegraph  waves that Marco I discovered.     

       Yet I also learned some things about spiritualism, King Edward VII, a scientist named Oliver Lodge who was a competitor of Marconi, the rise in popularity of over the counter medicines, medical practices,  and many other things that have a connection to this story but are not the main story.

       Guglielmo Marconi was a driven man, and the story of his wireless telegraph was interesting. The story was Dr. Crippen, the murder of his wife and his travel to Quebec with the woman he loved was even more interesting to me, but of course, I am a fan of murder mysteries. 

  My reading this book couldn't be timed any better as we came across the first lighthouse in Canada that was a Marconi station where Marconi tested out his wireless telegraph. 

 

  Along with the lighthouse, we visited the small city of Rimouski, where Dr. Crippen was captured.   Those were fascinating  unplanned connections.

     I finished this book early this month after I came home from my trip. I haven't read every book by this author, but the several I have read were all interesting. Although this wasn't my favorite Erik Larson book, it was definitely still a  very good read.

      That's it for me for this month's book post. As always, I love recommendations, but my to-read list is quite long now. And as always, thanks if you made it through this whole post.