Flashback
Posted: 2019/03/21 Filed under: audio book, Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2019, audio book, book lust i, book review, Fiction, florida, Joyce Bean, march, mystery Leave a commentBarr, Nevada. Flashback. Read by Joyce Bean. Grand Haven. MI: Brilliance Audio, 2003.
Reason read: Barr’s birth month is in March.
Anna Pigeon is back. This time as a park ranger on one of the islands of Dry Tortugas National Park off the coast of Florida. She’s there to fill in temporarily for another ranger who has fallen ill and run from a marriage proposal she doesn’t know what to do about. While there she takes to reading old Civil War era letters written by a great-great-aunt that play an integral part in a mystery surrounding a missing woman. When a mysterious boat explosion yields unidentified body parts Anna is in the thick of the crime; as usual getting herself into sticky situations. If you remember from earlier Pigeon mysteries, she is extremely claustrophobic. To give you an idea, the scene where she is diving under an engine to recover parts of a dead man…
In typical fashion Barr describes this national park in such a way you want to book a flight to it immediately. She captures the culture, the atmosphere with vivid detail.
Confessional: I don’t know that much about diving. I’ve only done the “snubing” version (half diving, half snorkeling where instead of wearing your air tank, it floats in a raft on the surface of the ocean). Having said that, I have to ask: is it possible to puke underwater? Can you remove your mouthpiece and spew, as a result giving the fish something new to feed on?
As an aside, I feel that Barr tries a little too hard to be funny. A reference to John Wayne Bobbit has the potential to be funny but only to a limit number of people.
Audio info: Joyce Bean’s accents are a little wonky to my untrained ear and don’t fast forward to the next track. Each track starts in mid-sentence. Really odd. The music at the end of the disc is nice, though.
Author fact: Barr also wrote Blind Descent (already read) and Hunting Season (next on my list).
Book trivia: Flashback is book number eleven in the Anna Pigeon series. I read Blind Descent (number six in the series) way back in 2011.
Nancy said: Pearl listed Flashback as one of her favorite occupation-centric mysteries.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (p 118).
White Sky, Black Ice
Posted: 2019/03/18 Filed under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2019, alaska, book lust iii, book review, Fiction, march, murder, mystery, police, series Leave a commentJones, Stan. White Sky, Black Ice. New York: Soho Press, 1999.
Reason read: Alaska’s Seward Day takes place in March.
The first book in Stan Jones’s Nathan Active series has the task of painting a picture of who Nathan Active is. The character development is slow in regards to Active’s personality. Jones spends a lot of time building the backstory of Active’s adoption after his fifteen year old Inupiat mother gave him up. He was raised by a white couple in Anchorage and grew up to be a state trooper. Here’s the rub: he has been posted back in his little birth village of Chukchi where he feels torn between the cultures of his upbringing and the traditions in his blood. He’s an obvious outsider, being raised in the big city. But when atypical suicides start happening one right after the other Active decides to listen to his ancestral roots and dig in.
Confessional: because White Sky, Black Ice takes an environmental spin I kept thinking of Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. She also tackles the theory that our planet is going to hell.
Author fact: Stan Jones launched the Kotzubue newspaper. He was also an editor for a couple of other newspapers.
Book trivia: White Sky, Black Ice is the first in the Nathan Active series.
Nancy said: Pear said nothing specific except to say White Sky, Black Ice is the first in a series.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the interesting chapter “All Set For Alaska” (p 14).
Monkey’s Raincoat
Posted: 2019/03/12 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2019, book lust i, book review, california, Fiction, march, murder, mystery, Robert Crais, series Leave a commentCrais, Robert. The Monkey’s Raincoat. New York: Perfect Crime Book, 1987.
Reason read: I needed another category for March and decided to throw this one in the mix because March is a rainy month. Get it? Sigh.
It’s really too bad I don’t have a lot more of Robert Crais on my reading list. I fell in love with wisecracking private investigator, Elvis Cole, immediately. (My only other Crais is a Joe Pike mystery.) But, back to Elvis Cole. With Cole’s affinity for Disney characters, yoga, and a cat named nothing, he is a bundle of personality and then some. He’s thirty five years old, former military and security, likes to look at the ladies and isn’t above saying something outrageous just to see someone’s reaction. What’s not to love? I took to his sarcastic kindness right away.
When we first meet Elvis, he is about to launch into a new investigation involving a weepy woman’s missing husband and son. All clues lead to Mr. Missing taking off with a sexy young girlfriend until he is found shot to death in the Hollywood Hills. What starts off as a simple missing case has now evolved into a murderous mystery involving high stakes drug deals gone wrong and bad ass thugs who will stop at nothing to regain the upper hand. It is up to Elvis and his silent (in more ways than one) partner, Joe Pike, to find Ellen’s missing son and bring him back, dead or alive. The details are a little dated (these are the days of calling from street corner payphones and Wang Chung hits), but still a good read.
Mousy mom Ellen Lang was a mystery to me. She didn’t get Cole’s joke about the humor of paramedics (keeping one “in stitches”) yet she understood that two years at the “University of Southeast Asia” meant a stint in Vietnam. Throughout the entire book she wasn’t consistent to me. Someone who was consistent and I wanted more of was Joe Pike. The inside flap described him as an enigma and that just scratches the surface of Pike’s personality. Can’t wait to read more about him later.
Quote I liked, “Everything always goes wrong whent the cameras turned away” (p 27).
Author fact: If you ever get the chance to check out the author photo on the back of The Monkey’s Raincoat, please do. Robert Crais could not look any cooler in his over-sized sunglasses, Batman tee-shirt and glowing white kicks. The pose is pretty bad ass, too.
Book trivia: The Monkey’s Raincoat won the Anthony and Macavity Awards.
Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about Monkey’s Raincoat except to include it in a list she called “private eye novels.”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (p 116).
Blackout
Posted: 2019/03/11 Filed under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2019, book lust iii, book review, Brazil, Fiction, Luiz Garcia-Roza, march, murder, mystery Leave a commentGarcia-Roza, Luiz Alfredo. Blackout: an Inspector Espinosa Mystery. Translated by Benjamin Moser. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008.
Reason read: to finish the series started in February in honor of Brazil’s Carnival.
When a crippled and seemingly homeless man is found shot to death in a cul-de-sac in a wealthy neighborhood Espinosa knew from childhood personal intrigue is added to his professional duty to find the killer. The secluded neighborhood is up a very steep hill so why would a vagrant man with only one leg be there, especially late at night in a torrential downpour? Espinosa likes two men for the crime. Both were collecting their cars in the same cul-de-sac after a dinner party. Both men initially lie to Espinosa but one man in particular holds his attention longer. There is something about Aldo. Espinosa and his team slowly turn up the pressure on their prime suspect, showing up at Aldo’s work, following him around town, and repeatedly interviewing his therapist wife. Such scrutiny finally reveals Aldo is having an affair with a coworker. Even after Aldo’s wife is found murdered Espinosa refuses to consider he has an open and shut case. He shows considerable restraint when he does not eagerly arrest the obvious suspect.
Character development is subtle and substantial all at once. The character of Camilla Bruno was intriguing. Was she seducing patients or not? I wish I had more Garcia-Rozas on my Challenge list. I would have liked to see how Espinoza’s personality evolves. His love of books, for example.
One of the best part’s of Garcia-Roza’s writing is his elegant descriptions of the Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods (Copacabana and Ipanema specifically). I found myself playing around with Google Earth just to see how close he came to matching the true landscapes.
As an aside, I just finished watching two documentaries about how an innocent man spent considerable time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit because the state wanted to close their high profile case. Police became fixed on the wrong man and made the evidence fit the guilt instead of looking at every viable suspect out there. Espinosa would have been good on both of these cases. He certainly wouldn’t have rushed to judgement.
Author fact: Garcia-Roza is an academic and has written at least five other books which are not on my Challenge list.
Book trivia: this is the sixth book in the Espinosa series.
Nancy said: Pearl said “mystery fans can rejoice in reading Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s complex novels” (Book Lust To Go p 45).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the very simple chapter called “Brazil” (p 43).
Monstrous Regiment of Women
Posted: 2019/02/21 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust II, Fiction | Tags: 2019, book lust ii, book review, february, Fiction, Laurie King, mystery, series, women 1 CommentKing, Laurie R. A Monstrous Regiment of Women. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Reason read: to continue the series started in January in honor of Mystery month.
When we last left Mary Russell, she was a young woman on the verge of partnering with the incomparable Sherlock Holmes. She had a razor sharp wit, blistering fast powers of observation and deduction which rivaled those of Holmes.
Now in A Monstrous Regiment of Women Mary’s adventures as Holmes’s sidekick continue. She progressively hones her skills as a super sleuth while advancing her academic studies in Oxford. A chance encounter with an old friend leads Mary to Margery Childe, a enthusiastic leader of an organization called the New Temple of God, a bizarre combination of post World War I suffrage activities and feminist Christianity. Childe’s approach to feminism and religion draws Mary into the membership but when a series of murders claim the lives of wealthy female volunteers, Mary cannot help but wonder if she has stepped into a trap. She more than fits the profile of the previous victims: wealthy young woman dedicated with their minds, hearts and purses to the cause.
Best line to quotes, “I knew every movement and gesture of the man, the lines and muscles of his face that were more familiar than my own, the mind that had moulded mine, and I knew that when his thoughts returned from the contemplation of that particular gaze and with a few deft words unearth the topic I’d been trying so desperately to divert him from” (p 71), and “It is very difficult to think with the end of a revolver in one’s face” (p 243).
Author fact: King is still writing about Mary and Sherlock. You can check out her page here.
Book trivia: A Monstrous Regiment of Women covers a little over one month of Mary’s life with Sherlock.
Nancy said: Pearl lets readers know Mary Russell becomes Holmes’s partner in A Monstrous Regiment of Women.
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Ms Mystery” (p 169).
