A bit of this and that

BY HERESIES DISTRESSED: DAVID WEBER
Book 3 in series.......Now the battle for the soul of the planet Safehold has begun. The Kingdom of Charis and the Kingdom of Chisholm have joined together, pledged to stand against the tyranny of a corrupt Church. The youthful Queen Sharleyan of Chisholm has wed King Cayleb of Charis, ..... and has found in Cayleb's arms the love she never dared hope for in a 'marriage of state. ' In Cayleb's cause, his defiance of the ruthless Group of Four who govern mother Church, she has found the task to which she can commit her mind and her courage. It is a cause for which she was born. Yet there are things Sharleyan still does not know. .... Secrets like the true story of humanity on Safehold. Like the intricate web of lies, deception, and fabricated 'religion' which have chained humanity for almost a thousand years..... Like the existence of a young woman, Nimue Alban, nine hundred years dead, whose heart, mind, and memories live on within the android body of the warrior-monk she knows as Merlin.

I thought this might be a trilogy and I'd be reading an ending but it was not to be. I have no idea how many books will be in this series but I will hang in til the end although I find myself doing some skip-reading. You need to read these in order for anything to make full sense.


QUEEN OF THE FLOWERS: KERRY GREENWOOD
Crime strikes close to home in this latest installment of Greenwood's charming series (The Castlemaine Murders, etc.) featuring 1920s Aussie amateur sleuth, Phryne Fisher. While the town of St. Kilda prepares for the 1928 Flower Parade, Phryne's adopted daughter, Ruth, disappears after learning her father's identity from her birthmother, Anna Ross. Phryne adds Ruth to her caseload, which coincidentally includes the search for another missing young woman, Rose Weston. As with other series entries, the solution to the mystery is secondary to the author's clever prose and gift for characterization. Phryne carries the action ably, even if her resourcefulness and unflappability sometimes border on the superhuman. The engaging cast of familiar supporting characters—including Phryne's maid, Dot, and her Chinese lover, Lin Chung—will delight longtime fans, but newcomers who like their crime on the lighter side can jump in without any trouble.

Fast easy reading and it's not really necessary to read them in order although as long as you aren't a stickler for fitting all the characters into the narrative..ie Ruth.


STILL WATERS: JOHN MOSS
Review
"Moss spins a mystery that sparkles with dynamic setting … with vivid pictures, resonant insights and a spin on mystery storytelling that is as multilayered as it is beautiful, Moss teases us down the path to resolution. Still Waters is a mystery told by a storyteller par excellence and is not to be missed." (Don Graves, The Hamilton Spectator ) This is the review I read and prompted my putting in a reserve at the library.

This psychological mystery introduces David Morgan and Miranda Quin, two maverick and culturally sophisticated Toronto police detectives. When a man is found dead in a garden pond in the wealthy heart of Toronto's Rosedale neighbourhood Morgan is lead into speculations about Japanese ornamental koi fish, and Quin into a chilling sequence of revelations that could destroy her. But the real mystery begins not with the deceased but with a woman who walks onto the crime scene and without emotion declares herself to be the victim's mistress. From that point on everything changes, even the past.


GRAVE DOUBTS: JOHN MOSS

"Summertime demands a really good, grisly mystery, and John Moss, in his [second] novel featuring Toronto detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan, delivers the goods ... The plot is really solid here, but it's also fun to follow the cops along the byways of Toronto and then up to Georgian Bay. Grave Doubts is a great weekend-at-the-cottage novel."- - Margaret Cannon Globe and Mail Jun 13 "... John Moss has produced an elliptical dance of words ... a couple of hundred pages of puzzlement, suspicion, illumination and confusion that take Quin and Morgan all over the Southern map ... For those willing to suspend their disbelief from very high rafters, however, and who are intrigued by slippery depictions of shifting relationships, radical demonstrations of loyalties and disloyalties, and lots of interesting allusions and bits of ancillary information, it has a kind of hypnotic delight." -- The London Free Press Jun 13
The discovery of two headless corpses dressed in colonial clothing and locked in a grisly embrace draws Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan of the Toronto Police Service into a Gothic mixture of sex and death that ultimately threatens their survival.
What if the difference between good and evil is only perception?

Enjoyed the first so went right for the second. A bit of a drawn out finish that left me soggy but worth sticking with it. I'll watch for more of their adventures. I like Quin and Morgan.


THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE: ALAN BRADLEY
In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

Reading the reviews in the paper pays, this was another book I'd have missed otherwise. Quirky and fun. I like Flavia and her sisters.

5 books