Read Books This will provide a list of the books I've read with a brief review. Users are blocked, contact me for access. I welcome discussions, but I'm tired of spam.

Queen of the Night is a novel of suspense involving the murder of four people at a formal dinner on an indian reservation in the middle of nowhere. The book tells parallel stories set decades apart, and the stories of several separate individuals whose lives become intertwined.

This is the fourth Brandon Walker book. I hadn’t realized that when I started, or I would have preferred to start with the first. I can’t say if that would have made things clearer.

I thought the book got off to a slow start. The different characters were initially hard to keep apart, and there was nothing to tie the stories together. However, once the stories did connect, I found the pace of the book pick up distinctly and it became much more interesting.

The characters are interesting, if a little flat. Although the murder was unusual, it didn’t seem to matter. I thought some of the information came a bit easy, so I classify the book more as suspense than mystery. The book does provide some interesting insights into the Tohono O’odham tribe, its culture, and a little of its language.

The writing was good, but not great. It had a good flow and was easy to read. I did enjoy the book, but found it difficult to read prior to the murder.

He Shall Thunder in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters

This is the twelfth book in the Amelia Peabody series. In this book, they return to Egypt for another excavation, but little of the book sees any archaeology work. World War I is raging, and events engulf our heros in intrigue and mystery. The Master Criminal is back, and has placed himself in the center of affairs.

As it goes with the series, this book is more about the characters than the events. The main characters continue in their unusual styles to entertain us. Ramses and Nefret are maturing in more ways than one, and insert themselves into the intrigue that surrounds them. As events play out, we learn new and unexpected events and histories of several characters, including the past of The Master Criminal.

This book was better than several of the preceeding ones and is worth the read. This book would stand on its own, except that the reader would lack a good understanding of the characters which provides most of the value of the book.

After a hound show at a hunting club, a man, naturally hated and who mistreats animals, is murdered. Later, a woman turns up as an apparent suicide, and another body surfaces.

I found the book a little difficult to get into, it is book seven in the “Sister” Jane Arnold series, and perhaps earlier books would help understand the characters.

Much of the book is in dialog form. I found the dialog natural and well written, and the people were well formed. There seemed to be too little investigation, I didn’t feel there was adequate information for a reader to actually figure it out.

One thing that did bother me was that the animals talked. Not to humans, or at least the humans didn’t understand them. I tried to interpret it as what humans interpret from their pets, but it did go beyond that. The hounds revealed the smell of the killer. It felt like something I shouldn’t have known, but it didn’t come into the solution.

The solution seemed to appear out of the blue in the late pages of the book. This just isn’t my style of book.

This is the latest in the series of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russel stories by Laurie R. King. It is also the second in a two-part story starting in The Language of Bees. As its predecessor, this is more of an adventure story than a mystery, but the depth of Sherlock Holmes is not lost.

From the previous book, Mary Russel and Sherlock Holmes are split in different parts of Europe, hunted by Lestrade and trying to learn information about Mycroft, who is a major focus in this book.

This book introduces a new character, Robert Goodman, who is a man of the woods with a strong influence of childlike innocence. He seems open, free-spritied, and has an ability to see through complex situations to find a simple unstated truth. He is a fun character who’s past is mysterious and unraveled in part during the story. He plays a counterpart to both Holmes and Estelle, Sherlock’s granddaughter. I would love to see more of this character in the future.

The book is fairly fast-moving and does a good job of keeping your interest. Mary Russel is the primary focus, as we follow her from the northern reaches of Scotland back to London, under pursuit and avoiding Lestrade. Laurie King does a good job of portraying the intelligent sophistication of the characters, and explaining intricacies to the reader without violating the narrator-author illusion.

Overall, the book is thoroughly enjoyable and I am looking forward to the next one.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie won the First Dagger award, which prompted my reading. It is a light mystery story involving an 11-year-old girl who’s father is accused of a murder. She solves the murder mostly through legwork and clever deduction. The story is told in the first person, and does a good job of portraying the thoughts, energy, and goals of a child, at least from the perspective of an adult.

The protagonist, Flavia De Luce, is a precocious child and chemistry wiz. She is the daughter of a lower nobleman living in England. She makes the occasional error, which seem very appropriate for this character.

The supporting characters were mostly flat, but also mostly unimportant to the story. Only the inspector and antagonist really played an important role.

I felt the writing did a good job of describing people and the puzzle. The writing flowed well, although the book was a tad on the light side. There was too much information provided early on, making it a little easy to figure out. But the solution was good and made sense.

Spook Country is a fast-paced book that conceals its subject until late in the book. I was disappointed in what it provided and how things played out.

The book has very short chapters, sometimes only one or two pages in length. For me, this made it difficult to get to know the characters and follow the events.

In the early book, it discusses lots of interesting technology innovations, but these eventually feel like just a way for the author to show his understanding, as they aren’t used in the book. Although the book keeps hinting that they are important. This went a long way to break the illusion of having a narrator vs. the author’s telling the story.

As the book neared its end, reviewing earlier material didn’t feel like it made sense. Some of the character actions early on didn’t feel like they were consistent with what the character should have known at the time. Although this only affected some minor events, it felt like the events were more oriented towards telling a story than internal consistency.

The suspense was good, it was never clear what was going on until the final pages. Although, again, I didn’t feel that the final solution was well thought out. I don’t think anyone would really use the solution they adopted.