It has been a misty, moisty very sleepy week around here. It’s been the kind of weather that makes a human want to curl up and take a nap. Apparently is also has the same effect on cats, because here’s Tuna shutting the whole world out while he naps on the cushy blankie. With a side – literally – of his sister Luna in the background doing the same.
I picked up Unbound II because there’s an Ink & Sigil story in it by Kevin Hearne. It’s the origin story for “Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite” and I’ve been terribly curious about just how she got that name. Now I know. I also picked up The Last Unicorn because it looks like I’m going to be reviewing The Way Home by the same author which includes two Last Unicorn novellas. I’m sure I read The Last Unicorn at some point, by that point was probably 50(!) years ago and I don’t remember a thing. It would probably help the review if I did. At least a bit.
I see the words “Ho Ho Ho” and in my head there’s a deep voice and a jolly old man in a Santa suit booming “Merry Christmas” even though I don’t personally celebrate the holiday.
Hanukkah begins in the evening of Sunday, December 18 this year and lasts until Boxing Day, December 26 in case you were wondering. I certainly was and I had to go look it up. We kind of celebrate “December” at Chez Reading Reality, and excuse to give each other a present – if we can think of anything either of us wants. Which means that the actual day isn’t marked as it was when I was a kid.
Back to “Ho-Ho-HO!” If you’re looking for a cute grown-up book about Santa – or at least about people dressed as Santa – take a look at A Wish for Winter by Viola Shipman.
I’m digressing again, aren’t I? But there’s something about the holiday season that makes us all a bit scatterbrained, isn’t there?
Do you feel like you’re pulled in all directions during the holidays? Can’t wait to get back to “normal”? Or are you able to just “let it go” along with “letting it snow”?
Tell us how you feel for a chance at our usual holiday prize – and all year ’round – the winner’s choice of a $10 Amazon Gift Card or $10 in books.
"One of the year's most delightful rom-coms."—New York Times bestselling author Julia London on The Dachshund Wears Prada The perfect romcom for dog lovers! Pets of Park Avenue is the story of a self-confessed hot mess who learns that life is more fun when things don't go according to plan. What do you do when The One is also the one who broke your heart?
Self-proclaimed hot mess Scout Myers is determined to prove she’s finally got her act together. Raised by grandparents who saw her as her wayward mother’s wayward daughter, Scout’s used to being written off. So when the opportunity for a promotion arises at Paws in the City, the talent agency where she works, Scout is desperate to rise to the occasion. With shared custody of her little sister also on the line, Scout can’t afford a single mistake…like suddenly needing a canine stand-in for an important photoshoot. Luckily (or not) she knows the owner of the perfect pup replacement: the estranged husband she walked out on years ago.
On the surface, it appears Lane Halliday’s life has been blissfully drama free without Scout, but she suspects her handsome-as-ever not-quite-ex-husband doth protest too much. Working together even feels like old times—except for all that lingering, unresolved tension. But Scout’s not sure she’s ready to confront the reasons she left Lane, and when their plans to finalize the divorce become very real, Scout starts to wonder whether second chances might be worth a little hot mess. Paws in the CityBook 1 - The Dachshund Wears Prada
My Review:
Pets of Park Avenue combines a second chance at love romance with a bit of a comedy of errors wrapped around the paws of an adorably fluffy little Bichon Frisé who seems to be experiencing nearly as much sad fluff as her people.
Both the one she still has and the one that only thinks she got away.
This followup to The Dachshund Wears Prada follows the second member of the Paws in the City media team, that self-proclaimed hot mess – and Isla’s best friend – Scout Myers. When the small agency’s star Bichon Frisé, Sasha, is accidentally dyed hot pink in the middle of a big opportunity for both the dog and the agency, Scout is the one sorta/kinda in charge of their canine charge.
At least, she’s the one who feels responsible for the accidental dye-job. Because being held responsible for every accident that happens in her vicinity and taking the blame for all the fallout is just what her cold, rule-bound, hidebound grandparents have conditioned her to do.
Theirs was not a house in which the phrase “shit happens” was ever even uttered, let alone believed. If Scout was nearby, it must have been her fault – whether it was or not. Because Scout was just like her mother, their wayward daughter, and had to be straight-jacketed into proper behavior no matter how much it broke her spirit.
Reining Scout in was the only way her grandparents could hope to save Scout’s little sister Lizzie from her terrible influence. So they did. At every opportunity. Until they kicked her to the curb at age 21. For not being properly obedient and respectful and for not following every last one of their stifling and arbitrary rules.
So Scout feels responsible for the temporarily pink Bichon, and needs a well-behaved substitute until the dye and the resulting buzz-cut grow out. Which is where her not-exactly-ex-husband, and his suddenly not-exactly-perfectly-behaved Bichon come in.
Scout ran out on both the man and the dog five years ago because, well, reasons. Reasons that they never told each other. They were together for one glorious month and have been separated for five years of limbo but Scout needs a dog just like Sasha, and Twinkle Stardust (yes, really) is her best chance to fix what’s broken.
With the agency and possibly with herself.
What she really needs is to either put her past behind her or, perhaps, put it back in front of her again. She’s a bit older, possibly wiser, and trying to be more responsible. Because she wants custody of her teenage sister. Because she needs to start adulting.
And because she’s never found anyone to remotely match the one that she left behind.
Escape Rating B: The thing about Pets of Park Avenue that made this one so interesting was that it’s Scout’s discovery that she doesn’t need to get it together because she’s had it together all along. It’s also about the difference between what is said and what is meant, and that’s a sad and often hard lesson to learn.
In other words, Pets of Park Avenue isn’t as light and fluffy as one of the Bichon Frisés. I missed The Dachshund Wears Prada, at least the social media account that both establishes Isla as a media influencer AND gets her in so much trouble. Because the voice of the Dachshund that Isla puts out there is wry, funny and so very sharply observant that it gives the book a lighter tone than this one in spite of just how much Isla also needs to overcome.
Scout IS a hot mess in this book, but not for any of the reasons she thinks she is. She’s a hot mess because that’s all she’s ever been told she can be, and she’s taken that lesson so very much to heart. Throughout the story, it seems as if her grandparents are the villains of the piece. And they kind of are.
But they also kind of aren’t. Or at least, they didn’t intend to be. But what they meant versus what they said and how they said it, how much they saw AND treated Scout as if she was a carbon copy of her mother, sent their relationship and Scout herself off in some terrible directions that she spends the whole story dealing with.
The second-chance-at-love romance was, at first, heartbreaking. But as the story continues, they are both forced to acknowledge that they were just too young and too impulsive. The bitter turns to sweet as they look back at themselves and look now at each other in order to figure out what direction they need to go, together or apart. Either way would have made a satisfying ending, but I preferred the direction they chose – if only to give Twinkle Stardust her own happy ever after.
So The Dachshund Wears Prada had a whole lot more lightness in it. Pets of Park Avenue was leavened with a bit more bittersweet. I’m looking forward to seeing what just what kind of canine and human drama we’ll get in Confessions of a Canine Drama Queen next summer!
From acclaimed author Tracy Clark comes a page-turning mystery featuring hard-boiled Chicago detective Harriet Foster, who’s on the hunt for a serial killer with a deadly affinity for redheads.
When a young red-haired woman is found brutally murdered in downtown Chicago, one detail stands out: the red lipstick encircling her wrists and ankles.
Detective Harriet Foster is on the case, even though she’s still grieving the sudden death of her partner. As a Black woman in a male-dominated department, Foster anticipates a rocky road ahead acclimating to a new team—and building trust with her new partner isn’t coming easily.
After another victim turns up with the same lipstick markings, Foster suspects she’s looking for a serial killer. Through a tip from a psychiatrist, Foster learns about Bodie Morgan: a troubled man with a twisted past and a penchant for pretty young redheads with the bluest eyes. As Foster wades into Morgan’s sinister history, the killer continues their gruesome assault on Chicago’s streets.
In her desperate race to catch the murderer before they strike again, Foster will have to confront the darkest of secrets—including her own.
My Review:
When we first meet Harriet Foster, we know two things. She’s a Chicago cop, and she’s a survivor. And at the moment, the one is inextricably linked to the other, both in the sense that it’s being a cop that gives her the tenacity to keep on living, and it’s being a cop that makes it necessary to have that sheer, driven stubbornness in the first place.
It’s late in the fall, it’s Chicago, it’s cold, and she’s having a damn hard time getting herself across the threshold of her new precinct. She’s just back from eight weeks leave after the senseless killing of her son, the subsequent death of her marriage and the suicide of her police partner in the parking lot of her previous precinct.
She’s thrown right into the deep end as soon as she gets through the door. Her new ‘partner’ is the department’s hard case, and they’ve just caught one. A naked, dead, butchered woman badly hidden under a pile of leaves in a park just off the Riverwalk.
It’s a spectacular mess, the scene is already a spectacle, and the lookie-loos and media are already out in force right along with CPD. Her partner is just so sure that the killer is the young black man who was found sleeping nearby with a single bloodstain on his lapel. Harriet is pretty sure it wasn’t him, because if he’d been the murderer there’d be way more than a single bloodstain on his clothes. He’d be drenched in the stuff.
And she’s certainly unwilling to rush to any judgment. Not just because the young man is the same age as her dead son. Harriet Foster just isn’t the kind of cop who rushes to judgment – even on her worst day.
Which this is already shaping up to be. Worst day, worst week, worst month, worst case. Someone is out there eviscerating redheads, managing to stay just one step ahead of the cops. The news media are baying for somebody’s blood and City Hall is looking for a scapegoat.
But Harriet Foster keeps putting one step in front of the other, one long day and even longer night after the other, using the frustrations of the case to keep her own demons at bay. In the end, she’ll at least have put one monster to rest – even if it’s not one of her own.
Escape Rating A+: This one absolutely had me from the very first page. While some of that was because I can still see most of the settings in my head, it was mostly because of Harriet Foster herself. She’s trapped like an insect in amber, still processing – slowly and badly – her recent losses and hoping that something in going back to the job is going to get her through the day and the one after that and the one after that.
At the same time, she is exactly the kind of protagonist that I read mysteries for, in that she’s questioning and human and oh-so-capable all at the same time. It’s so clear that she hasn’t remotely got her life figured out, but once the case begins she’s all there for it.
That she’s experienced enough to know when to push back on a shit-talking so-called partner and when to suck it up and stand in solidarity with the rest of the cops in her new cop shop just felt right.
And then there’s the case, which is just the type of twisted, humdinger that reminded me so much of the kind of case that Eve Dallas ends up trying to unravel in the In Death series. The bodies are gruesome, the clues are few, the perpetrator is clever and the media vultures are circling.
At the same time, we have alternating perspectives from people who might, or might not, be involved in the mess, from childhood memories of a murderous daddy to adult children trying to pretend they’re normal to a rogue psychologist looking for her next star psychopath. They bring both perspective and confusion to the mystery, allowing the real perpetrator to hide in plain sight.
As much as the case reminded me of many in the In Death series, Harriet Foster only resembles Dallas in her dogged determination to solve the mystery and put the guilty party either away or under. There’s no romance even hinted at here and there shouldn’t be. Harriet’s personal story is about her determination to find a way forward and to spot the light at the end of her personal tunnel of grief. She’s far from there yet, which bodes well for future entries in the series.
What we have in Hideis a case of one person unraveling, and one person, well, raveling. When the murderer starts coming apart, their descent is swift and sprays lots of collateral damage. Harriet Foster, on the other hand, is oh-so-slowly raveling herself back together, one day, one clue, and one paper clip at a time. And her progress, both on the case and on herself, is utterly absorbing to watch.
Hide is the first book in what looks to be a compelling mystery suspense series. While it isn’t officially out until January 1, it is available NOW to Amazon Prime members as one of the Amazon First Reads books this month. So if you are as impatient to read it as I was there is a way to get it this month.
The second book in the series, Fall, will be out one year from now. And I can’t wait to see how and what Harriet will be doing next winter. In the meantime, if you’re on the hunt for a series with a similar vibe, take a look at Harriet’s British counterpart, Inspector Anjelica Henley, solving the case of The Jigsaw Man.
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.
Officially, winter won’t be here in the Northern hemisphere until the day after this hop closes. The official start of winter this year is December 21, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. But depending on where you live, it might feel like winter is already here. It might even feel like winter has been here for quite some time by this point.
Winter usually deals Atlanta a glancing blow, which is fine by me. Today feels a bit like a Seattle winter in that it is gloomy, chilly, wet, rainy and has been for several days. But climate’s what you expect, weather is what you get, and wet and chilly in the mid-40s is a considerable improvement over snow showers in the low-30s as it is in Anchorage right now. Especially considering that that represents a warm-ish front so it can snow.
I don’t miss that at all.
What about you? What represents a perfect winter day – or even just a typical one? Answer below for your chance at Reading Reality’s regular blog hop prize, the winner’s choice of a $10 Amazon Gift Card or $10 in books.
The hotel was her refuge, but scandal is afoot—and a killer stalks the halls in this charming series debut perfect for fans of Rhys Bowen and Ashley Weaver.
It’s 1958 and Evelyn Elizabeth Grace Murphy has not left the Pinnacle Hotel in fourteen months. She suffers from agoraphobia, and what’s more, it’s her father’s hotel, and everything she needs is there. Evelyn’s always been good at finding things, she discovered her mother dead in a Manhattan alleyway fifteen years earlier. Now she’s finding trouble inside her sanctuary. At a party for artist Billie Bell, his newest work is stolen, and Evelyn’s fake boyfriend (and real best friend), movie star Henry Fox, is accused of the theft. But just as Evelyn sets out to prove Henry’s innocence, she finds Billie Bell dead.
The murder weapon links the crime to the hotel’s chief of security. But why would he use a knife with his initials on the handle? With her beloved home in disarray, Evelyn joins up with hotel employee (and her secret crush) Mac Cooper to get to the bottom of the case.
As Mac picks locks and Evelyn snoops around the hotel, they discover the walls around them contain more secrets than they previously knew. Now, Evelyn must force herself to leave the hotel to follow the clues—but when she and Mac set off to chase a lead, their car crashes and they barely escape with their lives. Someone snipped Evelyn’s brake lines, and now the stakes have become dangerously high.
Evelyn’s knack for sleuthing—and her playful imagination—are always hard at work, and she throws an elaborate party at the hotel where every guest is a suspect. But will the killer emerge from the glamorous lineup? If not, Evelyn just might find herself…next in line for murder.
My Review:
The socialite of the title, is Evelyn Elizabeth Grace Murphy, the daughter of the owner of the Pinnacle Hotel in Manhattan. Her penchant for finding missing items, such as a diplomat’s daughter or a supposedly stolen necklace lead to the search for a murderer when that murder occurs in her home and sanctuary – her father’s hotel where she lives in a top-floor suite designed and decorated just for her.
And her little purse dog Presley. Mustn’t ever forget Presley.
As a socialite, Evelyn lives to be seen, especially with her society page boyfriend, actor Henry Fox. Which is a bit of a problem, because Evelyn hasn’t left the Pinnacle in months. She can, but she can’t. When she was a little girl, she found her mother’s dead body just outside the hotel. The trauma has been drawing her in ever since, to the point where agoraphobia keeps her from leaving her sanctuary – the Pinnacle.
But Evelyn’s whole world teeters on a tightrope. Her romance with Henry Fox is a ruse, concocted of her need to be featured in the society columns and his need to keep the world from discovering that he’s gay. They’re the best of friends.
Howsomever, Evelyn is also friends with Mac Cooper, one of the bellhops at her father’s hotel. Mac walks the dog, keeps Evelyn up with all the hotel gossip, and is entirely too good at more than a little bit of kiss and canoodle.
So when a high-profile artist is murdered in the hotel, Mac is the perfect person to help her stage distractions, pick the locks of rooms the police have closed off, and generally assist her with her own investigation into the crime. Because Henry Fox is the prime suspect, at least until the ham-fisted police latch onto someone even better – the hotel’s head of security.
But Evelyn isn’t going to let things rest. The sanctity of her sanctuary must be restored, and she’s just the woman to do it. All she has to do is juggle Mac, Henry and whatever other secret Henry is keeping long enough to figure out whodunnit.
Escape Rating B: The Socialite’s Guide to Murder isn’t quite a cozy, but it is a light and bubbly mystery that has much of the same appeal. The Pinnacle, while not a small town, does a surprisingly good job of functioning as one for the purpose of the story.
Evelyn as a heroine embodies both the “poor little rich girl” and “bird in a gilded cage” tropes. What’s a bit different is that her cage is completely self-imposed. There’s a lot of trauma hiding behind her ditzy, spoiled persona. She’s aware that the ditziness is an act, although she’s a bit oblivious about just how spoiled she is.
Which is reflected in her relationship with Mac. They may be, probably are, falling in love with each other. And it is more than a bit frothy and bubbly, but there’s an undertone to it that gave me more than a bit of pause while reading. There’s a rather vast power imbalance between them as she’s paying him $10 or $20 every single time he does something for her. $10 doesn’t sound like that much, but it’s the equivalent of $100 in today’s terms. It adds up to a lot of money. She’s initially not at all sure whether he’s her friend because he likes her or because she’s paying him and it doesn’t feel like she worries about it nearly enough.
(If that shoe were on the other foot it would be an extremely squicky situation. It’s not less squicky because of the role reversal even if it’s intended to feel that way.)
Once I was able to let my willing suspension of disbelief set all of that aside, the mystery itself is a lot of fun. I did guess that the initial art heist that kicks things off wasn’t exactly what it seemed, but the murder that followed had plenty of tasty red herrings to fish for and tempting would-be clues to sent this reader on many an enjoyable wild goose chase.
The setting of the mystery within the confines of this great and grand hotel was a treat. It still felt like a cozy in a setting that isn’t really cozy at all. More like elegant and opulent, and it was a pleasure to read the way it all worked and how Evelyn’s world came together.
So the mystery is appropriately puzzling, the setting is different in a delicious way and the heroine and her little dog are fun to follow. If you like your mysteries with more than a bit of bubble and froth The Socialite’s Guide to Murder is a lovely little read.
And for anyone who enjoyed The Three Dahlias, Evelyn Elizabeth Grace Murphy the amateur sleuth would fit right into their crime solving shenanigans – once she is able to leave the Pinnacle. Maybe in the next book in the series.
It’s a kind of misty, moisty weekend here in the ATL. Here’s a picture of part of the clowder watching the world drip by.
That’s Lucifer on the left and George and Luna on the right. This particular configuration gets along well. George and Luna are buddies and nobody messes with Lucifer. He’s the smallest of the five cats, but he has a tremendous amount of presence. And he was here first so the rest of them defer to his demonic majesty.
Between The Twist of a Knife and A World of Curiosities this week, I ended up with some mystery television to watch. Magpie Murders was terrific. I won’t say it was better than the book, but it certainly made terrific use of its new medium. Three Pines, on the other hand, was not bad, and certainly better than an earlier attempt, but I have some reservations. They did a good job casting Gamache, but so much of what makes him so fascinating in the books is going on beneath the surface, which is not something that TV does well at all. But I’m curious enough to see how the series turns out.
I did say I was going to pick up the rest of the Merry Folger series, didn’t I? I really liked Death on a Winter Stroll because I really liked Merry as a character so I expect her series to be a great comfort read.
But speaking of comfort reads, well, sorta/kinda, I bought A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny earlier this week because I adore the Gamache series, even if – or especially because – it uses its very comforting characters to tell some quite disturbing stories – as was the case this time.
The book I’m most looking forward to in this stack – since I’ve already read and reviewed the Gamache – is City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita. It seems to be based, at least a bit, on Whittier Alaska, which really is a city where all the inhabitants live under one roof. What a great place to set a mystery!
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's beloved series.
It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge.
But something has.
As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines.
But to what end?
Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?
As Chief Inspector Gamache works to uncover answers, his alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered. In it the man describes his terror when bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. Every word of the 160-year-old letter is filled with dread. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it up.
As the bricks are removed, Gamache, Beauvoir and the villagers discover a world of curiosities. But the head of homicide soon realizes there’s more in that room than meets the eye. There are puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge.
In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into their world. Into their lives. And into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.
My Review:
Armand Gamache’s chickens come home to roost – and lay rotten eggs all over Gamache’s past cases, his present peace, and even Three Pines itself in this 18th book in the series.
A World of Curiosities is a story about reckonings, about settling up accounts and finding out that one has been found wanting. Even Armand Gamache. And that all of his mistakes, omissions and oversights have followed him home and put his family and friends in danger.
The roots of this story go deep, back to events that have been previously touched on but not described in detail, back to Armand’s own early cases as well as to the horrific case where he found Jean-Guy Beauvoir languishing in the basement of an outlying Sûreté office. Because Jean-Guy, being himself, was considered insubordinate. Because he wouldn’t play along.
A case that initially seems to be at the heart of it all. And is. But isn’t. But is after all. Again, one of Gamache’s oversight chickens that has come home to roost and shit all over Three Pines.
At first it all seems like an interesting bit of curiosity. A hidden room is found over the bookstore. It’s been bricked over – actually stoned over – for well over a century, lost to time and hidden from sight until a very old but newly discovered letter makes its way from an archive, to a dead woman, to the descendant of the man who bricked that room over all those years ago.
It’s not a straightforward path, rather a convoluted set of fits and starts that seems to have been in motion for years of its own. As was the intent of its patient and painstaking creator. A man who has been plotting his revenge against Armand Gamache for decades, and now has the perfect pawns in place to make Gamache pay.
Or so he believes.
Escape Rating A+: I know I’m not conveying this one well at all. Obviously, I loved it. I was also a bit disturbed by it, because all of the past crimes that lead up to this present danger were very disturbing.
The story opens at a combined commemoration and graduation ceremony at the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. The massacre was a real event, a 1989 mass killing of female engineering students by a man who was outraged by women moving into what were formerly male-only preserves.
In addition to bringing this horrific crime back into the light, it also serves as a way of introducing two of the important characters of this entry in the series, two young women, Harriet Landers and Fiona Arsenault, who both graduate as engineers during the ceremony.
It’s Fiona who links back to the earlier case, and it’s that earlier case that is so very disturbing. Because it began as a missing persons case, which turned into a murder case, which led to the discovery that Fiona and Sam Arsenault, ages 13 and 10 respectively, were being pimped out by their now-dead mother. And the damage that was done to them, that echoed through their lives and their personalities from those foundational experiences to the present day.
One of the questions that echoes down through this entire book is the question about not whether they were permanently damaged by their early experiences but just how much they were damaged and whether they can ever be something that might be considered saved or rehabilitated. That Gamache believes that Sam is the true sociopath while Jean-Guy believes it is Fiona doesn’t alter the question about whether either of them can contain their true natures well enough not to spend their lives harming themselves, each other and everyone around them.
Part of what makes the story such a riveting tangle, however, is the way that the focus is solidly on the Arsenaults and the questions about will they, won’t they, did they, don’t they that the true evil hiding in plain sight isn’t even glimpsed until very late in the game.
A World of Curiosities, like so many of the books in this marvelous series, was just about a one-sitting read for me. I started it at dinner and finished just before bed. Which was after midnight and the only reason it was before bed was that something about the story shook me up enough that I didn’t want to take it to bed with me. It was also one of the rare cases with this series where I did thumb to the end about midway through, not because I needed to find out whodunnit – I was happy to follow that trail with Gamache – but because I needed the reassurance that all my friends, the characters who have come to inhabit the series and the village of Three Pines, were going to come out of this alive if not unscathed.
I also realized that the characters are what I love this story for, rather than the process of the investigation and the sheer brilliance of the detectives. Not that Gamache and his colleagues are not generally brilliant, but that’s not the point for me. Every book in this series is such a deep character study, of Gamache, his family and friends, the villagers, and of course the perpetrators and even the red herring characters. Not that forensics and all the trappings of modern policing don’t play a part in the ultimate solution, but Gamache solves crimes by knowing and understanding the people involved and that’s what makes the series so compelling.
While the mystery in A World of Curiosities is a page-turning twisting, turning, swirling – and occasionally stomach-churning whodunnit, the real charm of the series is in its characters, and the best way to get every single drop of that charm is to start at the very beginning with Still Life.
Now I have a year at least to wait for the hoped-for 19th book in the series. In the meantime, there’s a brand new TV series titled Three Pines, based on the novels, that begins tonight on Amazon Prime. I know what I’ll be watching this weekend!
Current Giveaways:
Blog Recap:
Coming This Week:
Pets of Park Avenue (Paws in the City, #2) by 
This followup to 
But they also kind of aren’t. Or at least, they didn’t intend to be. But what they meant versus what they said and how they said it, how much they saw AND treated Scout as if she was a carbon copy of her mother, sent their relationship and Scout herself off in some terrible directions that she spends the whole story dealing with.
Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1) by 
Hide is the first book in what looks to be a compelling mystery suspense series. While it isn’t officially out until January 1, it is available NOW to Amazon Prime members as one of the Amazon First Reads books this month. So if you are as impatient to read it as I was there is a way to get it this month.
The Socialite's Guide to Murder by 
Current Giveaways:
Blog Recap:
Coming This Week:
A World of Curiosities (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #18) by 
Armand Gamache’s chickens come home to roost – and lay rotten eggs all over Gamache’s past cases, his present peace, and even Three Pines itself in this 18th book in the series.
Escape Rating A+: I know I’m not conveying this one well at all. Obviously, I loved it. I was also a bit disturbed by it, because all of the past crimes that lead up to this present danger were very disturbing.