Death of a Neighborhood Witch

 

Death of a Neighborhood Witch by Laura Levine

Reviewed by Gerti

“Death of a Neighborhood Witch” is another funny mystery from the author of the Jaine Austen mysteries, Laura Levine. However, unlike so many other authors who have gleaned inspiration from the famed British novelist Jane Austen, Laura Levine’s only connection with the original author, her plot, and characters, is that the heroine’s name. It is not even a running joke in this book, as it was in Levine’s first novel, “This Pen for Hire.” Perhaps author Levine has realized that not that many people who read mysteries know who Jane Austen is, or perhaps she feels the joke has run its course. Either way, I don’t mind.

Levine uses the Austen name to reel in new fans, because once they read one of her hysterical books, they will be hooked, as I am. Laura Levine’s comedy background is impressive - Levine wrote for such classic TV shows as “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Laverne and Shirley” and her skills are one display here, as heroine Jaine solves yet another murder, after being the chief suspect first. Her comic antics are laugh-out-loudable, but also plausible, which is what makes them so fun! These comic turns are what I really love about the book, and the series.

However, I dislike that she has changed the personality of her nosey neighbor Lance to make him flaming in this book, and I liked him better when he could just hear through her paper-thin walls. He is positively nasty in this book, and his double-crossing her after they pick out Halloween costumes (he changes her flapper outfit to a gorilla suit at the last minute) is the reason she becomes a murder suspect at all. No one needs friends like that!

I also dislike the frequent references to Jaine’s cat, Prozac, but I understand that is part of Levine’s schtick, just as Joanne Fluke‘s cat is an important character in all her Hannah Swensen food-related mysteries. It is Prozac running into the yard of the neighborhood witch Cryptessa Muldoon (and inadvertently killing her bird!) that sets the wheels of the mystery in motion. Cryptessa is an irascible old lady who in her youth used to star in a short-lived TV series called I Married a Zombie. Think of her as analogous to Morticia Adams or Lily Munster.

Cryptessa is hated by her neighbors for being cranky and nosey, as she takes pictures of her neighbors, who are engaged in some pretty wild stuff for middle-class middle-aged people. So when she is found dead with a “Do Not Tresspass” sign staked through her body, everyone is a suspect, and Jaine has to figure out who done it. In the end, it doesn’t really matter who did it, because the mystery is just an excuse for Jaine to butt into everyone’s lives and find out their dirty little secrets. Lucky for us, Levine’s comic writing talents and easy writing style make it a pleasure to go along for the ride. This book is a hoot!

The Poet

 

The Poet by Michael Connelly

Reviewed by Gerti

Even before I started reading “The Poet”, Stephen King’s gushing forward let me know that it was something special. He praises Michael Connelly for the enticingly clever first line, “Death is my beat”, which comes from the mind of journalist, Jack McEvoy, who is struggling with his emotions after the death of his homicide detective brother, Sean. King praises the book as a marvelous piece of storytelling, and it is, including “a series of surprises that go off like well-placed dynamite charges”. I’ve found those unexpected twists in plot to be typical of Connelly’s writing. Although his comments were written in 2003, King calls this book “the best work Michael Connelly, a prolific writer, has done up to this point, and marks(s) him as an important voice in the genre at the turn of the century.” With high praise like that, what can I say, but that Connelly has written another great book filled with memorable characters and a sizzling storyline?

Connelly’s writing never fails to impress me. Since I was once a journalist, I really like his realistic characterization of newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy, and the problems Jack faces within and without his newsroom. He believes that his twin brother’s death was not a suicide, but has difficulty convincing others that it’s more than wishful thinking. He breaks the big story, however, when his research reveals a pattern to the supposed suicide deaths of several homicide detectives across the country, and the FBI is called in to investigate. Soon, Jack finds himself on the trail of a serial killer called The Poet, with a taste for Edgar Allan Poe (who else?) There is the obligatory romance with a tougher-than-nails female agent, until Jack begins to suspect that she may be behind some of the deaths. But the true killer’s identity is that dynamite blast Stephen King was referring to… so I won’t spoil it for you!

Suffice it to say that I agree with Stephen King that this is a great book, complicated but satisfying. I love the way McEvoy follows the clues wherever they lead, even if they sometimes lead him astray for a while. I even like his relationship with FBI agent Rachel Walling, as it seems more natural here than her “romance” in another book (“The Narrows”) with another of Connelly’s favorite protagonists, sometime LAPD detective Harry Bosch. This book is irresistible, and I finished it in a day, despite it being over 500 pages long. If the writing weren’t so good, I might even have to complain about how much Connelly writes!

I strongly recommend “The Poet” to anyone who likes a crime story where the good guys win, almost. But just like students in college take psychology classes to figure out what is wrong with them, this book shows that the FBI (and journalism – LOL) is riddled with broken people, some of whom can’t be fixed.

Ender's Game

 

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Reviewed by Gerti 

My husband read Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction novel “Ender’s Game” decades ago, and my son a few years ago before the movie of the same name came out. They were both able to scoff when we watched the movie together about how the story was handled by the filmmakers. And while I don’t always trust their taste in literature since it runs more toward science fiction than mine, they were right when it comes to this book. “Ender’s Game” is amazing.

The storyline is dramatic and suspenseful, with a likeable main character, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who even though he is not even 10 at the book’s beginning, is nonetheless frightening in his understanding of the world and other people. He is a “Third” child in a world where families are not allowed to have that many children. He has older siblings named Peter and Valentine, and while Peter is a sadist, sister Valentine has always come to Ender’s aid. This is why Ender feels that someone older and wiser will always come to his aid as he goes through his military training, but we learn later that that is not the case.

I don’t want to ruin the plot for you, but let’s just say that Ender kills people. There are two instances where Ender is being bullied by one child in particular, and that child also has a pack of followers. Ender realizes that if he doesn’t decisively win a fight, the bullying will continue and only get worse. So he cleverly defeats his older boy bullies. But what he doesn’t realize until the novel’s end is that he in fact kills those boys, not as Peter would out of cruelty, but out of necessity, as Ender sees it. And while adults are watching, the other boys could just have easily have killed Ender, and no one would have come to his aid.

In incidents like those, Ender proves his strategic intelligence. He is seen as the last hope for humans in a war against alien creatures called “buggers”. He believes he is a student at Battle School, preparing for the coming war against them. He doesn’t realize till the end that each simulation he goes through, he is actually fighting battles against these telepathic creatures. I did, perhaps because I had already seen the movie, but there were enough clues left by the author that Ender has a special connection with the computers at the academy. He was so extraordinary when playing a video game on the school’s machines that his human handlers had not designed the levels on which he was playing.

This book won the Hugo & Nebula awards for writers of science fiction, and the fights between Ender and the other boys, as well as the battle simulations in the special zero gravity rooms, are brilliantly written, so clear and precise in their language that visualizing them was easy even for someone who prefers Regency Romances like myself. My only critique of the book, and apparently it is a common one, is that Ender would be too young to do all this, starting at age 6. I could be wrong, however, as my teenaged son disagrees, and he probably remembers more clearly how young boys think since he’s closer to that age.

The Pelican Brief

 

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

Reviewed by Gerti

John Grisham introduces us to a female protagonist in “The Pelican Brief” who must be his ideal woman. Darby Shaw is a brilliant law student at Tulane, so smart in fact that she figures out who killed 2 Supreme Court Justices before even the government does. And that puts her life in danger.

But more than that, Shaw is Grisham’s dream girl, because besides having a first class mind, she is a younger woman who is sleeping with her older and frequently drunk law professor, Thomas Callahan. I sense a little wish fulfillment here, as not only is she brilliant and willing to sleep around, but Darby Shaw is also gorgeous. So stunning that she literally turns heads when she walks down the street, although being modest (as if!), she wears oversized sweaters that hide her rockin’ bod.

Not to take away from the great plot, which has Callahan and his best friend being killed as part of the conspiracy from the White House down to protect the man who wanted the Supreme Court Justices killed just to make more money. Darby is constantly moving and of course outsmarting the government and the virtual mobsters who are chasing her at each turn in order to get hold of “The Pelican Brief”, which she wrote. But like Jennifer Garner in “Alias”, Darby is able to change her identity quickly, dying her hair, moving around thanks to all the money she has, and basically getting help from other fellows who are looking to get in her pants, namely the reporter Gray Grantham. I don’t think it’s an accident that his name sounds a lot like John Grisham, either.

It is a great story, and the suspense level is high. She is being stalked by all kinds of characters, including one of the world’s most infamous assassins, Khamel, who actually killed the esteemed jurists from the highest court in the land. But everyone is so swayed by Darby’s looks, Callahan, Grantham and even “all-business” assassin Khamel, that this reads more like a teenager’s daydream than a classic thriller. Don’t get me wrong – I loved it. But the character of Darby Shaw was so obviously written by a man, and a love-starved middle-aged man, that it is comical and detracts from what would otherwise be a great and gripping story.

Grisham’s writing is as good as it usually is, but I find it hard to enjoy even a thriller like this when the book is so hamstrung by juvenile lusts. I like to think that Darby Shaw could have been a slightly dumpy but brilliant law student, and still written “The Pelican Brief”. But perhaps Grisham wrote the book with the movie version already in mind. Although I had to laugh when Julia Roberts was chosen to play the female lead in the film, and then so obviously didn’t dye or cut her hair (as Darby does many times in the book) to escape the bad guys. It’s just another decision by male “artists” who changed the storyline in order to cater to their vision of female beauty.

Plum Lucky

 

Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich

Reviewed by Gerti

I had never read a book by Janet Evanovich before, so picking up this book was a little like getting on what I thought was an elevator and finding out it was a rollercoaster. “Plum Lucky” is a comic thrill ride, filled with quirky characters that were both horrible and hysterical at the same time. I had a great time reading it!

The protagonist is a woman named Stephanie Plum, who works for her uncle in the bail bonds business. The story is told from her point of view, which sounds as though it might limit the amount of information coming in to the reader, but that is by no means true. Stephanie has a funny family, led by her Grandma Mazur, who has just found a duffle-bag filled with money. The problems come in as the original owner of the money, and the man who stole it from him, both try to get their money back from Grandma. She however has taken the windfall, bought a Winnebago, and gone from Trenton to Atlantic City to gamble.

Since Stephanie is good at tracking down scofflaws, her mother enlists her aid in finding her errant grandmother, but Stephanie is “Plum Lucky” to have a bunch of people who help her out. Those people include the other staff of the bail bond business, office manager Connie and former whore now (almost) high fashion model Lula. The cast rounds out with a cop boyfriend for Stephanie, another sexy people tracker named Diesel, a mad mobster named Delvina, a leprechaun thief named Snuggy, and a racehorse headed for the glue factory named Doug. There are people who talk to horses, people wearing tinfoil on their heads, and people shooting rocket launchers. It’s a mad romp as Stephanie and her crew try to bring Grandma back home alive and well, return the money to the mobster, but also have enough money left to pay for Doug’s operation so he isn’t put down.

Does “Plum Lucky” make me want to look for another book by Evanovich? Yes, because it’s so plum crazy, but also very entertaining. No brain cells died in the reading of this book, meaning it was as easy to digest as a bowl full of Cool Whip. And while there was very little mystery involved in the novel, it was as much fun as a girl’s night out. To top it off, I read this St. Patrick’s Day themed book the day before the holiday, so it seemed like Evanovich and I are meant to be. Can’t wait to see if she can keep up the manic action and wit in her next book! I feel “Plum Lucky” to have finally found this author!

The Lost Years

 

The Lost Years by Mary Higgins Clark

Reviewed by Gerti

I am an enormous fan of Mary Higgins Clark, but had seen the book “The Lost Years” before and chosen not to read it because I didn’t like the plot, which seemed to me to be derivative of the currently popular Dan Brown novels. However, now that I am running out of new MHC books, I finally forced myself to read this book, and I’m glad I did. The derivative part involves a recently discovered letter written by Jesus Christ, a priceless artifact which has scholars and archeologists scrambling. But the human aspect of the tale is about Jonathan Lyons, a very human bible scholar who is having an affair with a much younger woman instead of staying home to care for his Alzheimer’s afflicted wife.

Mariah Lyons is their daughter, and she has her own successful career in New York as a financial planner, which is where she met the sleuthing team of Alvirah and Willy Meehan. Clark has had great success with this pair, whose popularity seemingly rivals that of Nick and Nora Charles. I find them amusing, especially since Alvirah has a pin that controls a secret recording device, which seems in a few cases to also be able to record conversations that happened before it gets turned on! However, they are good for a laugh and a welcome diversion, although they don’t really solve the murder mystery here, and seem as confused as the cops.

The main plot, however, is that when Jonathan Lyons is killed, shot to death in his den, there are many suspects, including his lover Lillian and his memory-addled wife. While the police cruelly assume Kathleen Lyons did it and that her strange behavior and memory lapses are all an act, Mariah fights hard to keep her mother out of jail. Four other suspects are the boys who frequently joined the family for meals, including 2 with a crush on Mariah. Greg Pearson and Richard Callahan are those two, with Greg’s crush being long-standing but not reciprocated. Mariah is warming up to Richard, but is he just being charming now to get the Jesus letter, or does he already have it?

I liked the premise and the story Clark weaves, although the ending wasn’t entirely satisfactory for me. I liked protagonist Mariah, whose character seems pretty consistent, but don’t like how her mother’s personality seems to change by the end of the book. She seemed a harmless Alzheimer’s sufferer to start, but when she is later found to have violent episodes, I almost suspected there was someone goading her at the hospital where she was being observed. I also didn’t like Lillian, the mistress, because her personality seemed inconsistent. She is generally a conniving B-word and then we’re asked to be sympathetic to her plight? I don’t think so. “The Lost Years” isn’t a perfect novel, nor is it my favorite by MHC, but it is quite entertaining if you like that sort of stolen treasure genre.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder

 

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Reviewed by Gerti

This is the second book I have read by Joanne Fluke, but it is the first offering in her series of recipe murder mysteries. I was underwhelmed by the last book of hers I read (“The Carrot Cake Murder”), and wondered if the series started out good but weakened over time. The answer to that question is yes!

“Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder” is the first of the Fluke’s Hannah Swensen books, and Hannah is the absolutely likeable owner of a bake shop in Lake Eden, Minnesota called “The Cookie Jar.” In this book, her usual delivery of milk from the Cozy Cow Dairy every morning becomes unusual when she goes into the alley to check on her deliveryman, and finds him shot to death in his truck. Sadly, a bag of her cookies is on the seat next to him!

To save her reputation, and that of her food, Hannah goes the extra mile to find out whodunit, and in the process uncovers a number of other mysteries, including the fact that the football coach beats his wife and that one of the richest men in town was in hock to the man who owns the dairy, where murder victim Ron LaSalle worked. Pretty soon, his boss Max is missing, too, and Hannah works with her policeman brother-in-law to tie up the chocolate chip murder mystery before more bodies show up!

I like this book better than “The Carrot Cake Murder” because Fluke presents more background information here than she does in that book. I gave her writing another try because I suspected showing up late in a series might be like trying to jump into a conversation between two high school friends, because “The Carrot Cake Murder” didn’t present enough info on the characters or town, as though the author felt I should have already known those things. Well here, Fluke tells the whole story of the delicious protagonist Hannah, giving a background on who’s dating whom, what the relationship is between Hannah and her sisters (sorry, Woody Allen), as well as some frightening details on what life is like during a Minnesota winter.

The mystery here in “Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder” is also more substantive than in “Carrot Cake”, with a few more twists and turns, and the whole effort feels more thought out. While the other novel was meringue, this book is as hearty and filling as a loaf of zucchini bread. Once you start reading Fluke’s mysteries (with recipes included!) you’ll want another helping, too.