The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

       


Review of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors.

My Review:

As luck would have it, I stumbled upon this book at the library the other day when I only came there to use their printer. Ever since I read McCall Smith’s other series (Portuguese Irregular Verbs), I had wanted to give this one a try but I wanted to start it from the beginning.

We begin with our main character Precious Ramotswe, a thirty-something woman living in Botswana who has just inherited a very valuable heard of cattle from her dying father. She sells them and with the proceeds decides to open the first detective agency in her country to have a woman at the helm.

There are a few slight detours into other characters’ lives but on the whole we focus on Mma Ramotswe and her efforts to help her clients sort through the mysteries in their lives.

The story is told in much the same style as McCall Smith’s other series, that is in little vignettes (centering mostly around her cases), but it seemed less humorous too me. And for good reason, I think. Some of these stories are heart-breaking. Others are just mildly amusing.

I don’t know how authentic the characters are compared with the people who actually live in Botswana but the author appears to know more about the place than I do. I know, that’s not saying much but that’s all I can say.

I can say that I liked the character of Precious Ramotswe. She seems to be a truly kind person who cares about the lives of her neighbors and her clients. Reading her back-story of her troubled marriage made me truly sympathetic to her goal of wanting to succeed as the first lady detective in her country.

It was that sympathy that later made me fearful for her life when she got mixed up in the case of a boy who she feared was probably taken by a witch doctor. I can see how she would make an ideal protagonist for a series.

I am still not sure that I will continue to read this series yet or not. There was an enticing ending, though not the kind I expected. And I did like the story.

However, I did not love it. As I said earlier, it was not as funny for me as Portuguese Irregular Verbs but it had its own charm and pacing. I might give the second one a try yet. And I am recommending it as a good light summer read.

Contains: some violence, sexuality

The Sable City

 

Review of The Sable City by M. Edward Mcnally


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: "Matilda Lanai, she of the sickening fall and the miraculous, silt-spitting, quaking resurrection. It might be a sign at that. The Island girl wasn’t stupid. She knew how to work. And she had it inside her to be ruthless. Block had seen it plain as day."

Epic Fantasy, Muskets & Magic. Historical fiction in a fictional world

My Review:

Finally I found a book in the Fantasy genre that picked my interest for this week and it turned out to be a very good one. It is called The Sable City and is apparently part of a trilogy.

We begin our story through the eyes of one Captain Block who is a Miilarkian dwarf. Though the islands of Miilark are populated primarily with humans, Captain Block long ago adapted to the customs of the place (including shaving off his beard as Miilarkian men are all clean-shaven) and made it his home.

Block is tasked with going on a special quest assigned to him by his house, which is how Miilarkian societies are divided, and must choose someone to help him. Rather than searching for the top person for the job, Block seems to be looking for someone rather mediocre and choses Matilda Lanai who is also of the same house.

We are not told what “Tilda” and Block’s mission is and they also keep that information from others that they encounter in their travels. Later it is revealed that they are looking for a man who was long ago exiled from Miilark but they don’t say what they will do when they find them Dugan, a deserter soldier who they team up with on the road, assumes that their intention is to kill the man when they find him.

Dugan is looking for the same man and promises to lead them to the man if they promise not to kill him also. Thus, they come to an uneasy truce.

Soon the mission begins to unravel. They encounter strange giant mosquitos and a knight bent on vengeance against Dugan. And all the while, Tilda wonders why Captain Block has chosen her for this mission when he had his choice of the best of their house, yet she can’t ask him because it is somehow against their culture. How will she continue when she has so many questions and faces so many strange new places? She is a trained assassin but one who has never left her homeland. Everything is so new to her.

This is what the reader will uncover if she or he continues to read. The story is very engrossing as well as unique compared to many Fantasies of today. No stealing from The Lord of the Rings here.

I would love to go on about all the great characters in this one but I would give away too many spoilers I think. Suffice it to say it is well worth the time spent getting to know them and hearing their stories as well as their backstories.

I will end, instead, with a great quote from the story. “Good luck wears off, the Tulls had said. Bad luck lasts forever.” Isn’t that the truth? Well, seems like it anyway.

Contains: Fantasy violence, mild language, sexual innuendo

SpeakEasy

       

Review of SpeakEasy by Lissa Staley

Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: It’s a chick-lit mystery with some history, written collaboratively by over 20 local authors as part of the community novel project of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. In modern-day Kansas, Ronni Long interviews 108 year old Julia, who doubts all the adventures of her long life should be revisited. As the mystery unfolds, Julia’s secrets and Ronni’s lies put both women in danger.

My Review:

This story is easily a first for me both as a reviewer and a reader. The story has multiple authors. A separate author for each chapter in fact. And when I read that (about the different authors) along with the premise of the story, I knew I just had to try this one out.

The premise I alluded to earlier center’s around the lives of two of our main characters: Ronni and Julia. Ronni is a graduate anthropology student writing her dissertation about the Prohibition Era in Topeka when she finds out about Julia Stanford.

Julia is 106 years old, I think (I don’t remember the exact age right now but it is a few years over a hundred), and has worked in a well-known speakeasy of the time called Mike’s Mirage. At the start of our story she quietly resides in a local nursing home where Ronni hopes to interview her for her project.

Of course there are several things that conspire to keep that from happening, the first of which is car trouble. But Ronni quickly finds a ride only to encounter more problems. As we are drawn into the story we find out that no one is what they seem. Nearly everyone has something to hide. We go along for the ride to find out what and why.

The positives on this one are first and foremost the premise and the story. Who doesn’t love a good mystery combined with historical fiction?

The characters are great too. Well most of them anyway. The secrets we later find out about the guys in Pete’s band and Charles as well as Pete’s grandfather seems to stretch credibility. I can understand the main characters having secret lives but in this story practically everyone has a secret and that was a little hard for me to swallow.

Also, narrative voice does seem to suffer a bit from having multiple authors. And some of the continuity isn’t there. In one of the first chapters we see that despite having spent time in the auto shop, Ronni’s car still doesn’t work quite right but then in the next chapter she is seen driving it back to Julia’a with no problems or explanations. It just doesn’t make sense.

Some of the characters even seem to speak differently from one chapter to the next. I realize that they all have something that they are trying to hide so they might act differently from one scene to the next but somehow it just didn’t fit together the way it should.

On the plus side, it was valuable lesson for me that the proverbial “they” are right when they say you can usually distinguish one author’s voice from another, even when they are trying to imitate someone else. I noticed a difference in tone from one author to another in most cases even if they didn’t all stand out like a sore thumb.

Still, I am recommending this book as a good read. It is interesting and worth the time.

Lady Macbeth's Daughter

 


Review of Lady Macbeth's Daughter by Lisa Klein


Overview from www.goodreads.com: Albia has grown up with no knowledge of her mother of her father, the powerful Macbeth. Instead she knows the dark lure of the Wychelm Wood and the moors, where she’s been raised by three strange sisters. It’s only when the ambitious Macbeth seeks out the sisters to foretell his fate that Albia’s life becomes tangled with the man who leaves nothing but bloodshed in his wake. She even falls in love with Fleance, Macbeth’s rival for the throne. Yet when Albia learns that she has the second sight, she must decide whether to ignore the terrible future she foresees—or to change it. Will she be able to save the man she loves from her murderous father?  And can she forgive her parents their wrongs, or must she destroy them to save Scotland from tyranny?

In her highly anticipated follow-up to Ophelia, Lisa Klein delivers a powerful reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, featuring a young woman so seamlessly drawn it seems impossible she was not part of the Bard’s original play.

My Review:

Double, double, toil and trouble boil out the cauldron in this retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth but with a twist. Macbeth and his lady have a daughter.

After being promised by an old hag soothsayer that he will have lots of sons, Macbeth, thane of Moray, flies into a rage when a daughter with a deformed leg is born to him and Lady Grelach (Macbeth). He orders the girl killed and thus begins the descent of the Macbeth’s marriage into the abyss.

Unbeknownst to either parent however, Lady Macbeth’s maid Rhuven saves the child, giving her to her sister to raise her. They name her Albia. She grows up not knowing her true origin and wondering about her family’s connection to the later King Macbeth.

This story is somewhat short as it is a YA Historical Fiction story but that does not mean that it is lacking. The interjection of Albia into the story works very well. I don’t want to spoil the ending but Albia herself becomes part of the story so that she seems as likely as the others to be a character in this play. It is as though she belonged in this story all along and was accidently omitted by the Bard. She fits in that well.

I am not sure however that I liked the witch characters all that much, the others that is. Sure they saved Albia’s life but with the exception of her adopted mother, they always seem to be up to some mischief. They want to tinker with fate and sometimes it seems that they are cruel to other characters when they do it.

I love Albia’s story however and since she features strongly in the plot, I kept reading. I would highly recommend this story to anyone with an interest in the Shakespeare play or Medieval Scotland in general. It also has some beautiful quotes. The only thing that saddened me about was that I found it at a dollar store. I don’t think it deserves to be there.

Contains: some violence and sexually suggestive scenes.


P.S. My apologizes for not posting a review last week. My personal life was crazy and I just didn't get to it.

Dead on Arrival

       


Review of Dead on Arrival by Lori Avocato


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: Romance – and murder – is in the air!

Medical insurance fraud investigator Pauline Sokol likes to keep her feet firmly placed on the ground, but her new undercover assignment has the aero-phobic ex-nurse flying high and her stomach lurching! Compelled by her convictions of right and wrong, she takes off in order to ground a land-and-air ambulance company that’s been doing some rather creative billing, and needs to crash and burn before they soak the insurance company for more.

Pauline’s insides do a real loop-de-loop when the company’s owner is found dead, and Pauline starts to receive threatening phone calls. Suddenly the air feels safer than the ground! If Pauline (and handsome, irritating, fellow investigator Jagger) doesn’t solve this case soon, even a jolt of electricity from the sexy helo-pilot-paramedic ER Dano won’t be enough to revive her. 

My Review:

Part Chick-Lit, part Mystery, Dead on Arrival is funny, romp through one of the cases of Emergency Services worker and Insurance Fraud Investigator, Pauline Sokol. As an RN, her expertise is apparently in demand in the fraud investigation business and this time she’ll be working as an RN for an ambulance company along with her partner-in-crime/mentor, Jagger, in an effort to uncover who is committing fraud with a side of murder.

This one reminded me of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plumb series in that we have an amateur female detective trying to solve a case without the assistance of the police and it is funny but, for the most part, that is where the similarities end (except for the two, make that three, hot guys that she is trying for and the humorous tone).

Our protagonist, Pauline Sokol (not sure what nationality that name is), is desperate to prove to Jagger that she is improving her detecting skills and that she can handle this case by herself but she can’t seem to get totally out from underneath his shadow and expectations. We hear her thoughts as she relates how proud she is that she thought of this or that on her own so I can only assume that in previously novels she had to be told what to do.

Currently being in the medical field myself, I found the details somewhat interesting though I don’t think anyone who is not in the field would find it too boring. I never thought too much about the billing side of things before though and Pauline’s justification to her family that her investigations are important because insurance fraud raises the rates for everyone else made sense. And then you add in a murder and things get a whole lot more dangerous, and interesting.

Meanwhile Pauline’s wisecracks and weak hormones kept me laughing along with the strange cases she encounters in the ambulance rides with “Buzz Lightyear” and “ER Dano.” But when Pauline begins falling for ER Dano even though she has him on her short list of potential suspects will she be able to do the right thing and keep her personal feelings out of the case?

This case as told through Pauline’s eyes was both interesting and entertaining too. I loved some of the other characters as well, especially Pauline’s mom, Stella.

The only downside to this story is some of the profanity was a bit much at times for me and there were some typos. Plus, we are told two times about the time before the story took place when Pauline went out of town and her mother replaced all her underwear with thongs. It was funny the first time, the second time was overkill. Still, a good, lighthearted read.


Contains: profanity (including a couple of f bombs), sexuality, and psycho patients

 

The Puppet Queen

       


Review of The Puppet Queen by Mira Zamin


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: After Selene's homeland falls to the Pari curse, she is forced to must contest for the throne by her insidious fiancé. When rivalries threaten to plunge the country into civil war, Selene must fight through magic and malice—her family's fate hangs in the balance.

The Puppet Queen is a young adult fantasy retelling of Sleeping Beauty infused with the folklore of the Middle East.

My Review:

The story this week is a retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty tale but from the point of view of Sleeping Beauty’s sister, her twin sister. Selene, our main character, is the mischievous twin of the future sleeping beauty. She is constantly venturing outside when she’s not supposed to and getting into trouble.

One day she convinces her sister Auralia to go out with her. That’s when things start to get crazy. Some men from the palace follow them and summarily escort Auralia back to the palace. When she arrives back Selene wonders why her parents, the Emir and Emira of Aquia, never cared when she left the palace on her own but are obviously worried about her sister venturing out.

It is then that she is told the story about the Pari curse that was placed on her family. The night she (and her sister) were born lightning struck their sacred tree and the blame was placed on Selene since it happened at the exact moment that she came out of her mother’s womb. A Pari queen came to her parents but since Selene was somewhere else at the moment, she saw only the one child and assumed that this was the one responsible for the damage to their tree.

Her father tried to reason with the Pari queen but to no avail and Auralia was cursed to hurt her finger on a spindle which would usher in death for everyone in Aquia. The curse was later adjusted by the djinn so that they would only sleep and then only until Auralia’s true love released them with a kiss.

Of course the plot goes on but I will leave the rest for you to read. And it is really a great story worth reading. I loved the character of Selene and how she grows in the novel. Even when her mother is asleep Selene uses her words, and those of other family members to guide her in her quest to remove the curse and rule Aquia.

First, she must fight against an abusive husband and learn to rule in her own right. Later she goes up against his cronies as well as the other Emirs and Emiras in Ghalain with only the help of a few trusted friends as well as the djinn who have helped her family before. She will soon find a way to break the curse, find her sister’s true love and become the woman she was destined to be.

If there is any downside to the story, it would be the lack of editing. Several times I was jarred out of the story by typos and other errors that could have been prevented by the author hiring a good editor. However, it was not enough to make me stop reading. So as long as you’re not too bad of a stickler for these kinds of things and you like Fantasy, you should enjoy the story.

Contains: mild language, violence

Cry Wolf

Review of Cry Wolf by J. Carson Black


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: Laura Cardinal: Packs a SIG Sauer P226 9mm. Investigates homicides in small towns that have limited resources. Brings justice to murder victims--and to their killers. Laura’s job description: Criminal Investigator with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. But maybe it should just say “Troubleshooter”.

Tell me no lies.

Laura and her aspiring-film-director partner, Anthony, catch a homicide case where nothing is as it appears. When pathological liar Sean Perrin is found dead in his car at a trailhead in scenic Madera Canyon, he leaves behind a skein of lies and half-truths that are impossible to untangle. From violent death in a sordid motel room to a high-end prostitution ring in Las Vegas, Laura and Anthony follow Sean’s trail across a landscape of broken dreams and convincing lies—until they confront the true evil behind the mask.

My Review:

This week’s review comes to us courtesy of a Nook book that I bought for .99 cents which features twelve mystery/thriller novels. The first one was Don’t Know Jack which I reviewed a few weeks ago. I enjoyed Cry Wolf by J. Carson Black much more.

It was also one of a series, though strangely, the last one instead of the first one. It seems like most of the cheap or free books on the Barnes & Noble website nearly always feature the first book in the series.

Our protagonist on this one is one Laura Cardinal, homicide detective for some police department near Tucson. Her blissful Saturday with her man is interrupted by the call to duty when Las Vegas resident Sean Perrin gets himself murder in nearby Madera Canyon.

She and her partner, Anthony, a screenwriter in training, must now unravel the mess of lies that Mr. Perrin has told about himself. For example, was he really a Navy Seal? Did he really have a model for a wife? Well, you get the idea.

It turns out that at least some of Mr. Perrin’s stories were true but which one got him killed? While searching for the answer which seems always just out of reach for Laura, she has to contend with the occasional appearances by her former, deceased, mentor, Frank. He points her in the right direction but he can’t solve the case for her.

This story seemed short to me but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I appreciate how the author wisely didn’t load it down with a bunch of crap just to make it longer. The ending was different from what I expected but not unlikely, as were the characters.

I recommend it as a great read for summer, light and entertaining. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to enjoy this one.

Contains: some language and sexuality