Read Recently — December 2019 — A rock of solidifying darkness

Bookman Dead Style: a Dangerous Type mystery by Paige Shelton

Sequel to To Helvetica and Back

To be honest, I kind of forget about this series when I’m not actually reading the books. This is my way of saying that it may be a while before I get to the third book.

As the book opens, our hero Clare Henry is in “The Rescued Word”, the shop she runs with ther Grandfather (with part-time help from her neice Marion, who is expected to be a snowboarding star at the Winter Olympics soon), where they repair typewriters, fix books, and occasionally print stuff on the old press they keep in the back. It is winter, and time for the definitely not the Sundance Film Festival Star City Film Festival — the serial numbers get filed off a lot of things in this one. Star City is in Utah, but their film festival is not Sundance (though Sundance is used as a code word at one point), and there are polygamists who live around the Star City area, but they are not ever called Mormons (not even rogue Mormons). I get this; no one wants to be sued, but to me at least this just makes the whole thing stand out even more.

Clare and Marion are dealing with handsome movie star Matt Bane, in town for the festival and in the store to order some personalized cards for use in sending some thank-yous. Summoned to a phone call, he arranges to come back and pick up the cards but is unable to after he is arrested for murder. The victim? His own sister, Cassie.

Of course, Clare sets out to investigate, not really sure why she wants to help Matt Bane, but only sure that she does. The job is complicated by the need to make sure all useful info gets to the police, including her best friend Jodie (whose brother, Clare’s ex, is now Chief of Police), Clare’s boyfriend Seth bringing in a friend’s antique typewriter ribbon tins for the store to sell, only for one of them to turn out to contain $100 000, and two of Matt’s costars, his former girlfriend (the older woman, Nell Sterling) and his current girlfirend (the young goth, Adele White), both acting suspiciously. As does Matt’s manager/aide, Howie. There is a giant red herring involving a super-secret party held in a big house outside the town, where Clare hopes to get revelations but nothing noteworthy actually happens, and issues with a local polygamist family whose youngest sister-wife is a high-school friend of Clare and Jodie.

The biggest problem I have with the book is that the killer’s identity is too obvious. I spotted it over two hundred pages before the big reveal, and not due to any clues, just due to how the character is written. I mean, that’s a big flaw in a mystery that isn’t doing one of those “the viewpoint character is the murderer” things. It isn’t like we’re supposed to solve the mystery that soon. On the other hand, I like Clare, Seth, Matt, Nell, Adele, and Jodie, and can tolerate the rest of the characters who we’re supposed to like. The town is not well-sketched, but we spend most of our time in Bygone Alley (where the store is located) and the Main Street (where the Hotel where the murder takes place is located), so it’s probably an effect of that limitation that the rest of the city is a bigger mystery than the actual whodunnit. If I’m making sense, which I suspect I’m not. Anyway, it’s a decent enough book. Mildly recommended, and like most mystery series you can start reading it here.

Re-read Recently — December 2019 — Urban Fantasy

Smoke and Mirrors by Tanya Huff

I first read this back in 2006. Write-up occurred
here.

Still recommended.

Something From the Nightside: a novel of the Nightside by Simon R. Green

I read this one initially when it was new, back in 03 or 04. I didn’t write it up back then — in fact, I made no record of it at all until the sequel came out. This began Green’s long-running urban fantasy series, known as “the Nightside” after the place where all the stories were set. The individual books were short by modern standards, about two-hundred pages, and came out fairly rapidly (at one point I referred to it as “the first quarterly dark/urban fantasy series”.

This volume sets the series up for us, so it’s mostly wandering around seeing the sights and meeting the people. We start out by meeting series hero/first-person narrator John Taylor, a private investigator. John is rather down on his luck, living in his office in a bad neighbourhood of London (UK) and owing money to some bad people. In fact, he’s on the line with one creditor when a client comes in: Joanna Barrett, a rich, good-looking woman, who is seeking her runaway teenage daughter, Cathy. She’s seeking John’s help in particular because Cathy is in “the Nightside”. John used to operate in the Nightside, but he hasn’t been back in a while.

He describes it as, “a square mile of narrow streets and back alleys in the centre of city [sic] . . . in practice the Nightside is much bigger than that . . . There are those who say the Nightside is actually bigger than the city which surrounds it, these days. . . . It’s always night in the Nightside. It’s always three o’clock in the morning, and the dawn never comes. . . . You can buy or sell anything in the Nightside, and no-one asks questions. No-one cares. . . . Everything you ever feared or dreamed of is running loose somewhere in the shifting streets of the Nightside . . . you can find anything in the Nightside, if it doesn’t find you first. It’s a sick, magical, dangerous place.”

John was born there, to a human father and a mother who was something else, though no one seems to know what. She abandoned her husband and child when John was young, and his father drank himself to death. John has a gift that only works in the Nightside, allowing him to open an inner eye and find anything or anyone missing . . . so of course, some powerful force is always blocking his power throughout the series. The only question is what, and how. All right, that’s two questions. This time John is able to find enough to confirm that Cathy came to the Nightside, once he returns with Joanna in tow, but not where she went after she left the subway. They seek information in Strangefellows, the oldest bar in London, owned by one of Merlin’s descendants — currently, Alex Morrisey, described as “a long streak of misery in basic black”. In the bar they meet Razor Eddie, the “Punk God of the Straight Razor”, a thin man in a foul-smelling trench coat, armed with the afore-mentioned straight razor that he got on the Street of Gods one distressing night. Fortunately, Eddie is John’s friend, because on the way out of Strangefellows they are attacked by the Harrowing, agents of John’s enemies (he doesn’t know who they are or why they hate him, but they sent him fleeing the Nightside five years ago). The Harrowing are faceless figures in dark suits with hypodermic syringes for fingers. Eddie saves John and Joanna, and they continue on their quest.

In another location they run into Suzie Shooter, aka Shotgun Suzie. A tall blonde bounty hunter, Suzie favours the pump-action shotgun, and at one point went after John himself. Still, he regards her as a friend.

Also, in the course of their travels they fall into a Timeslip, which takes them to a dark future (literally dark — even the moon is gone), caused by John seeking out his mother. Here they meet the Collector, who gathers oddities from across time and space. And when they stop to recover from that event, back in the Nightside proper, they meet Walker, who represents the Authorities, the people who run the Nightside. Walker speaks with the Voice of Authority — people must obey him. It seems that Cathy isn’t the only person to disappear lately, in the area where they have been led to think she is. Walker gives them twelve hours to solve the case or else.

So the story is basically, go to this place, meet this person. Go to that place, meet the next person. Fill in pages until it’s novel length and call it a day. If it wasn’t Green, wasn’t weird and violent and engaging, no one would have given it a second look. But it does set up the rest of the series very well, and even if that’s all it does and it isn’t Green’s best series it’s still a lot of fun. Recommended.

Read Recently — December 2019 — The Planet Is Fine

Humans: a brief history of how we f***ed it all up by Tom Philips

Tom Philips is a British writer, seemingly (and according to the very short bio in the back of the book) specializing in humour. though he claims to have studied Archaeology and Anthropology (which just goes to show something), all three of which were probably useful in writing this book. Certainly you couldn’t get through a book on how humans have made a mess of things throughout history without either a sense of humour or suicide.

Philips uses humour. He starts at what he calls “the dawn of fuck-ups”, with the ape-like creature who would one day be known to the modern world as Lucy, possibly our earliest known ancestor, falling out of a tree and dying (he considers this an omen for the rest of history)(caveat — Lucy might not have fallen out of a tree. Philips acknowledges this, but it works better for his narrative and is funnier if he assumes she did). The point of the book is not just that things go wrong, but incidents in which we made them go wrong, so he looks at things like the introduction of rabbits to Australia, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (and Hitler’s subsequent, equally bad, invasion of Russia), the creation of leaded gasoline and its consequences for children worldwide, and so on.

It’s an easy read, and funny (but darkly humourous). I enjoyed it but not everyone will, the subject matter being always dark (I keep coming back to that word) and humour being rather personal. Therefor, mildly recommended (but if you have enjoyed things that I have called humourous before: Highly recommended).

Read Recently — December 2019 — More Murder

Artificial Condition: the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Murderbot returns! Having left its* new human friends behind on a station that it now learns from news programs is called “Port FreeCommerce”, it has been travelling around illegally on robotically-driven transports, trading views of the entertainment media it downloads at each new station. It has been drifting, but now it has come to a conclusion: it must journey to a particular station and investigate an event in its past, from before a memory wipe (memory-wiping a construct is difficult, because it has an organic brain that cannot be totally wiped, unlike the computer parts). There was an event in which it went berserk and killed the clients and now it is wondering: did it hack its governor module, giving itself free will, to kill all those people?

It finds a transport going to the right station, but only once they are underway does Murderbot find out that the Transport (which Murderbot names ART — the RT stands for “Research Transport”; the A stands for Murderbot’s assessment of the transport’s character) is an immensely powerful computer, fully capable of wiping out Murderbot any time it chooses to. Fortunately, though the two bots squabble like the Odd Couple, they manage to cooperate and ART takes Murderbot to its destination and helps it get through its mission.

Needing a work permit to get from the nearest station to the site, Murderbot disguises itself as an augmented human security consultant. The clients, a trio of young people representing a larger collective, need to get to the site to negotiate with a former employer who has stolen data from them. Now she says that she will sell it back to them in exchange for their entire original pay. Murderbot thinks it is a bad idea — and is quickly proven right when right off the start an effort is made to kill the clients — but goes along to get its investigation going. What it finds out, and how it interacts with its adorable clients, are fascinating.

Wells begins expanding her fictional universe with this volume and while she doesn’t take us outside the Corporate Rim, we learn a lot more about it. Descriptions are not this series’ biggest strength, but I enjoyed what we got. Characters are the strongest point: Murderbot, our first person narrator, is delightfully snarky and ART is its best possible partner. Hopefully we shall see it again as the series goes on. While we and Murderbot move on to new places and people, those we met in the first volume are not forgotten and help drive the story forward.

But, no story is perfect, and there was one thing I didn’t like; fortunately, it’s a minor one. At one point, our two heroic bots use ART’s medical facilities to alter Murderbot’s body to make it look less like a Secbot. To be specific, they remove 2 centimeters of material from Murderbot’s arms and legs (Muderbot also writes some new code to make itself move more like a human under most circumstances). Presumably that’s one centimeter from each of the upper and lower limbs. The problem is that you can’t just shorten the limbs and go happily on your way; humanoid proportions are what they are for reasons and if your arms and legs are shorter than they need to be for your torso, people will notice. Even if they don’t know how what they are seeing is wrong, they will know that something is and pay even more attention to you. And no, you can’t just shorten the torso too, because then your head will look too large. I had to just pretend that they found a magic way to make Murderbot shorter to get through or that they found some other way to change its appearance. This might not bother you the way it bothered me, of course, and I would be surprised if it’s mentioned in any future volumes, so I count it as a minor thing.

Artificial Condition is Highly Recommneded.

*While Murderbot has a part-robotic/part-organic body, it has no sexual characteristics and no interest in sex at all. In fact, it finds the whole idea a turn-off. It also has no gender and chooses to refer to itself as “it”, as do most of the constructs it deals with. It is, however, careful to properly gender all the humans it meets.

Read Recently — December 2019 — Like An Arrow

Thief of Time: a Discworld Novel by Terry Pratchett

When I wrote about the book Hogfather, way back in 2016, I suggested that it was the last “Susan Sto-Helit & Death” book, and I was wrong. Thief of Time follows, exactly six books later.

It begins with a man visiting Gytha “Nanny” Ogg, several times over several years. Each time he wants to know if she is the best midwife in the world, and when she is he needs her urgently. It then moves on to one Jeremy Clockson, an orphan raised by the clockmakers’ guild in Ankh-Morpork. Jeremy, to be as honest as possible, is a psychopath with a fixation on timekeeping. Specifically, with clocks being accurate. He does not deal well with them not being accurate. Just ask Williamson, who kept his clocks five minutes fast (“I am better now,” says Jeremy, “I have medecine.” So far, however, no one has asked him if he takes the medecine). He is visited by one Lady Myria LeJean, who wants him to make a clock for her. A Perfect clock. One that would measure the fabled “tick of the universe”, like the fabled Glass Clock of of Bad Schuschein in the Grim Fairy Tale by the same title. The one that allegedly trapped a personnified Time.

Meanwhile, Susan Sto-Helit is a teacher in a private school. She is a strict and magical teacher; the school is a straw-liberal school of which Susan is, of course, the most successful part. I found myself wondering if this was Pratchett’s own views about education; it can be a serios mistake to assume that an author believes everything they write. but sometimes you have to wonder. She is called on by her Grandfather (Death) to save the world . . . because after next Wednesday, it just ceases to exist. There is nothing after next Wednesday. Not even time itself . . . . He also points out that the Auditors of Reality, those . . . beings is the wrong word. Call them functionaries who detest all individuality, to such an extent that if one of them ever refers to itself by a personal pronoun, it ceases to exist and is immediately replaced by another, identical one (they are all identical) which has not yet used such forbidden language about itself . . . are back and behind whatever scheme is at work. Susan will have to take them on because Death has to go bet the band back together. If the world is going to end, the horsemen must ride out. Of course, getting them all together might be more difficult than Death at first realises, and will involve the fifth horseman, the one who quit before they got famous.

Of course, Death is not the only one who noticed something going on. In the mountains around the hub of the Discworld there are many monestaries, each with its specific fixation (such as the Monks of Cool). It is the History Monks who make up the other part of our tale, the followers of the way of Wen the Eternally Surprised, whose Monestary is located in a particular valley where it is always a pleasant spring day. It is the purpose of the History Monks to ensure that Time occurs. Not in any particular way, but that it occurs at all. We last saw them in Night Watch, which I wrote up back in July of 2018 (Night Watch, fittingly, was written and published after Thief of Time) when they urged a temporally displaced Sam Vimes to become his own teacher.

Among the History Monks is a new Novice, one Newgate Ludd, an orphan raised by the Thieves’ Guild (who give all their orphans the last name “Ludd” after one of the founders of the Guild). Newgate has a natural talent for the kind of time manipulation that the Monks do, so he was encouraged to join and given the new name “Lobsang” — Pratchett must have really liked the name Lobsang because he used it in The Long Earth as well, and I doubt it’s the only Tibetan or psuedo-Tibetan name he could have found. Anyway, Ludd is a bit much for the Master of Novices so they stick him with Lu-Tze, the elderly sweeper, an aggressively humble man who follows the Way of Mrs Cosmopilite and embodies Rule One, “Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men!” But even with natural talent and Lu-Tse on his side, can Lobsang Ludd save the world when Jeremy completes his clock? Well, he may need Susan’s help.

This is a thick book, and even in this long write-up I left a lot out (I haven’t even mentioned the Igor, for example). It contains a lot of surprises like a redefinition of the term “death by chocolate” that is a bit more literal than usual, and gives us Pratchett at the top of his game. The Death series goes out with a bang. Highly recommended.

Read Recently — December 2019 — A schedule to keep

An Easy Death: a Gunnie Rose novel by Charlaine Harris

As with the Midnight, Texas books, this is the start of a new series that I was surprised to find I enjoyed. This is not an urban fantasy or mystery of any kind; rather it is closer to a post-apocolyptic story. But it’s also an alternate history, which is where the apocalypse comes in. Before I can even begin talking about the plot of the book, we have to look at some history. And before we do that, we have to discuss trigger warnings: this book contains rape, both past and present, child endangerment, and child death. With those caveats in mind, the book is recommended, and would probably go to highly recommended without the need for them. Now you don’t have to read any further if you don’t want to.

As noted, the story takes place in an alternate history. Exactly when is hard to say; if anyone actually speaks, reads or thinks of the date I didn’t noticce it. I don’t think it can be later than 1950ish; I think it more likely to be 1945ish due to the history of a couple of characters we can’t even talk about until the plot recap. Anyway, the first change from our history is that, instead of dying in the Russian Revolution, the Tsar and his family fled and ended up in California. Then FDR died; assassinated. We don’t know when that was, other than that it was after he was sworn in as President (thus when peope refer to “the President” they mean him) but I’m assuming it was the 1933 Zangara assassination, a miss in our world. That occurred in Florida, which matches up with Harris’ brief history) and then the VP died in a flare-up of influenza, which killed a lot of Americans. With the crash, the country broke up, part of it being devoured by Canada (we don’t get a list of which states were taken in by Canada; the only one we learn for sure is Michigan). The original 13 colonies, less Georgia, rejoin Britain to avoid being Canadianized (which is funny to me, both because stories which make Canada a power that the US fears are always funny, and because of course at that point Canada was itself not technically independent of Britain). Georgia joined a bunch of the southern states (again, we aren’t told which ones) to form Dixie, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico plus a bit of Colorado became Texoma, a lot of the plains states became New America, and something got taken by Mexico, but we are never told what. California and Oregon became the new Holy Russian Empire. The Tsar brought his wizards with him, trained by Grigori Rasputin, so now the HRE is the only country that openly uses magic. The HRE and the Wizards themselves call them “wizards”; all others we encounter call them “Grigoris”.

Our hero and first-person narrator, Lizbeth Rose, lives in Texoma, not far from the New American border. When Lizbeth’s mother, Candle, was 16, she was raped by a grigori passing through the area — he used mind control to make her sleep with him and then moved on, leaving her pregnant. Fortunately, she loves her daughter. Lizbeth is a Gunnie, a mercenary gunslinger with the Tarken crew (led by a man named Tarken. Other members are a black woman named Galilee, who had to flee Dixie when it became apparant she was going to have a child of lighter skin tone than she, something white Dixians, who run things there, frown on, Martin, who drives the crew’s truck and is involved with Galilee, and Tarken, leader and Lizbeth’s lover (both sets of relationships are recent. Tarken used to have a wife and still has a kid who lives with his ex). The crew is setting off, at the start of the book, to take some farmers through the turbulent border to New America, where they have relatives. It’s a short trip, two or three days drive, and they’ve done it often before. This time, They are ambushed by bandits after dark on the first day. Martin is shot and the truck rolls, throwing Lizbeth up against a rock, concussing her and separating her from her wepaons. When she awakens she is unarmed, the others of her crew are dead, and the farmers have been marched off by the bandits. She tracks down the bandits, kills them, rescues the farmers and walks them to their destination.

When she gets back home she has to deal with the emotional fallout, not only her own but that of the other people attached to the rest of the crew. She also has to deal with joblessness. Fortunately (?) a friend points a couple of clients at her — a pair of Grigoris from the HRE looking for one of their ilk who fled the HRE a while ago. One Oleg Karkarov, who Lizbeth knows was shot to death in a town nearby just a few months ago. The Grigoris, Paulina Coopersmith and Eli Savarov, still need a guide and guard even if Oleg is dead, because he had a brother and they need to find out if his blood will work for some purpose (Lizbeth figures it has to do with healing the Tsar). During the trip to the place of Oleg’s death, they learn that his brother was with him and fled the scene for Juarez, Mexico, where one of the brothers had a daughter. Paulina and Eli, with Lizbeth to guard, are now heading for Juarez. We also learn, during this phase of things, that Lizbeth had her own issues with Oleg, something that she doesn’t Paulina and Eli to learn, though we figure it out before anything is stated. People start trying to kill them almost immediately, and both guns and sorcery are going to be needed to keep all three of them alive.

By the way, Eli and Paulina are the characters whose history we couldn’t even talk about yet in reference to the date. Now we can. Paulina, who is British but moved to the HRE, is in her late thirties and Eli is younger than her (mid-twenties, Lizbeth says). However, he was born in Russia and his family fled with the Tsar when he was a child. If we assume, for convenience, that he was born in 1915, and he’s as old as 30, we get 1945. Lizbeth doesn’t remember the world before, and she’s 19. Anyway, that’s just me speculating.

Before we sum up, I wanted to add that the world we get is, at least as far as Lizbeth’s part of it and view of it, is fairly liberal: women continue to have rights, queer characters and prostitutes aren’t looked down on and outside Dixie race doesn’t seem to be an issue.

So, obviously the world-building caught my eye, I like westerns and genre-crossing westerns in particular, I like Lizbeth and her family, there’s enough action for fans of that, and the plot takes some interesting twists, though none so big that you can’t see them coming if you pay attention.

As noted above, recommended with cautions. Would be highly recommended if it weren’t for those cautions.

Read Recently — December 2019 — Ask not for whom – wait, wrong kind of toll

The Toll by Cherie Priest

The Toll is a horror novel by Cherie Priest. It is set in and around the town of Staywater, Georgia, a small town, mostly abandoned, and quite near the Okefenokee swamp (a swamp name that I, for some reason, always thought was fictional, but no, it’s a real place that I just never thought to look up until now). Central to our experience of the town are the Spratford cousins, Daisy and Claire, also known as “The Old Ladies”, because they are over 80. They are raising their godson, Cameron, who was abandoned on their doorstep one day 17 years ago. Cameron likes to sneak drinks from a bottle of Jack and his godmothers pretend they don’t know. He also goes into town to hang out at the only available entertainment, Thirsty’s bar (run by Dave and Jess; Jess is really who Cam comes to town to see. She’s pretty but sees herself as too old for him).

Meanwhile, on the nearby State Road 177, which runs through the swamp, Titus and Melanie Bell are on their way to the local state park, where they will spend their honeymoon camping in cabins and canoeing in the swamp. They are quarreling a bit and kind of reminding me of a couple in one Stephen King short story. Then they come to a bridge; a dark, narrow bridge that they can’t see the other side of. As he drives slowly through it, Titus passes out and when he wakes up he’s outside the car (which is stopped) and the bridge is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Melanie.

Titus manages to reach the cops, and they put him up in a motel near Staywater while they investigate/try to find Melanie. The locals he talks to aren’t very hopeful, though. It seems that every thirteen years or so people in the area disappear. It used to be large numbers (the area was notorious for its floods) but since the Old Ladies (then not-so-old) were found injured in the swamp in the aftermath of the floods of 1966, it’s been only a few per session.

It seems that the being responsible for the bridge is a hunter, a predator from somewhere else. Or at least it was; the Old Ladies killed it in ’66 but that didn’t stop it. It keeps coming back, on the same schedule, and if you cross its bridge you must pay the toll.

The idea that the monster at the end of the book is the ghost of a horror from beyond is a great one (reminds me of the Manley Wade Wellman “Silver John” story “One Other”), and I wish that Priest had done a better job of it, but at the end the actual creature just didn’t work for me (though there are some nice bits involving it, like when Titus and some cops are in the swamp trying to find Melanie and Titus gets a glimpse of the creature watching them from the water, or when the Old Ladies try to tell Cameron about what they fought back in ’66). But ultimately, the creature itself doesn’t grab me, and a story like this really turns on its adversary (I know Priest can do better because she has done better; see the Borden Dispatches for example).

In addition I had two other problems, both of them spoilerous, but both of them probably unique to me, so I’ll keep them to myself (at least for now). So on the plus side, Priest’s usual excellent characterization and her firm grasp of the southern setting. Minus: uninteresting monster. Mildly not-recommended.

Read Recently — December 2019 — Acting like an adult

Sleep like a baby by Charlaine Harris

The ninth Aurora Teagarden mystery starts with Roe having her baby and then jumps ahead two months. Roe and Robin (and Roe’s younger half-brother Philip) are adjusting to being a family that contains a tiny human. Overall, things are going well, though Roe still has to decide whether she’s going back to work at the library as her maternity leave is over (to tell the truth, when this came up for discussion in the book I realised I had forgotten that Roe ever worked in a library, as it comes up so rarely in the latter books).

Then Roe gets the flu. This would not ordinarily be a big problem, as Robin works from home and is a very supportive Dad, but Robin is going to Bouchercon, the world mystery convention and as he has been nominated for the Anthony Award Roe really wants him to go (Bouchercon and the Anthony are both, I was surprised to learn, real. The convention appears to be the mystery-lovers’ equivalent of SF’s Worldcon, even taking place in a different city each year. In the book it is taking place in Nashville, and as far as I can tell it never has done so in the real world). Fortunately, when Roe was recently out of the hospital they had a caretaker come in and work part-time helping to take care of the baby and the woman, Virginia, is available to come again and stay nights. Roe can still feed the baby, as long as she is careful to wear a mask.

Everything seems to be going well, until the stormy night when Roe, now starting to recover, awakens to find the baby monitor in her room, the baby fussing, Virginia missing, and a dead woman in the back yard. The dead woman is not Virginia, but rather turns out to be a former stalker of Robin, a woman who tried to kill Roe some time ago. A neighbour claims to have seen a man resembling Robin skulking around the back yard that night. Fortunately, Robin has an impeccable alibi . . . doesn’t he?

Extra complications range from the major (Roe’s mother’s new husband having a heart attack; a shooting at the hospital) to the minor (Roe’s diaper bag, with her driver’s license inside, is stolen at the hospital. Robin’s keys and an old sweater that he wears when writing both go missing. That sort of thing).

So there are two mysteries: what happened to Virginia? And who (and how) killed the Stalker? Roe solves the second, but the solution to the first kind of comes out of nowhere. Given it’s book nine, and half the mystery isn’t so much solved as discovered, this can’t go above mildly recommended for the average reader — but recommended for those who are already fans of the series.

Read Recently — December 2019 — No dummy

Crash Test Girl: an unlikely experiment in using the scientific method to answer lifes toughest questions by Kari Byron

Kari Byron became famous as part of the Mythbusters Build Team. When the producers started winding the Mythbusters down, the Build Team (by then presenters as well as builders) were one of the first things they cut.

Crash Test Girl is part autobiography, part (as the sub-title suggests) look at taking an experimental approach to life. Byron looks at stages in her life, suggests hypotheses that she might have used before starting them, and sees how the hypothesis stands up to the experiment that is real life. This despite pointing out, on the very first page of the book, that she is not a scientist. So, for example, in Chapter one, “Career”, she hypothesises, “If you follow the traditional path, you’ll eventually land the job of your dreams.” Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.

Byron’s led what she manages to make sound like an interesting life, writing with a warm and engaging style that matches the personna she presented on television. If you’ve never watched the Mythbusters you might not be as drawn to this as I was. Similar if you watched it but didn’t like it, or liked the show but didn’t like Byron. On the other hand if, like me, you like biographies, even when they are of people you’ve never heard of, this might do for you. I recommend it, with the warnings above.

Read Recently — December 2019 — The Dead Are Always On Time

Better Late Than Never by Jenn McKinlay

When the book opens, the Briar Creek Public Library is having its first “fine amnesty” — that is, overdue books are being allowed to be returned fine-free for a limited time. While Ms. Cole, the grumpy older librarian nicknamed “the Lemon” for always looking like she swallowed one, disapproves, the library is getting a lot of books back that otherwise would be lost so series hero Lindsey Norris is counting the whole thing as a win. The staff are even holding a small contest to see who can find the book that was the most overdue, which new hire Paula seems likely to win with a copy of The Catcher In The Rye that has been missing for twenty years.

Curiosity leads Lindsey to try to find out who the book was checked out to. While at first the name, Candice Whitley, means little to Lindsey, it nearly drives Ms. Cole to faint. It seems that Candice Whitley was a high school teacher who was murdered, by strangulation, the same night she checked out the book. Who would return to book now, and why? Reasoning that it must have been kept by Candice’s killer and probably returned by same, Lindsey takes the book to Police Chief Emma Plewiicki, who is meeting with the Mayor and his assistant about a series of robberies the town has been having. They want Emma to focus on the more recent crimes, but Emma, aware of the whole “no statute of limitations” thing, can’t ignore the more serieus crime. She does not, for once, tell Lindsey to stay out of it — instead she asks for copies of any useful info she finds. Perhaps Emma is catching on?

Suspects there were aplenty: Candice’s boyfriend at the time, younger brother of the Mayor’s right=hand man, and Matthew Mercer, her prize pupil who may have been stalking her and who left town in the wake of the murder, are the two prime suspects, though both had alibis.

Lindsey does her best to find the killer, but will doing so put her in danger?

McKinlay continues to develp this series in good directions. I like all the characters, except maybe Robbie Vine, who keeps goading Lindsey into investigating when she would like to step back and who keeps hitting on her — though she manages to figure out that he would rather be with Emma in this story, which ends that romantic triangle. The mystery makes sense once we have all the pieces, and the locations are well-described. My only complaint is that when LIndsey confrtonts the murderer the danger is ended by what feels like kind of a deus ex machina.

Overall, recemmended, as is the entire series.