eyes.2c Reviews

The Baron of Magister Valley (Viscount of Adrilankha #4) by Steven Brust         Steven Brust, one of my fav authors. Such a pleasure to be back in Dragaera, with all it's intrigues and different Houses that make up part of this world, it's magic and sorcery. Indeed I'd forgotten the wordy ways of some of the Dragaerans. This tale as related by the pompous historian and self acclaimed storyteller, "Paarfi of Roundwood (esteemed historian of House of Hawk and exquisite artisan of truths)" in a convoluted and drawn out manner, uses a very precious and exacting style, à la Alexander Dumas. He delights in giving drawn out explanations to us mere mortal aficionados about everything from philosophical theories to reasons why he doesn't include some information. Underneath the effusion of verbose language is a fascinating story of betrayal and revenge, hope and justice. Two Houses suffer at the hands of those who are greedy and corrupt. (Indeed that corrupt...

Mr. Malcolm's List by Suzanne Allain        2 or 4 stars? I'm conflicted! If you want a romantic comedy spoof, then maybe 4 stars. If you're looking for the more genuine romance article, then 2. That's my burning question. I was suitably underwhelmed by The List as a serious regency work. How a supposedly intelligent woman was beguiled by her one time uneasy schoolfriend to punish a potential swain for not continuing to court her friend is beyond me. And when said perceptive young woman continually falls in with her friend's plans mostly because she thinking of something or someone else and just murmurs appropriate noises of approval, well then, of course she's going to find herself in deep water. Couple that with the fact that said friend is fiendishly sure of herself (read spoiled, arrogant and used to getting her own way) with a true 'mean girls' streak, and the story becomes farcical. (I must say though I kept flashing to scenes from 1940...

Would I Lie to the Duke (Union of Rakes #2) by Eva Leigh      A young woman Jessica McGale is determined to save the family soap business. The product is of high quality, the only problem is that a fire has destroyed the plant. She and her siblings need investors. Noel Edwards, the Duke of Rotherby heads a group called the Bazaar who each year hold a week long event looking at businesses to invest in. Jess is resolved to attend. How she manages this is heart beatingly fascinating. Worthy of Becky Sharpe of Vanity Fair. How Jess manages to keep her ruse going provides delicious tension. What she didn't understand was how much she'd be attracted to the duke. Noel is besieged by sycophants and people who want something from him. The only people he trusts are his fellow members of The Union of Rakes, four men he's known since Eton.  (How they first come to know each other is nicely drawn.) The Duke trusts very few and Jessica's actions are setup for breaking th...

The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay        Cautionary tale, mythology, philosophical reader, a traditional story feminist? Maybe all, some or. One of the above. One thing is true, this is definitely not funny. Kismet? Reincarnation? Or making choices pushed on by changing times, a ghost, your own set of beliefs, or simple taking up the mantle of survival? Bride Somlata marries into the Mitra family. She is from a poor but determined family. Traits that will stand her and her new family in good stead. Then there's the aunt/sister-in-law Pishma, a child widow locked in her own set of rooms buoyed up by her anger at the Mitras, and a cache of jewelry. A cache she alerts Somlata about in a rather unexpected way. Somlata's daughter Boshon floats through life, rebelling against her culture. She likes being alone and testing people. Her relationship with a poorer boy who returns from America shows her lack of empathy. The last test she executes i...

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel       I must admit that the plight of Eva Traube unfolded before my mind's eye in startling detail, even if it was smudged in tones of grey with the occasional flashes of color. Escaping Paris in 1942, a sliver ahead of the rounding up of Jewish Parisians by the Nazis, Eva makes her way to Aurignon, in the Free Zone. By a set of twisted circumstances she ends up forging papers along with a fellow forgerer and Resistance member Rémy, for Jewish children being funnelled through to Swizerland. A local priest, Père Clément, is embedded in the program. Eva and Père's discussions about God and guilt and their efforts are touching parts of the story. Eva is determined that as new identies are being forged for the children a list of their names should be kept. Using a mathematical code sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, she and Remy record the childrens'real identities in a religious text. Spurred on by her mother's despairing v...

I Saw Him Die (Agatha Christie #4) by Andrew Wilson         Agatha Christie is meant to be on a repairing lease, on a holiday on Skye with her daughter, Rosalind and her sister, Mary. A time of rest before her marriage to Max Mallowan, the archeologist she'd met in earlier in the year in Ur, in southern Iraq. Max is fourteen years younger than Agatha. Something she worries about, and wonders at. She no sooner arrives than she has a message from her Secret Intelligence Service contact John Davison requesting help. “One of [their] former agents, Robin Kinmuir, who [lived] on Skye, believed he was in danger. He’d received a series of threatening letters." Against her better judgement Agatha agrees to assist Davison, leaving her daughter and sister with the arranged subterfuge of having to go to London unexpectedly to see her literary agent. When Agatha and Davison journey to Kinmuir's property they find a lodge full of guests, murder and a chain of happenstance...

Mother Land: A Novel by Leah Franqui         So you uproot yourself from family and friends and follow your love to his home country. We're not talking about an American in Paris here, rather an American in Mumbai. Culture shock? Yes, especially when your mother-in-law lands on your doorstep, and not just for a two week visit.  You see, having left her husband, it appears Swati is determined to educate Rachel on how to be a proper Indian wife. Irony anyone? When Rachel ends up with a cleaner coming more frequently and a cook she definitely doesn't want things start to fall apart, and yet mysteriously they also come together, just not in the way either Rachel or Swati expected. For Rachel cooking is important, for Swati one has servants for that. Rachel Meyer saw coming to Mumbai as an opportunity  to have a more ordered life, to experience a new beginning. She finds something different. Her new understandings in many ways are due to her mother-in-law...

Fair as a Star (Victorian Romantics #1) by Mimi Matthews          A gentle regency romance with a slightly different set of circumstances, sensitively portraying the issue of mental well being. One could be lulled into thinking this is just a pleasing romance. But there's so much more happening here I think. A young woman, Beryl Burnham is promised to one brother whilst having feelings for another. The so called Rivenhall Triplets, describe the three brothers born quickly in succession.  Now only two are left. "Henry, now a baronet ... [and] Mark, curate to the current vicar of Shepton Worthy." Beryl became engaged to Sir Henry Rivenhall. Her reasons are complex. Having secretly suffered from melancholy for years she agrees to marry him, more to appease her mother, to hide her secret, and to allay her fears about proposed draconian treatments. Fearing Beryl's melancholy might become public, her aunt whisked her off to Paris for three months with the ...

Lady Anne and the Menacing Mystic (Lady Anne Addison Mysteries #4)   by Victoria Hamilton    Lady Anne Addison is in Bath staying with her mother, Lady Barbara, Countess of Harecross. Anne is preparing for her marriage to the Marquess, Lord Darkefell. Although she's reluctant to make her engagement known because she doesn't want to become the focus of Bath society' much to her mother's disgust. There's enough gossip circulating around town with unsuspected people suddenly becoming engaged. Anne doesn't want to join the list. And there seems to be a lingering thought that marriage will mean surrendering her freedom, that she might become something less. Despite Darkefell's reassurance. The presence of a mystic, whose become society's latest fad, comes to Anne's notice. Her dearest friend Lydia Bestwick, wife of Lord John, Darkefell’s younger brother. Lydia appears to have fallen under her sway. Lady Anne is determined to expose the woman as a cha...

Of Mutts and Men (A Chet & Bernie Mystery #10)   by Spencer Quinn           What a rollicking, at times hilarious read featuring Private Investigators, Bernie Little and his dog Chet. (Failed K-9 school are the hints I get--but that's another story and one I dearly need to read!) BTW I haven't read any of this series before. Starting at #10 really posed no problem and I've already lined up to begin from the beginning! In this story we have a dead hydrologist, an ex girlfriend, various bit players including other friends and some unforgiving baddies. Bernie and Chet track down the person who appears to have committed the murder. The police are satisfied, but Bernie isn't. And that's where the story gets interesting. The plot wends its way along at a reasonable pace, but the one who steals the show is Chet (Chester). The story is told from his viewpoint--and what a totally enjoyable, and often wickedly funny that filter is! Bernie is a PI always ...

The Molten City (Tom Harper Mystery #8) by Chris Nickson           I have no idea why this is my first Tom Harper book. I've read many Nickson novels but not about this particular Superintendent of the Leeds City Police. My loss. Leeds, obviously a place Nickson likes to set his mysteries. There's his historical series  with Simon Weston in the 1820's Leeds of Regency times. Fast forward a hundred years to the early 1900's and Leeds' crime stories of the late Victorian years. "To those who fought so we’d all have the vote. We owe you more than we can ever pay." I love this--Nickson's dedication. Something I feel strongly about, particularly as every time I go to the polls I know I stand on the shoulders of particularly the women who fought for my right to vote. I refuse to throw their gift away. But back to Leeds in 1908 and the logistical nightmare of deployment of police forces Tom Harper is faced with. The Prime Minister, Asquith, has chose...

Death of a Prominent Citizen (A Reverend Mother Mystery #7) by Cora Harrison           A variation on the locked room mystery, with a dead body, seven heirs and other sundries gathered in the house to await their wealthy relative's decision on whom will inherit her fortune. Amongst them the Reverend Mother. This relative, Charlotte Hendrick, is also a slum lord. Feelings are running high about the conditions and rents in these areas around the Cork of the 1920's. That same night a crowd has gathered to witness the reenactment of the building of a Viking house. An incident that turns into a riot. Another slum lord dies at the hands of the crowd. Eileen is present and her observations are particularly salient. I must admit I'm enjoying following the growth of Patrick and Eileen into their roles, and how they're developing their strengths. Old friends are welcomed and new characters introduced. Front and center in this particular murder, the sharp mind of ...

Murder in Chianti (A Tuscan Mystery #1) by Camilla Trinchieri            American 'Conor Domenico Doyle had had a very bad start to his day' owing to the  discovery of a dead body in the woods near the farm house he's currently renting in Gravigna, Tuscany. Nico Doyle had left (well been asked to leave) the homicide squad with the NYPD. Which was timely as his Italian wife, Rita, the love of his life had been diagnosed with cancer and wanted to return home to Tuscany to be near her family. When Rita died Nico took up permanent residence in the village, cooking and helping out at the family restaurant, the Bar All’Angolo. Nico's start to the day involved finding a dog and a rather gruesomely murdered man. That leads to him joining Salvatore Perillo , Maresciallo dei Carabinieri, the officer in charge of the investigation, in an unofficial capacity. Of course the dog becomes part of Nico's life. Known to Nico as OneWag but amusingly the rest of...

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees          Not you're usual post 1945 European reconstruction story. This is set mainly in Germany after the surrender. Edith Graham decides that now is the time to do her bit and she applies to work for the British government Control Commission for Germany, concerned with rebuilding that nation and searching for war criminals. Before she leaves London for Germany she is briefed by Vera Atkins about possibly discovering the fate of four British women agents dropped behind enemy lines who disappeared. Two other women will form part of this coterie, her friend Dorie and journalist Adeline Parnell. Edith hits on the idea of using recipes as a coding method for sending messages between them. Coupled with that is a request from her cousin Leo who's in the Secret Service asking her to make contact with an old flame, Count Kurt von Stavenow.  It seems Kurt is a wanted war criminal, a Doctor involved in the most...

The House on Boundary Street by Tea Cooper            It's 1923 Sydney. With her brother killed in the war, her father now dead, and lack of a job has Dolly Bowman leaves her small town home of Wollombi and heads for Sydney. She's lined up new employment as a maid at a boarding house, 54 Boundary Street. What Dolly doesn't know is that she's taking employment in a high class brothel where the step up from maid to whore is a forgone conclusion. Her brother's best mate Jack Dalton hasn't been back to their hometown ever. Imagine his shocked surprise when Dolly, also a childhood friend turns up at Boundary Street and after a few shocks becomes the new singer in the club he part owns. Surprises all around, and how Dolly avoids the oldest profession in the world is another tale. Then there's the problem of the cocaine trade in Sydney. Not that Boundary Street has anything to do with that. A story with quite a few twists and turns about a time in Australi...

A Choir of Crows (Owen Archer Mystery #12) by Candace Robb         As always I'm intrigued by Owen and Lucie Archer, their children, their apprentices and cohort of friends, living their lives in medieval England, bearing up under an often fraught political scene. It's late 1374 and York is in uproar. Alexander Neville is coming to be installed as Archbishop of York, a powerful position. One that strengthens the might of the Neville's. Two dead bodies are found and Owen is tasked to investigate quickly before important personages reach York. A third quickly occurs. Time is of the essence. Ambrose Coates a gifted Welsh crwth player and a friend to river woman and healer Magda Digby has returned, his movements stealthy and secretive. He's accompanied by a talented, nay gifted singer he was playing with in a musical troupe. A singer with the voice of an Angel! They'd been forced to flee from the troupe. For some reason the singer is a person of interest to man...