book reviews

Still more books finished! I let the stacks collect until I have a few ... and I'm still trying to catch up on the ones I read in North Carolina and New York this summer. My annual pilgrimage to Plymouth is coming up in a few weeks, so I'm collecting books to read there - but I think I may have collected a few too many! There is a limit to how many books a person can read in a weekend, sad to say.

Elaine Viets, Murder with Reservations. From a mystery standpoint, this may be her best plot yet. And from a character development standpoint, I really like that she's moving the characters' lives forward. I was nervous for a while that every book was going to fall into the "character in love, character and boyfriend have misunderstanding, character and boyfriend reconcile" plotline, which gets stale quickly. (This is why I stopped reading Janet Evanovich except on a casual basis. How long can one woman stay stuck in a love triangle?)

Elaine Viets, Murder Unleashed. A bit of a convoluted plot, and a little on the farcical side. And suffered from being the second book in a row to follow the character arc I mentioned above, with the misunderstanding and reconciliation. Still, her books are fun, fast reads, and she has a lovely way with characters.

Louis L'Amour, Borden Chantry. A Western murder mystery! Nice plot, nice characterization. Chantry himself is a great character, and the ending is deep and thought-provoking.

Stephen Taylor, Caliban's Shore: The Wreck of the Grosvenor and the Strange Fate of her Survivors. This was an enjoyable book - well-written, engaging, filled with tidbits and well-researched information. But in the end, it promised more than it delivered - literally. At one point, the author promised to talk about the youngest member of the shipwrecked party, who may have had the strangest story of them all. But he never did, unless it was hidden somewhere in a chapter full of maybes that didn't seem to go anywhere. And the book was arranged oddly - only the first half was chronological, but it didn't follow all the groups, so people kept popping up and you didn't know what had happened to them since the last you heard of them, and halfway through the chronology ended and the speculation began. I just have too many quibbles with the book to keep it.

Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Queenly Contestant. This was the last of the series - I read all the ones I own (probably 70% of the series) in chronological order. Queenly Contestant was a fine installment - not remarkable, but perfectly solid, and the series itself is generally thought-provoking, with good characters, exciting plots, and a multidecade chronicle of life in Los Angeles. Well done, Mr. Gardner.