Monday, November 26, 2012

Bright and breezy holiday reading


PLAYING WITH POISON by Cindy Blackburn was the perfect book for the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s bright and breezy, an easy read that kept me laughing.

Opening line: “‘Going bra shopping at age fifty-two gives new meaning to the phrase fallen woman,’ I announced as I gazed at my reflection.”

The speaker is Jessie, the protagonist. Her friend Candy pokes her head around the dressing room door and says, “I hope my figure looks that nice when I’m old.”

Really, now, fifty-two isn’t that old, and it doesn’t bother Jessie as much as it seems to bother everyone else, especially Captain Wilson Rye of the Clarence, North Carolina Police Department.

And why is it any of Rye’s business? No sooner has Jessie paid for the royal blue bra and matching panties and hauled them home than her doorbell rings. Candy’s handsome fiancĂ© stumbles in, flops down on Jessie’s couch and dies. Enter Capt. Rye. Since the victim died on her couch, Rye figures Jessie for the killer and becomes an unwelcome fixture in her life.

Jessie writes steamy romance novels under the name of Adele Nightingale. Like everyone else on the planet she has a work in progress. The working title is “Temptation at Twilight” and passages are scattered throughout this book, making it part of the fun.

Jessie’s loft features a roof garden overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains and The Stone Fountain bar, where she likes to play pool. These days her pool sharking is a distant memory. She pays her bills with royalties from her novels which Jimmy Beak, an obnoxious local newscaster, tells the world are “almost pornographic.” Sales, of course, shoot up over the moon.

The attractive Capt. Rye keeps dogging Jessie with yet another set of incriminating questions. During a search of her loft he ogles her book shelf and pinches her copy of “A Deluge of Desire." He admits later that he only read the good parts. Twice.

Jessie’s real life associates are every bit as colorful as her fictional characters. There’s Lt. Densmore, who’s deathly afraid of heights. There’s Bryce, the bartender at The Stone Fountain who keeps changing his college major because he can’t decide what he wants to be. There’s Ian, Jessie’s asinine ex-husband, and his equally asinine new wife. There’s Jessie’s cat Snowflake, who likes to sit on laps.

And there’s Candy, whose taste in clothes runs to mini-skirts and stiletto heels, who inherits money under the terms of her murdered fiance’s will, and whose old boy friend shows up hot to trot. Talk about a perfect pair of suspects.

Jessie decides to clear her own name and keep Candy out of jail by ferreting out the killer. The denouement, while fraught with peril, is just plain funny.

Next up, DOUBLE SHOT, Book #2 in this delightful new series, and after that Book #3, THREE ODD BALLS.

FTC DISCLOSURE NOTICE       
I don’t have the foggiest idea what this is all about, but I keep seeing it on other blogs, so here it is.

FTC Disclosure Notice
FTC has a new regulation which went into effect in December, 2009 which says, basically, "Amateur Bloggers to Disclose Freebies or Be Fined." Here's my required FTC Disclosure Notice regarding review copies of books obtained for this blog. No other compensation is accepted beyond review copies of books. When I do write a review, or opinion, the source of the book cited will be disclosed in the post in which the review/opinion appears. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me.


MEET THE AUTHOR


When Cindy Blackburn isn’t writing books she’s teaching history and grading papers. Cindy holds a Master's degree in European history from the College of Charleston (South Carolina) and teaches at Trident Technical College in Charleston. Come summer she'll be on the porch of her lakeside shack in Vermont.

Her favorite travel destinations are all in Europe, her favorite TV show is NCIS and her favorite authors (if she must choose) are Joan Hess and Spencer Quinn.

Check her out at


Saturday, November 17, 2012

A priceless treasure comes within reach

SKULDUGGERY by Carolyn Hart

San Francisco, 1980s: A knock on the door. The unexpected visitor is a young Chinese man named Jimmy. He has read a newspaper article referring to anthropologist Ellen Christie as “the bone lady” and wants her to examine a skull he believes belongs to Peking Man.

Those ancient bones have been missing since 1941. At the prospect of such priceless treasure within reach, Ellen throws caution to the winds. She climbs on the back of Jimmy’s motorcycle and they roar off to Chinatown.

When she holds the skull in her hands Ellen is mesmerized, but before she can question Jimmy, his older brother Dan bursts in. Within minutes they are assaulted by two thugs who had followed Dan. Ellen, Jimmy and Dan escape through a secret tunnel and Jimmy disappears.


What follows is a journey through another time, another place, as Ellen and Dan search Chinatown block by block, looking for Jimmy. The author paints a harrowing picture of a Chinatown that tourists never see, a warren of immigrants living in squalor and despair. Also emerging are a portrait of Jimmy, who devotes his life to helping others, and a revealing look at the resilience of the immigrants he works with.

Ellen and Dan must question people without revealing anything that would start a storm of rumors about the reappearance of long-lost fossils. Ellen is constantly torn between her concern for the safety of the ancient bones and her concern for the living people she comes to admire and respect. She must also deal with her growing attraction to Dan, a handsome, no-nonsense lawyer, and her out-of-the-blue brush with death.

In this slim volume (175 pages) the author touches on 500,000 years of human evolution without slowing the plot’s momentum. The startling denouement comes in the aftermath of a Chinese New Year’s parade.

In her Introduction to SKULDUGGERY, Carolyn Hart writes: “Ellen’s challenge occurs in the San Francisco Chinatown of the 1980s, evoking a part of the past of American Chinese, whose families came to this country as immigrants, as so many of our forebears did, and stayed to become a part of the rich and varied tapestry that makes America truly a land created by those who dare.”

I will never again think of San Francisco’s Chinatown as simply an exotic collection of shops and restaurants.

FTC DISCLOSURE NOTICE       
I don’t have the foggiest idea what this is all about, but I keep seeing it on other blogs, so here it is.

FTC Disclosure Notice
FTC has a new regulation which went into effect in December, 2009 which says, basically, "Amateur Bloggers to Disclose Freebies or Be Fined." Here's my required FTC Disclosure Notice regarding review copies of books obtained for this blog. No other compensation is accepted beyond review copies of books. When I do write a review, or opinion, the source of the book cited will be disclosed in the post in which the review/opinion appears. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me.



MEET THE AUTHOR

What makes Carolyn Hart tick? Writing!
This busy Oklahoma author writes several mystery series and has about 3 million books in print. Her first love was journalism and she saw herself as the next Marguerite Higgins. Higgins was a famous American reporter who covered World War II, the Korean War and the war in Vietnam.

In Carolyn’s case, love, marriage and motherhood intervened, and she gave up working as a reporter. How she developed a career as a best-selling mystery novelist is told in a fascinating article by another best-selling Oklahoma author, Judith Henry Wall, in an article titled “Hart of the Mystery.” Wall’s article was published in Sooner Magazine, Winter 2007 issue. You can read it at http://tinyurl.com/c9kx8k8


Carolyn Hart’s many awards include:
• Guest of Honor at the Malice Domestic annual conference in 1997 and recipient of its Lifetime Achievement in 2007.
• 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book.
• Invited to speak at the 2003 Library of Congress National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

She may have given up her dream of being the next Marguerite Higgins, but she’s doing very well as “the American Agatha Christie.”


Peking Man


Archaeological excavations at Zhoukoudian near Beijing (formerly known as Peking) began in the 1920s and uncovered fossils half a million years old. Excavations came to an end in 1937 with the Japanese invasion.

(Quoting from Wikipedia)
Fossils of Peking Man were placed in the safe at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Peking Union Medical College. Eventually, in November 1941, secretary Hu Chengzi packed up the fossils so they could be sent to USA for safekeeping until the end of the war. They vanished en route to the port city of Qinhuangdao in northern China. … There are various theories of what might have happened, including a theory that the bones sank with the Japanese ship Awa Maru in 1945. … The Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1987. New excavations were started at the site in June 2009.
(End Quote)
The Wikipedia article with some excellent photos are at

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW -- Welcome to Cornwall

Welcome to Cornwall, a peninsula with the longest stretch of continuous coastline in Britain, making it a smugglers’ haven. But that was more than 100 years ago. Or was it?

Carola Dunn’s latest Cornish mystery takes place in the present. An early autumn afternoon begins agreeably enough. The protagonist, Eleanor Trewynn; her Westie, Teazle; her neighbor, artist Nick Gresham; and her niece, Detective Sergeant Megan Pencarrow, get together for an impromptu coastal excursion.

Eleanor, who operates a charity shop, wants to contact a few farm wives. Nick wants to do some sketching. Megan wants a temporary respite from her stressful job. The Westie is ready to run and romp. It is not to be. A perilous journey through a woodland of “cliffs’ coves and caves” takes them to the inlet, where they find the body of a man floating in the water.

He’s breathing, though barely. Megan launches a complicated rescue operation, aided by a couple of passing hikers, which ends with the completely nude victim in a sleeping bag, warmed by the body heat of the mostly naked female hiker. Eleanor manages to find a telephone and soon the trails are buzzing with emergency personnel.

Megan’s boss, DI Scumble, orders her to sit watch at the hospital. Eventually the patient regains consciousness long enough to mumble his name—Kalith Chudasama—and a few disconnected words: “The cave … my family … They didn’t come … must swim … My mother … dying …”

Back at the station Megan and Scumble theorize that Indians living in East Africa, which no longer wants them, are being smuggled into England via the Cornish coast. English law prohibits some immigrant settlers even though they may hold British passports. The man Megan rescued fits the profile, especially if he is traveling with his family.

In this set up, the author introduces several village characters and draws the reader into the small, cozy world of Cornwall.The action moves in a leisurely manner but it kept me turning the pages. As the police-procedural aspect of the story kicks in, Eleanor and Megan make a good mother-daughter team.

Megan takes her job seriously, while sidestepping a couple of romantic entanglements. Eleanor is absent-minded and soft-hearted, but her mind ticks like a clock. She figures that if a family has come ashore illegally, someone must know which smuggler’s cave hides them. She goes through the village one house at a time to find the answer.

The denouement is both wild and funny, and the author ties up all the threads in a surprising but satisfactory ending.

This is the third book in Carola Dunn’s Cornish mystery series. The earlier books are MANNA FROM HADES (2009) and A COLOURFUL DEATH (2010).


FTC DISCLOSURE NOTICE
I don’t have the foggiest idea what this is all about, but I keep seeing it on other blogs, so here it is.

FTC Disclosure Notice
FTC has a new regulation which went into effect in December, 2009 which says, basically, "Amateur Bloggers to Disclose Freebies or Be Fined." Here's my required FTC Disclosure Notice regarding review copies of books obtained for this blog. No other compensation is accepted beyond review copies of books. When I do write a review, or opinion, the source of the book cited will be disclosed in the post in which the review/opinion appears. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me.

Meet the author. From her web site:
I was born and grew up in England. After graduating from Manchester University, I set off around the world, but only made it halfway, to Fiji, before turning back to get married. I lived in Southern California for 20 years, and then moved to Eugene, Oregon, where I live now.


VALLEY OF THE SHADOW by Carola Dunn
Minotaur Books, Hardcover Dec. 11, 2012
Robinson E-book, Kindle and Nook June 20, 2013



“The Smuggler’s Song”

Smuggling was a way of life in 18th century England, due at least partly to taxation imposed by a succession of governments who needed money to pay for wars in Europe. With France just across the English Channel, and the rugged Cornish coast pocked with caves for hiding goods until they could be picked up and distributed, smuggling was a source of income for entire communities.

There’s a history of smuggling here:

Smuggling flourished because so many villagers were involved, and everyone turned a blind eye (or “watched the wall”) to all the activity going on.

British author Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called “The Smuggler’s Song.” First stanza:

“If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,/
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street./
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie./
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!”

There’s an excellent YouTube video with Murray Lachlan Young reading the poem. It’s very atmospheric and gives me the shivers!