The More The Terrier

David Rosenfelt is back with another Christmas-themed mystery in his Andy Carpenter mystery series - The More The Terrier (#1,344).  Laurie Carpenter loves Christmas.  Andy not so much.  But when a small terrier shows up on their doorstep, they're in the mood to be charitable (it's a dog, isn't it?).  They think there's something familiar about the dog.  It's not a stray because it's obviously well-taken care of, but it isn't until their son Ricky comes home that the mystery is solved.  He identifies Murphy by a trick he taught the dog whom they fostered until he was adopted into a loving home.  When they return the dog to his owners, a short distance away, the mother is glad to see the dog but distressed because her son BJ is in jail on a murder charge.

Of course, Andy and Laurie investigate.  BJ is accused of murdering his professor, a brilliant computer scientist, over a grade dispute.  In fact, he has a defense attorney who urges him to plead guilty for a lesser sentence.  Andy wants to know how this sleazebag attorney came to represent BJ, and the deeper he digs, the more suspicious the circumstances become.  BJ is a pawn in a game some very clever people are playing...

Clever twists and lots of riffs on how much Andy hates Christmas.  Entertaining read.

Royal Holiday

Our library has a "Christmas In July" display, and I found one of Jasmine Guillory's romances - Royal Holiday (#1,343).  Not only in she one of my favorite romance writers, but this story featured Sandringham, where the British royals spend Christmas, and a heroine in her fifties.  Romance isn't just for the young!

Vivian Forest has been invited to take a break from her job as a hospital social worker to accompany her stylist daughter on the assignment of a lifetime: arranging the holiday wardrobe of the Duke and Duchess as a stand-in for the Duchess' regular stylist on maternity leave.  It's the chance of a lifetime for Maddie, and she gets to bring her mother as her plus one!  While Maddie is busy, Vivian bumps into the Queen's private secretary in the kitchen of the cottage where they are staying.  The cook is famous for her scones, and Malcolm Hudson is there to take advantage of them.  He and Vivian hit it off, and he finds himself inviting her on a tour of the grounds.  One thing leads to another in the most delightful way.

Yes, this is a steamy romance, but it grows so naturally out of the story you find yourself wrapped up in it all.  It just adds to the pleasure of reading Royal Holiday.

And naturally, there are conflicts - there is an ocean between this pair of lovers.  Will they ever be able to resolve it?  And do they even want to?  You'll just have to read Royal Holiday to find out.

Splinter Effect

In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed the time-travel adventure Splinter Effect (#1,342) by debut novelist Andrew Ludington.  Think Indiana Jones, if he had the technology behind him to send him back to particular moments in time.

Rabbit Ward is a chrono-archaeologist on a mission.  He's been commissioned to retrieve six manuscripts known to have been in the Library of Alexandria when Caesar destroyed it.  He manages to grab three, but another scavenger from the future beats him to the other manuscripts.  He has barely enough time to hide his trophies before he must jump back to 2018, his own time.  His corporate sponsors are disappointed, to say the least.  So he's glad to be given another chance to go after his real prize - the Menorah looted by  the Romans from the Temple in Jerusalem.  He's tried to retrieve it once before and failed, but this time he's going back to Constantinople in 535 CE and he vows he will be successful...

Things never go as expected, and his own past failures come back to haunt him, while he is forced to team up with his nemesis, Helen, who grabbed the manuscripts from him in Alexandria. Of course, she's after the same Menorah.  And even if they are successful, who will claim the Menorah in the future?  Blending into the past isn't always easy, especially when you know how things are supposed to go.  Their mission is not to change the past in ways that will affect the future.  When things do change, that's the Splinter Effect, and all bets are off.

Rabbit and Helen make such a great team, I sure hope we haven't seen the last of them!  I think this could be the start of a very promising series.  Please, Andrew Ludington, let's go more places in time!

Austen At Sea

 There's been a bit of buzz on Natalie Jenner's Austen At Sea (#1,341).  She's also the author of The Jane Austen Society.  Looking back, I didn't care much for that book, either, and many of my criticisms of Austen at Sea are the same.  I felt that this book couldn't decide what it wanted to be: was it serious literary criticism with the Massachusetts Supreme Court justices debating the merits of Jane Austen's novel?  Or was it about Henrietta and Charlotte Stevenson, daughters of one such judge who correspond with Jane Austen's living brother?  Or was it about women's marital and property rights both in England and the United States at the end of the Civil War?  The story jumped between these threads and others.

Henrietta and Charlotte are invited to England by Sir Francis Austen with the lure of private letter written by Jane to her brother - one that has miraculously escaped the destruction of her papers by the rest of the family.  Not only do these two women in their twenties run away from home to do it (their father, a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge doesn't approve!) but Henrietta impulsively marries on board ship setting up future complications.  And why not randomly introduce Louisa May Alcott as an eccentric fellow passenger as a contrast to Jane Austen?

It was all such a mish-mash that it failed to entertain or enlighten me.  Hard pass on this one.

Just Some Stupid Love Story

I really thought Katelyn Doyle's Just Some Stupid Love Story (#1,340) had some promise.  A rekindled romance between two high school sweethearts at a fifteen year reunion?  Why not?

Turns out that this is the steamiest of steamy romances and not my cup of tea.  If you like the sex explicit and often, this may be the book for you.  I did not care to stick around, if you get my meaning.

On The Plus Side

I liked the idea of On The Plus Side (#1,339) by Jenny L. Howe.  That is until I read the Author's Note with all its disclaimers and trigger warnings.  I managed to read two pages and that was enough for me.  Did not finish.

Takedown Twenty - A Stephanie Plum Novel

How did I miss Janet Evanovich's Takedown Twenty (#1,338) in her best-selling Stephanie Plum series?  My husband found it on the library display and asked if I'd read it.  I hadn't!  In case you were wondering, this is the one with Kevin the giraffe and Joe's family connection Uncle Sunny.

Can it be that Stephanie might be tiring of the life of a bond retrieval agent?  She doesn't seem to be having much luck tracing the skips her cousin Vinnie is giving her.  And it's getting downright dangerous, too!  It doesn't help that Ranger is asking her to moonlight for a client of his whose mother was murdered and tossed in a dumpster.  

In the meantime, she does get a big-ticket trace - Uncle Sunny.  He's a well-known mobster who controls the Burg.  He's so well-liked in the neighborhood, no one will rat him out, including Joe Morelli, Sunny's godson and Stephanie's main squeeze.

And what about the giraffe roaming around the neighborhood?  No one has reported seeing him.  Stephanie and Lula are almost convinced they're imagining it, too, until Ranger spots him one dark night.

Bingo, funeral parlors and acquiring domestic tools are making Stephanie have serious thoughts about settling down if she and her grandmother make it out alive.  The question is - with whom?

Always a fun read!

Alice Chen's Reality Check

I'm not a fan of reality TV shows like Survivor, but I did enjoy this cheeky romance mystery set on one such couples show: Dawn Tay's Inferno.  Co-authors Kara Loo and Jennifer Young have a lot of fun with the off-set goings on in Alice Chen's Reality Check (#1,337) and I did too.

Alice is a no-nonsense math teacher who takes her challenges seriously.  When her boyfriend proposes becoming contestants on a new reality show an old college buddy is working on, he persuades Alice to agree when he tells her the jackpot for the winning couple will be one million dollars.  Although Alice hasn't shared the information with anyone, her mother's stage 4 cancer treatments are eating up her salary and than some. Winning a million dollars would sure help settle the medical debts.

Her old high school nemesis Daniel Cho just happens to be half of one of the other couples competing.  Now Alice has double motivation: to help her mother and beat the pants off Daniel (even if thinking of what's under those pants is making her sweat!)  When Alice's fiancé Chase is caught with his pants down with another contestant, it almost gets them thrown off the show, but the show's emcee and producer are determined to build up the show's ratings even more by swapping the couples and continuing on.  And Alice thought it couldn't get any worse - now she's paired with Daniel Cho and they've got to make good.

The behind-the-scenes shenanigans lead to sabotage and eventually murder on the set.  Can Alice and Daniel stop the killer before more people are hurt?  It's not looking good...

Alice and Daniel are strong characters in an interesting, if slightly preposterous setting.  Add to that a locked room mystery and you have it all!  And isn't that what beach reading is all about?  I look forward to reading more from this South Asian writing duo.

The Expectant Detectives

Kat Ailes debut novel, The Expectant Detectives (#1,336) is set in a charming Cotswold village at her boyfriend's suggestion, but Alice doesn't adjust easily to the move from London.  Add to that being close to her pregnancy due date, and you have a recipe for disaster.  Their rented cottage is quaint, but is a definite fixer-upper.  While dealing with repairs and unpacking, Alice manages to find a prenatal training group locally and meets a few of the local women her age in the class.  

Things are proceeding well when one of her classmates goes into labor and Alice gets a bloody preview of what's in store for her.  Meanwhile downstairs the owner of the shop has been murdered and now they're all suspects.  Can Alice and her clutzy dog Helen solve the mystery before someone else gets hurt?  The rest of the prenatal group band together hunt down the clues and the culprit.

The childbirth and pregnancy descriptions are more graphic than I cared for, but that's just me.  I did think that this mystery would have benefitted by some judicious pruning.  I found myself picking it up and putting it down, so it actually took me several months to finish reading it.  That should have been a clue right there.  And that may have been partly due to the cover art.  Really did not care for it.  I'd file this one under "Meh."

The Love Haters

I am a late comer to the Katherine Center fan club, but that only means that I have a lot of catching up to do.  I just finished her latest The Love Haters (#1,335) and loved it.

Katie loves her job as a videographer, even if some of her corporate clients aren't the world's most exciting.  For that, she has her own private YouTube channel featuring A Day In The Life, where she chronicles those unsung heroes who step forward when needed to pull a man from a burning car, or dive into a pool to rescue a child.  

But things at her company are not going well, and her own job might be next on the chopping block.  But her superior gives her a chance to film a recruiting video for the U.S. Coast Guard.  Its subject will be a rescue diver who saved Jennifer Anniston's dog after it fell off a cliff.  Hutch Hutchinson is perfect for the poster boy role.  The only problem is that he's stationed in Key West, and in order to fly on the helicopter to film him, she'll have to pass a swimming test.  And she doesn't even own a bathing suit, let alone swim!   

Complications and lies pile on, there's an epic "meet cute" and an amazing dog named George Bailey as she settles into a kitschy cottage hotel run by Hutch's colorful aunt Rue.  Katie not only meets the love of her life, but a welcoming family as well as she works to conquer her issues for a goal that will change her life for the better if she can survive long enough.

When I was discussing this novel with one of my friends who had also recently read it, we agreed on one thing: the reason we love these books so much is that there is an added layer of emotional depth.  They go beyond the "meet cute" and "happily ever after" of other romance books and tackle real issues everyday people struggle with.  How many women out there can relate to Katie's body image sensitivity and online bullying?  Ms. Center offers in her pages some gentle guidance which might help others suffering from these issues in a positive direction.  Their own happy endings?  Wouldn't that be nice?  I found Ms. Center's purposeful inclusion of these story elements in her Author's Note at the end of The Love Haters profound and moving.  More books like these?  Yes, please!

Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime

Leonie Swann's Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime (#1,334) is the second in what I hope will be a long-running series.  Originally written in German, her three books so far have been ably translated by Amy Bojang into cottage cozy English.  If you enjoy the Marlow Murder Club series, you should add Ms. Swann's books to your "To Read" list.

Agnes Sharp and the rest of the tenants at Sunset House have been suffering through a long cold spell with the boiler on the fritz.  Space heaters aren't just doing the trick.  And Agnes has decided to defer telling anyone about the body in the church for the time being. Why should it become her responsibility?  So Edwina winning a trip for two to a luxury eco resort on the Cornwall coast is just the ticket to escape.  Everyone (with Charlie's financial help!) will go with Edwina to the iconic Eden resort.  As the house mates explore the luxurious surroundings with spectacular walls of glass overlooking the sea, the bodies start to accumulate.  Edwina is convinced she is on a mission for her old spy masters, and somewhere along the way she has acquired a white boa constrictor as part of it.  It soon becomes clear to Agnes that she is on the unknown hitman's list and that the pile of corpses in cold storage will continue to pile up unless and until she can deduce who the assassin is...

The characters in these books are just so eccentric and delightfully over-the-top that they make the Thursday Murder Club crew look positively average.  And don't get me wrong - I love that series as well!

I can't wait until there's another installment in the Miss Sharp Investigates series.  In the meantime, I have to go back and read the mystery that started it all - Three Bags Full.