Book Catchup

It’s between the years, as we say over here, and I have been doing some catching up with my books - my e-books, to be more precise. I’ve been buying several cosy mysteries over the last couple of months and I didn’t always get to read them right away. At the moment, I have the peace and quiet and spare time, so I thought I might just as well get to it.

Caught Dead Handed (A Witch City Mystery) by Carol J. Penny

I couldn’t put this one down the moment I had picked it up. It was a spurt of the moment decision to buy this one, since it was the first of a new series and I read about it in the monthly review of new cosy mysteries over at the Cosy Chicks.

Lee Barrett is returning to her hometown of Salem MA, only to find herself in trouble when she leaves after not getting the job she wanted only to find another employee of the local TV station WITCH-TV dead in the water. Lee gets tangled up in the investigation after taking the late woman’s job on a whim and becoming the new medium/horror movie host of the station. The fact that after many years her visions are returning, doesn’t make things better, neither does that fact that the dead woman’s tomcat has decided to adopt her and her aunt.

The story is very well-written and fun to read. It’s a good balance between mystery and humour and has enough twists and turns to keep me interested and reading on.

Murder on the Half Shelf and Not the Killing Type (Booktown Mysteries) by Lorna Barrett

Murder on the Half Shelf has been the first Booktown Mystery I bought as an e-book, I have the prior ones as soft-covers. It took me some time to get around to it, after I had bought it, and I have to admit the series is running into a bit of a block with this one. Tricia and her sister Angela spend a night at the newly-opened Bed and Breakfast, only to stumble yet over another murder. It’s getting a bit of a stretch to have more crimes happening, since Tricia on the whole lacks the nosiness of Miss Marple, who stumbles over stuff, because she is actively searching for it (at least that’s my impression of her).

Not the Killing Type was a little better, then. This time, there is actually a link back to Tricia again, a logical reason for her to investigate, since her sister is among the suspects - and so is she. During a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, Angela is set to become the new head of the Chamber. Suddenly, though, a third party pops up, only to get murdered a little later. Everyone who was in the meeting is a suspect and Angela and Tricia even twice so. Finally, from my point of view, Tricia also breaks off with her on-off boyfriend, the local sheriff - a guy who every time something happens starts to treat Tricia as if he’d never met her before, just because she could always have been the one who done it in his eyes. Nobody needs a guy like that for a boyfriend and Tricia is putting up with too much, anyway.

I might still give the series another try, but if things don’t change to much, it might go the way of the Coffeehouse Mysteries, which I haven’t been reading any longer for quite a while now, too. After all, there’s a few interesting new series coming up, like the Witch City Mysteries above or the two following.

Iced Chiffon (A Consignment Store Mystery) by Duffy Brown

I took my sweet time with that one, admittedly, buying it quite a while ago, but never really starting to read it. I’d taken a look in the book at amazon and then decided I wanted to have it, but somehow always found other stuff to read first, despite the fact that it was on my Kindle the whole time.

At first, Reagan, the main character of the starting series, seems a bit of a letdown, since she’s sitting in her partially renovated home and feeling sorry for herself, since her ex definitely got the best of her (everything but the house) during their divorce. He’s got the company, all the money, the younger girlfriend, and even the Lexus. Reagan has a half-finished Victorian house and more bills than she can pay. And, after Reagan and her aunt found the corpse of Cupcake, her ex’s new girlfriend, in the Lexus, he even plans to sell her house, which he still hasn’t fully handed to her, in order to pay his lawyer who helped him cheat her out of everything she should have gotten during the divorce.

But Reagan grows quickly out of her misery, taking things into her own hands, investigating the murder of Cupcake (given name Janelle), so the lawyer won’t be able to run up that much of a bill. With courage, a little bit of luck, and a lot of snooping, she does her best to get to the bottom of it all. It doesn’t always help that Walker Boone, the lawyer, seems set on telling her to stay out of it, only to help her when things are getting tough. Or that the leader of a local gang is running a bet on who will find out first, Walker or Reagan.

At the same time, Reagan turns the ground floor of her house into a consignment shop called the Prissy Fox, in order to make some money and get her bills paid - plus the food for the dog which turned up under the porch and prefers hotdogs to premium food.

The story is full of interesting characters and the strange and colourful life of Savannah. It has twists, it has turns, it has oodles of suspects (since Cupcake was making some illegal money on the side), and it has a lot of witty barter between the gang-member-turned-lawyer and the temperamental consignment store owner. I’m looking forward to more of it.

Geared for the Grave (A Cycle Path Mystery) by Duffy Brown

Also by Duffy Brown (who also wrote Iced Chiffon), but the start of another series. I haven’t finished this book, so I can’t tell where it will lead me and what will happen, but I can already tell that the heroine will be interesting and the setting is very promising, too - Mackinac Island, full of bikes and horses, but empty of cars. Evidently also having at least one murderer present, but it can’t go out to the tourists.

Scandals, Secrets, and Murder (The Widow and the Rogue Mysteries) by Maggie Sefton

This one I’ve had on my hard disk (the Kindle app on my computer at any rate) for a while, but I haven’t found the peace to read it so far. It’s not set in the present, unlike the other books in this post, but in the past of Washington DC. A senator who cheats people out of money gets murdered in a brothel, the girl who was with him is almost killed as well. The wound, luckily, isn’t fatal, since the man was quite heavyset and the weapon didn’t pierce her body deep enough.

The book brings together two unlikely allies, a widow, doing good work with her husband’s money, and the relative of a young man suspected of the murder, who had to leave England for a while. Where the widow and the rogue are going to end up, I don’t know, but I still think I will get into this one, once I can devote the time to it.

I’m enjoying catching up on my books, having the time and the peace for reading to my heart’s content. Of course, I also enjoy playing multiplayer games against friends from Challengers, even though I usually get defeated.