Recent Reads

Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen.  Someone said "here is a clever book title, write a story" and Ryhs Bowen obliged with a story that has next to nothing to do with the title.  Set in 1932, Lady Georgiana is a distant relative of the British royal family who has to figure out a way to make a living without embarrassing her royal relatives.  It purports to be a cozy mystery, but the dead body doesn't show up until almost halfway through and it is more a romance novel than mystery.  I know mystery writers generally don't want their main characters to be too much smarter than the general reader, but Georgie is particularly stupid, especially in spending time with the killer long after it is clear who the killer is.  Plot lines are picked up and dropped at random.  Especially irksome was that she lied to her police about her alibi but when the police discovered evidence that her alibi was false, no one called her on that fact.  As for the spying, a very minor plot has Queen Mary asking Georgie to spy on the Prince of Wales and his married American lover.  This allows Bowen to engage in the popular sport of Wallis Simpson bashing even though in 1932, the Prince was not serious about Wallis and had an entirely different married American woman he was involved with (Lady Thelma Furness).  This was a free audio book from Audible which is probably the only reason I got through it since I listened during my commute.  The audio book was well done.  Too bad the story sucked.

The Name of the This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch.  Picked this up for free one day.  It's a pale imitation of a Lemony Snicket novel involving two oddball kids investigating a kidnapping.  The menacing bits are not very menacing.  For its intended junior fiction reader it is probably fine, but it is a bit thin for adult readers of children's fiction.

The Yellow Room by Mary Roberts Rinehart.  During WWII, a young woman and a few servants go to open the family summer home and discover a burned body in the linen cupboard.  I figured out who the victim was rather easily but was completely off base on who the murderer was.  A nice mystery with a touch of romance and intrigue.

Cat of the Century by Rita Mae Brown.  The problem with mystery series is that if one book is okay, I tend to read others. The Mrs. Murphy series was decent despite Brown's snobbish attitude and obvious wish that the world would revert to an agricultural society with a landed gentry (she'd be one of the few haves in this situation and not one of the far more prevalent have nots).  Brown's bad tendencies get worse in the more recent books.  This one came out in 2010.  I was annoyed when our heroine Harry got annoyed at a shopkeeper who made Harry pay for an expensive piece of pottery her dog broke in a shop.  It wasn't the fault of the dog that he got spooked by departing customers.  Right--it was the fault of the stupid human who took her unleashed animal into a store full of expensive breakables.  Yes, I get that Harry has some sort of undiagnosed medical condition where she is psychologically incapable of being away from an animal for more than five minutes, but she needs to accept the consequences of her actions.  Then Harry and her husband were discussing a trip Harry is to take.  She can't fly because they're environmentalists and air travel causes major pollution.  In fact, pollution would just clear up if all air traffic would cease (while Harry is strongly against government spending and regulation, she supports it when it protects her point of view).  She then debates taking her huge new truck that eats gas or her 1978 truck that, given its vintage, can't be good for the environment either.  Can't rent a car since that's too expensive, never mind that the rental cost would be offset by the increased fuel efficiency that would also be better for the environment.  This whole discussion is written in stilted dialogue that in no way resembles a conversation two family members would have with each other over the dinner table.  I could stomach her right wing agenda if only it wasn't so poorly written.  At this point, this book and another Brown sitting on my to be read shelf immediately got moved to the donate back to the library shelf.  

Sanders of the River by Edgar Wallace.  A rollicking adventure novel about a British commissioner in Africa. Yes, it is racist and the natives are viewed largely as children in need of discipline, but it is about what you would expect of a imperialist novel published in 1911.  Sanders at least tries to understand the ways of the natives and deal with them somewhat on their terms and not as a tyrannical despot.  There's some nice humor especially in the character of an escaped criminal who becomes a tribal chief.  Rather fun.