January Books Read

This is the best I can do at the moment.  We're still in the middle of moving house.  We bought a house in late October and thought how great it was that we'd have time to paint and renovate and move things before we sold our house in Philly.  Well, I'm not sure moving slowly is the way to do it.

The house in Philly sold the day after the Open House.  It's 99% a done deal, all the preliminary papers signed and inspections completed, just one thing to clear up and then the closing on the 22nd.  Movers are coming on the 13th to move the big furniture that we can't move and my many, many boxes of books.  I've already apologized to them twice.  We moved some of my more fragile or valuable books ourselves.

But, in just a few weeks, we get to sort out the chaos that is our new house.  How did we get all this 'stuff' and where are we going to put it?!  But there are gardens, a fireplace, huge mature trees, a fenced yard, a large patio, peace and quiet.  And good and old friends very close.  And family close, too.

In the meantime, here's what I managed to read in January:

Blackbird Fly  -  Lisa McClendon

Death Walks the Woods  -  Cyril Hare

Between the Pages  -  Kathleen Adelaide

The Wanted  -  Robert Crais

Dirge for a Dorset Druid  -   Margot Arnold

Nine Coaches Waiting  -  Mary Stewart

Blackbird Fly was sort of a combination of those 'ex-pat moves to village in France / Italy / some other European country and has trouble with the natives.  Except that this one is a suspense novel and includes more than one murder.  It didn't grab me and whirl me along, but I liked it enough to keep going.

I've always liked Cyril Hare and this one didn't disappoint.  There's a murder in a small village, there are quirky characters, there's even some humor.

Between the Pages is exactly what I expected from one of my favorite book bloggers, mirabile dictu. She write erudite blog posts about her love of Latin and books, and, sometimes, Latin books!  None of the books she writes about in Between the Pages are Latin books, though.  I love people who love books, but isn't that why you're reading this?  I recommend both her book, available on Amazon, and her blog.

The Wanted was good, but there wasn't enough Joe Pike!  More Joe Pike!  More Joe Pike!

With Dirge for a Dorset Druid, I've realized that although I like this series, my enjoyment is marred by the size of the type in the copies I've been able to find.  It's small and crowded on the page.  I'm at the age where my eyes blur and cross when confronted with too much small, crowded type.  It takes me forever to read.  That said, I like the archeological and murderous adventures of Sir Toby and Dr. Penny (I think she's a Dame now).  They're characters themselves and they're often in interesting locations to solve crimes.

Nine Coaches Waiting is a reread.  It's not on my list of Books Read, but I know I read it back in my teen years.  I wasn't as compulsive about keeping my list then as I am now.  Maybe I need to keep order in my life more now than back then.  Mary Stewart always delivers an exciting, romantic, suspenseful book.  At least that's my experience.  This one takes place in near the French / Swiss border, at an estate on the side of a mountain.  It involves a young boy set to inherit the estate when he comes of age and his uncle, who is his trustee.  Maybe his uncle thinks he should inherit the estate.      The new governess thinks the boy is at risk.

That's all folks until I get moved and settled.  I hope after that happens, someone will return my mind!

A Rainy Day in April

My husband still insists on watching the television weather forecasters  -  who seem to be wrong 98% of the time.  Today we were told excitedly that there would be heavy rain and flooding.  As the host of the classical radio station we listen to in the morning noted, he wasn't sure if it was light rain or a heavy mist.  Really.

I have two books to write about.  The first is one many people know:  The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart.  I read this decades ago and watched the Hayley Mills movie an eternity ago.  I've been re-reading Mary Stewarts books after having read some recent blog posts and finding three almost new  paperbacks in a Boston used book store.

Nicola Ferris, on vacation from her job at the British Embassy in Athens, encounters a disheveled and armed man while walking to her hotel in Crete.  He takes her to a shepherd's hut, where an injured man is hidden.  The injured man is Mark Langley, shot when he, his friend, Lambis, and his little brother, Colin, witnessed a local man being murdered.  Mark was shot when they escaped.

Nicola helps the men, although Mark doesn't want to endanger her.  She gathers information in the village and hunts for Colin, who has disappeared, probably kidnapped by the murderers, maybe murdered.  Her Aunt Frances, a botanist, joins her and, between the two of them, they discover who the murderers are and why they killed one of their cohort.

As with all the Mary Stewart books I've read, there are detailed and wonderful descriptions of locations and landscapes.  You can feel the heat of the sun, taste the salt of the ocean, see the wildflowers and birds.  There's also just the right mixture of suspense and romance.  To me, it was a  pleasurable book.

This is a mystery and author you may not be familiar with unless you're a fan of Golden Age Mysteries.  I read it on my Kindle.  I discovered that I have a hardback of another of Burton's mysteries.  I've had it for ages but haven't read it.  After reading Heir to Murder, I'm eager to read it.

If you're a fan of Murder She Wrote, you may think that Cabot Cove and Carmouth are very much alike.  The ratio of murder to residents is very high.  Carmouth is a small, coastal English village.  Heir to Murder starts out with the drowning death of the local doctor, drowned when his car rolled off the pier into the water.  His death is ruled accidental.  Then his nurse falls of a cliff walk one night on her way back to the village after attending to a patient.  Another accident.

Desmond and Mavis Merrion come to spend some time in Carmouth for Mavis's health.  Desmond is an ex-military intelligence officer.  Mavis wants to say hello to Lady Violet Vernham, an old friend of her late mother.  She lives on her estate, Dragonscourt, outside the village.  Lady Violet insists that they leave the hotel and stay with her indefinitely.

To amuse himself, Desmond investigates what he feels are the murders of Dr. Murford and Nurse Penruddock.  Then someone shoots at Lady Violet's estranged nephew, Philip Sampson, and bashes the local curate, Colin Carew, over the head one dark night.  Desmond realizes that, somehow, the murders and attempted murders are related to Lady Violet and who will inherit her wealth.  Because she has no children, she wants to leave her money to whomever will use it to help the people of Carmouth.  Oh, by the way, her niece works for her as a companion.  No one knows that Olivia Jones is her niece.

I think the book is written well and that the narrative flows.  I liked the characters.  I was kept guessing about the murderer until the very end.  Miles Burton is an author I'll look for again.

Airs Above the Ground - Mary Stewart

This book has been reprinted so many times.  There are tons of covers for it and this isn't the best one, but it's the one I read.

Not too long ago, I started re-exploring Mary Stewart's books, which I enjoyed when I was a teenager. I read The Ivy Tree and had to force myself to finish it.  Not so with Airs Above the Ground.

I thought I'd like it partly because I love the Lipizzan horses.  I've been to the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and I've seen the horses perform more than once.  They were trained as fearsome war horses.  The horses aren't the focus of the story, but they're an important part of it.  

Vanessa March and her husband have a fight before he leaves on a business trip.  He's in Stockholm, at least he said that's where he was going.  But a friend of hers sees him in a news clip at the movies in a story about a circus fire near Vienna.  That friend uses the information to coerce Vanessa into escorting her teenage son, Timothy, to Vienna to visit his estranged father.

Tim's father isn't interested in having a teenage son, so Tim and Vanessa go off to find her husband.  They find the circus and make friends with the performers.  Vanessa is a veterinarian and helps an old horse with an abscess.

They find her husband, who is there under a different name.  A man from his company was killed in the fire and he's trying to find out what happened to him.  He's been keeping a secret fromVanessa, a big secret.

There are car chases up a steep mountain, a near accident with a cog train, drug smuggling, and an equine surprise.

The action was so intense that I could barely put the book down.  It rekindled my interest in Mary Stewart. 

If you want to see the Lipizzaners in action, go here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Ii_Xdk6jI

If you want to watch an amazing equine athlete with an amazing sense of rhythm, here's the late, great Blue Hors Matine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw

The Ivy Tree - Mary Stewart

I remembered reading Mary Stewart as a teenager and I remembered enjoying her books.  I hadn't read any for probably thirty years, so when I found four pristine paperbacks at a used book store when we were in Boston last fall, I snatched them up.  (I bought them, I didn't steal them!)

But I did this book a complete disservice.  It was my paperback bathtub book.  I read it in small bits while soaking in a bubble bath, so it took me several months to read.  I am a clean person, but there are limits to how much time I can stay in the tub.  Or how often I can use bathing as an excuse for reading.  I sometimes take my 'bathtub book' out of the bathroom, but I was having trouble getting interested in this one.  Finally, I decided I needed to fish or cut bait and I took the book out of the bathroom and into the living room (and bedroom).  It turned out to be a cracking good read.

A young woman goes to the north of England and is spotted by a young man, Con, who mistakes her for his cousin Annabelle.  Annabelle disappeared mysteriously and completely eight years before.  Everyone assumes she's dead.  Except her grandfather, who is ill and is still hoping she'll reappear.  Con (an appropriate name for him) convinces her to pretend to be Annabelle in order to inherit her grandfather's farm and money.  Con is in the will, too, but is afraid that the old man will leave most of the assets to the old man's younger grand-daughter Julie.

So Mary Grey, well schooled in the details of Annabelle's life by Con and his sister Lisa, assumes the role.  She does the job very well  -  until she runs into Annabelle's former lover.  

The last fifty pages are what make it a cracking good read.  There's a storm, a few storm related  accidents, a young stallion, a sort of raging river, and a final twist.  And a haymow full of kittens.  What more could you ask?

Stewart's writing is very good.  Her attention to detail is spot on.  As a former rider, I was impressed that all the details about horses and riding were absolutely right.  She knew horses.  Her descriptions of landscapes and table settings and buildings are fabulous.  I could smell the flowers and hear the raindrops.  Now I'm eager to read her other three novels waiting on my TBR stack.  I will, however, give these my undivided  attention.

Busy in Boston

Jack and I have been spending weekends in Boston for the last few weeks.  We rented a condo on Beacon Hill for a month, near where we used to live.  We rented the same condo last fall and had a terrific time.  Because we're self-employed, we can't just go away for a month.  But we did manage to spend nine days there, plus those long weekends.  It's more comfortable and cheaper than a hotel.  This will be our last weekend there for this trip.

We miss New England so much, but my three nieces and their families live much closer to Philadelphia than to Boston.  If I were wealthy, I'd have houses / condos in both locations, but I'm not.  So, this will have to do for now (but I still play the lottery and hope!).

It's nice to have a home away from home.  Eating out is expensive and because I'm a vegetarian all the time and a vegan 99% of the time, it's sometimes hard for me to find good, satisfying food in restaurants.  My husband doesn't eat much flesh, but even he won't eat in restaurants that serve foie gras (diseased duck or goose liver produced by torturing birds), which, sadly, seems to show up on too many menus in Boston and Philadelphia.  So, in the condo, we can cook what we like to eat.

We get to see friends we haven't seen for months or years, we walk or take the T (the subway) all over the city, we visit the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard museums, the Gardner Museum, and we enjoy the sea air.  We love almost everything about Boston.

There are two wonderful used book stores near the condo.  Commonwealth Books has two stores within blocks of each other.  I bought an Angela Thirkell book (County Chronicle), four Mary Stewart paperbacks (that look like they've never been read) for a dollar each, and a handful of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Asey Mayo mysteries in those atmospheric newish paperback editions.  I won't mention the other well-known used book store where I bought many, many interesting and fine books back in the 1980's because it's not what it used to be.  What a disappointment.  But I did buy two books there:  a Trollope Society guide to Trollope and a nice little 1901 travel book about Hampshire, England, with intact pull-out maps.  I love these old travel books.

There's a wonderful pen store in Boston, Bromfield Pen Shop, also close to the condo we rented.  I love fountain pens, ink, notebooks, etc.  Jack bought me a black Waterman pen there for Mother's Day and two bottles of Noodler's ink:  Walnut and Navajo Turquoise.  They have such beautiful colors and lovely bottle labels.  I need a different pen for each gorgeous color!  My journal is starting to look like a rainbow!

I'll post more photos of our trip to Boston last fall, but I think this is enough for now.  Excuse me, but I must go read!