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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

November Books

I did better this month than last, despite feeling restless much of the time.  I started a few large books that have since been idling on a table.  But here's what I did finish:

The Lost Boy  -  Camilla Lackberg

Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd  -  Alan Bradley

The City Baker's Guide to Country Living  -  Louise Miller

Fifty Days of Solitude  -  Doris Grumbach

Bodies in a Bookshop  -  R. T. Campbell

Bear  -  Marian Engel

Turn Right at Machu Picchu  -  Mark Adams

The Princess Bride  -  William Goldman

The Skeleton Road  -  Val McDermid

Hiss and Hers  -  M. C. Beaton

You can see a trend here toward mindless reading, comfort books, things that don't require too much attention.  I started and discarded a couple of books.  Life's too short.  I can't imagine December's list will have much more depth.  We'll see.

The Skeleton Road - Val McDermid

I've read a lot of Val McDermid's books, but I gave up a while ago because they were so violently graphic.  Or graphically violent.  Maybe I've been reading the wrong series.  Those were the Tony Hill / Carol Jordan ones.  This is a DCI Karen Pirie book.  It takes place in and around Edinburgh.

During a routine safely inspection of a long abandoned building, a skeleton is found on the roof.  No identification is found on the body except a hotel key card and bits of bank card information rubbed off on the key card.  Pirie discovers that the bones belong to a Croatian general from the Balkan wars in the early 1990s.

Her investigation takes her to Oxford, to Maggie Blake, an Oxford professor, and her best friend, Tessa Minogue.  The general had been living with Blake after the wars and had disappeared eight years earlier.  Blake thought that he had decided to go back to whatever he left in Croatia.  A wife?  A family?  She had never known anything about his past.  It was only the present and the future that mattered to them.  She never tried to contact him or find out where he was.

In the meantime, someone is killing war criminals from the Balkans, people the war tribunal is about to arrest.  Someone is meting out swift justice of their own.  Was the general killed by the same person?  For the same reason?

DCI Pirie goes to Croatia to investigate.  Pirie stays one step ahead of the lawyers trying to solve the case of the premature murders of war criminals.  They do not like her for that.

I think this book lacked the intensity of the Tony Hill books.  Maybe that's something the violence brings to them.  But I enjoyed the plot and the characters in The Skeleton Road.  I'm up for another DCI Pirie case.

Nayeli, A Child in Need

Most of us want to help others in need, especially children.  Here's a chance to change the life of Nayeli, a young girl who has suffered both physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her family in Nicaragua.  A family here in the United States wants desperately to adopt her, to bring her here to be part of their family, to be safe, but they need some help.

Atalanta Sunguroff is my best friend's daughter.  She's the kind of young woman who gets things done, who puts her ethics first, who doesn't give up when things get difficult.  When she was just a teenager, she founded a charity to bring education and medical care to families living in the mountains of Nicaragua.  She hiked into the villages and organized opportunities for young people.  She's the real deal.  She doesn't talk about changing lives, she changes them for the better.

Atalanta is raising money to help with the expenses for adopting Nayeli.  You can read Nayeli's story in the information on the fund raising page at the link below.  Any amount will help Atalanta and her family save this little girl.  It all adds up.

https://www.youcaring.com/ourfamily-690463

Turn Right at Machu Picchu - Mark Adams

When I was younger, I was more adventurous.  I don't think that's unusual.  Jack and I travelled a lot in the 1980s and were interested in the non-tourist side of travelling.  Although we could have been kidnapped and murdered, or just kidnapped, or just murdered, several times, by taking chances, we took those chances.  We went to a posh, private gaming club in London, invited by non-felonious-looking English people.  And we got a private, unexpected tour of St. Lucia's decidedly non-tourist side by a man who jumped into our car at a forlorn crossroads and said he was a tour guide.  We couldn't get him out of the car, so we gave in.  A little riskier, but there was a rain forest and hot springs  -  into which we could have disappeared forever.  According to the newspaper, those things do happen.

Anyway, I'm much happier to travel via armchair and book.  The last time I flew to Boston, I had to almost strip in the middle of the Philly airport.  Is that civilized?  I think not.  I worry more about bug bites and non-vegan edible food, bathrooms, sleeping quarters, delayed flights, etc., than I ever did.  So I love a good travel narrative, and Turn Right at Machu Picchu is that.  I also love lost cities and exploration (yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my favorite movies), so I especially loved this book.

Mark Adams, a travel journalist who works mostly in an office, decides to follow in the footsteps of Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor credited with finding Machu Picchu, the city of the Incas, in 1911.  Bingham's story alone is worth reading.  Adams hires John Leivers, an Australian guide whose passion is documenting Inca structures before they're 'saved' by a sometimes inept Peruvian government and overrun by tourists.  Many of the perfectly constructed Inca roads have been paved over and the caretakers have badly repaired some ruins.  Machu Picchu, although the most famous of the Inca cities, is not the only one.

Adams writes humorously at times, like Bill Bryson, but he also adds the history that we should know to appreciate the world of the Incas, destroyed by the treasure hunting Spanish in the 1500s.  He alternates the story of the Incas and the Spanish, the story of Hiram Bingham, and his own excursion into the deserts and jungles of Peru.  I'd like to read more about John Leivers.  He's such a character that he deserves his own book.

This was an interesting and fun book.  I learned a lot about the Incas, the structures they left, the indigenous people of Peru, and the natural beauty and dangers of the country.  If this book piques your interest, you can find lots of things on YouTube and the Internet about Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham, and Peru.  For movie buffs, Secret of the Incas, a movie starring Charlton Heston, is available only on YouTube, as far as I can tell.  I have a first edition of Bingham's book Lost City of the Incas, so I've been delving into that.