What I Read in June, Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation So Far

I don't think many of us post about all the books we read.  Sometimes we don't want to write a bad review, so we skip that book.  Sometimes we just have nothing much to say about a book, even though we might have enjoyed it.  Here's my list of what I read in June.  Again, it's a list heavy in mysteries.  I should just accept that I'm a mystery junkie and always have been.

The Potter's Field  -  Andrea Camilleri

McNally's Luck  -  Lawrence Sanders

North and South  -  Elizabeth Gaskell

A Cat With the Blues  -  Lydia Anderson

The Travelling Hornplayer  -  Barbara Trapido

Toby's Folly  -  Margot Arnold

Manitou Canyon  -  William Kent Krueger

Knife Creek  -  Paul Doiron

The Lady of Sorrow  -  Anne Zouroudi

I finally got audio CDs for Don Quixote, which I'm hoping to finish one of these days.  I have a few other books partly read that I'd like to finish this summer.  But then there are all those unread books in my house and all those recommended on your blog posts!

Manitou Canyon (Krueger) / Knife Creek (Doiron)

I've been off in the woods for the past week.  No black flies or dangerous animals or crazy people (who seem to populate those remote places).  I've been in Maine and Minnesota, deep in the wilderness.

In Manitou Canyon, Cork O'Connor is hired to find a wealthy dam builder.  John Harris disappeared while on a camping trip with his grandchildren, Lindsay and Trevor.  Lindsay and Cork go back to the place where he disappeared.  They're captured by Harris's kidnappers.  Why do they want Harris and his grand-daughter?  Or is it Cork they want?  Much excitement ensues.

Up in Maine, Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch and his girlfriend Stacey are asked to kill some wild boars who have worked their way north and are becoming a problem.  They find the boars, but they also find a dead baby.

Mike and the State Police investigate.  Mike finds the woman who had the baby, but she's being held captive by some very nasty people.  They're more than happy to kill to protect themselves.

I just realized that in both books, the protagonists are taken prisoner and almost killed.  Fortunately for readers who like either or both of the series, Mike and Cork are rescued and will, I hope, continue to entertain me in future mysteries.  These books are real page-turners, fast reads.

Widowmaker - Paul Doiron

I read five books in the five days we were in Maine (2 days out of the week were travel days), but I've only read one in the three and a half days since we got back to Philly.  Mostly, I've been doing laundry, buying groceries, and going through a week's worth of mail and newspapers (for the crosswords).  Yesterday, Jack and I walked up to the library to pick up Widowmaker, which they were holding for me.  I read it in two days (technically, a day, since I started it yesterday afternoon, didn't read it last night or this morning, and finished it this afternoon).

This is a series that Elaine, of Random Jottings, in Colchester, England, posted about a few years ago.  Here he was, in my own backyard, but I had never heard of him.  Him being Paul Doiron, him being Mike Bowditch, Maine game warden.  Now I've read all seven of these books.

Mike Bowditch is a game warden who has trouble following the rules.  He's had many close calls and they've left him with both physical and emotional scars.  He's only 29 in this book.

Widowmaker is a ski resort on its last legs after a fatal accident involving poor maintenance of a ski lift.  A woman who works there finds Mike and tells him she wants him to find her missing son  -  who she says is Mike's half brother.  It could be true because Mike's father was a womanizer and a poacher and a general bad guy.  Mike balks at first and then decides he has to find out the truth.

Along the way, he encounters a couple of druggies and confiscates their wolf dog.  It's illegal to own a wolf dog in Maine unless you have a permit.  There's something about this wolf dog - his superior intelligence, his acceptance of people, his wildness - that gets to Mike.  The dog will be euthanized unless Mike finds someone qualified who will take him.  He finds a wolf rescue in New Hampshire, but, after visiting it, Mike can't leave him there.  The dog is domesticated but has killed a deer, so he's considered dangerous.  DNA shows that he's 90% wolf.

The boy who may be Mike's half brother is a convicted sex offender.  When he was 18, he had sex with his underage girlfriend.  Her father found out and convinced / coerced his daughter into saying it wasn't consensual.  Now the boy's branded a sex offender, on the sex offender list, but without a description of his crime.  He's been sent to a logging company that is the last resort for sex offenders who can't find work anywhere because of their conviction.  In reality, it's a slave labor camp.

Mike can't find the missing boy, but his bloody truck is found.  Someone decides to become a vigilante and rid the world of sex offenders and perverts, which is whomever fits their own description of pervert.  Was Mike's brother one of his victims?

The last several pages flew past as I raced to the end.  Which was slightly disappointing.  I like books  with all the loose ends tied up tightly and this one didn't do that.  Just a personal preference.  But, it was a fun read and very exciting in parts.  Snowstorms, wolf dogs, cross dressers, helicopter crashes  -  what more do you want?

A Bunch of Books

I've been reading so much that I've become greedy and ALL I want to do is read.  More, more, more!  Leave me alone!  I don't have time for this blogging stuff!  I want to read!  But I should tell you a little about the books I've finished, just to prove that I have been reading.

I don't have photos of all the books.  Some were e-books and some didn't photograph well.  Those shiny covers on library books create such glare.  I'm still not a competent photographer either.  Apparently.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor at The New Yorker for the last thirty years.  If you know that publication, you know they are the benchmark for grammar and literacy.  In a light, amusing way, Morris writes of how she got hired there, the crazy characters who worked there, and how she became one of those characters.  She discusses the fine points of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, laced with goofy comments and stories.  She confesses to loving a particular kind of pencil.  This is a fun book, and one that might make you overly conscious of your writing.

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Then it was time for some excitement.  I love this series of mysteries by Paul Doiron.  They take place in Maine, much of which is woodland, remote, and sort of spooky.  If you're the nervous sort, stay close to the coast!  Doiron's crime solver is Mike Bowditch, a Maine game warden.  Because Maine is so big and much of it is remote, game wardens function as police officers.  In The Precipice, two young women who have been through hiking the Appalachian Trail, that is, hiking from the start, at Springer Mountain in Georgia, to the end, at Mount Katahdin in Maine, disappear in Maine's Hundred-Mile Wilderness.  The Hundred-Mile Wilderness is considered the wildest part of the trail. 

Are the women lost?  Have they been in an accident?  Have they been murdered?  What's this about them being trailed by coyotes?  There seem to be plenty of suspects if they've been murdered, lots of loony people.  There's the weird ex-con who held the record for fastest unsupported through hike on the trail.  There's a family of apparently in-bred back woodsmen.  There's a strange minister.  Mike and his girlfriend are part of the search and rescue team.  

The whole book is exciting, but the ending is hold-your-breath dramatic.  

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I also read an Ann Cleeves mystery, Dead Water.  A woman connected with the local police in the Shetland Islands finds a body in her boat.  They bring in an outside investigator, Willow Reeves, an odd young woman.  Inspector Jimmy Perez is still on compassionate leave after the violent death of his fiancee a year earlier.  He becomes involved with this investigation and, in the process, furthers his healing.

The dead man was a local man who became an investigative reporter.  He left the area after he got a local girl pregnant.  His family wanted him to do better and didn't want him tied down.  The girl lost the baby anyway and was about to get married to an older, local man.  Why did the reporter come back?  Someone said he told them he was onto a story.  The prospective bridegroom is found dead, and then the woman who found the first body disappears.  Who says small towns aren't exciting?

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Still reluctant to return to Don Quixoite, who is still waiting in the wings, I read The Velveteen Rabbit.  Somehow, I missed this when I was a child.  All I have to say is Please forgive me for, finally, after about sixty years, throwing away most of my precious but grubby stuffed animals.  I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!

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Recently I read and enjoyed Dave Goulson's book, A Sting in the Tale, a book about bumblebees.  This is his followup book, A Buzz in the Meadow.  At the end of the first book, Goulson manages to buy a small derelict farm in France.  He hopes to restore its meadow to something closer to a natural, more ecologically balanced state.

I was hoping this would be more like those 'I bought a decrepit country house in a foreign land and restored it' type of book.  It has a little of that, but, as I probably should have expected, it was more  about the insects and birds and creatures that live there when he buys the place or show up after it became a better habitat.  There are butterflies, death watch beetles, owls, and others.  It's fascinating  -  except for the parts about genetics.  Insurance, taxes, and genetics  -  I can't wrap my brain around any of them.

Goulson has some serious things to say about pesticides and the ways in which humans are ruining the earth.  I agree with him 1,000%.  It's too bad that most of the people who read books like this are people who are already concerned about what sort of world we're leaving to the next generation and what sort of illnesses we're giving ourselves by trying to control nature.

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I read a few more books, but I'll either post something about them later or forget to do it.  Right now, I'd like to get back to Death Walks in Eastrepps by Francis Beeding.  It's a cracking good mystery and I may be able to finish it before I turn off the light tonight.

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I hope you're all reading some interesting or entertaining books.

Three Books

Until recently, my reading momentum was stalled.  I read almost nothing over the holidays and couldn't get back into a rhythm in January or February.  I was reading a little, but I wasn't finishing much.  I kept jumping from one book to another.  Now, I think I'm back on track, more focused.

It might help that I've been reading mostly library books.  You MUST read those first because you're under a deadline.  So here's what I've finished in the last week, all library books.

A book blogger mentioned reading one of Nick Hornby's collections of the columns he wrote for Believe magazine, thereby reminding me that I had read More Baths, Less Talking and would probably enjoy reading another.  His essays on books and reading seemed like just the thing.  I could finish them in a reasonable amount of time and they don't require sustained attention.  I borrowed Housekeeping vs. The Dirt from the library and dove in.  Just the trick.  

The chapters are usually only a few pages long and begin with a list of books he's bought during the month and a list of books he's read.  The lists don't correspond to each other.  We all buy more books than we can possibly read, don't we?  And we often buy books but put off reading them until later.  Or never.

I'm not going to go into the books he's read and written about.  He's an eclectic reader, so there's something for everyone.  Hornby's essays are personal and amusing.  I found myself smiling and nodding my head in agreement.  We readers have many things in common.  If you need a book to nudge you out of a reading slump, you might want to try one of Hornby's collections of reviews.

Next up is the latest in Laurie R. King's Mary Russell / Sherlock Holmes series.  It's a sort of prequel.  Russell and Holmes return to their home to find that a rock etched with a chrysanthemum has been artistically placed in their garden.  It can only have come from friends they made in Japan.  Dreaming Spies (a play on Matthew Arnold's name for Oxford, England, 'dreaming spires') finds Russell and Holmes taking a cruise from an adventure in India to San Francisco and then on to England.

On the ship, they meet Lord Darley, his much younger second wife, and his son.  Holmes suspects that Darley the elder is a sometimes blackmailer, something that he abhors.  They also meet an interesting young Japanese woman, Haruki.  She tells Mary that she and her family are acrobats.  They are, but they are much more than that.  Haruki recruits Russell and Holmes to help her recover a book that was accidentally given to the English royal family.  The book contains a secret that is being used to blackmail the Japanese royal family.

Haruki teaches Russell and Holmes the intricacies of Japanese customs.  There is a lot of detail about clothing, tea, Japanese baths, and food.  There is haiku and Basho, a famed poet who travelled all over Japan.  All that was interesting.  

Things come to an exciting finish back in England, at the Darley estate.

I like the Mary Russell series, but I liked the earlier books better.  Unless my memory deceives me, they were more exciting.  These later books seem to get bogged down in the details of places and often take a while to get exciting.  Details add much, but too many details seems like a tutorial, not a mystery.  Dreaming Spies was better than some of the recent books.

Now this is a cracking good read.  I'm always amused that this series of mysteries about a Maine Game Warden was introduced to me by Elaine, who lives in England.  I lived in New England most of my life and still own land in Maine.  But, thanks, Elaine for the tip.  I love this series, partly because I've been to many of the places mentioned in the book, partly because it's fast paced and exciting.

Mike Bowditch was a Maine Game Warden, but has resigned to live a less political life as a Maine hunting and fishing guide.  Unfortunately, he can't stay out of trouble.

Kathy Frost, Mike's former Game Warden mentor, and her new partner, Danielle Tate, shoot and kill a veteran of the Afghanistan war.  He had been horribly injured by an IED and had been scarred physically and mentally.  His mother calls to report that he's in the barn with a shotgun and she thinks he's going to hurt himself.  The wardens shoot him in self-defense.

Mike goes to visit Kathy and both of them are shot, she critically.  Even though he's no longer in law enforcement, he has to find out who shot her.  

His search leads him through Portland and Camden and up into the Maine woods.  He butts heads with the game wardens and the police.  He takes a couple of wrong turns and saves a life along the way.  There are a few women who distract him, too.  But Mike gets his man.  

I read this in two days.  It was hard to put down, pulling me along faster and faster.  The action starts right at the beginning and is sustained throughout the book.

More Mike Bowditch!