Dawn's Reading Blog

I love Ed McBain. What more can I say? I wish he hadn’t died as some of his later books were getting into a great groove. The Ollie character development towards the end was fantastic. Fiddlers continued Ollie’s romance with the Patricia Gomez and finished off Kling’s romance with Sharyn. The crime was a bit far-fetched but so well told and by such well-loved characters, it almost doesn’t matter what the crime is. A great read.

Close Enough To Kill is poorly written formulaic claptrap. I read it on a plane where it deserves to be read.

I’m always trying to find an Agatha Christie replacement but Victoria Thompson isn’t it. Although the story is set back-when, you wouldn’t know it except for an occasional reference to long skirts. It doesn’t capture the manners of the time at all. In fact, Murder on Lennox Hill (which isn’t even about a murder) deals forthwrightly with a subject that would be difficult even today. When a minister’s parishoners learn he’s been diddling the boys, they take matters into their own hands. Like immediately they believe this happened and tell each other. That it could even be discussed out loud, that they had words to say those things in mixed company, seemes unlikely. And that they would further spread this news, even more unlikely. Even today the victims of sexual abuse tend to shut up, not tell their whole church the sordid story.

And no one gets killed until the butt-end of the book so the title is a spoiler. I won’t read more of these.

My main problem with The Trophy Wife is the title. It calls up nothing when I hear it, despite the fact that I enjoyed the book. Someone could have put some effort into coming up with a more appropriate title. Since I won’t ever remember what this was about otherwise, I’ll tell myself: it’s about an executive’s wife getting kidnapped and what he does to get her back. The executive has a girlfriend and there’s a security head who gets heavily involved as well.

Anyway, I bought this looking for a fast-paced, fun read and it was. Although I started to get a glimmer of the ending before it happened, it was far enough along in the story that I wasn’t bothered. The pacing was good and there were enough plot twists to keep me on my toes.

Everyone says this is a pseudonym for a male mystery written but I haven’t been able to find out who. Seems kind of stupid since you might as well get cross-over sales. I’d read another by her/him.

I went to Border’s (something I don’t do often enough anymore) and picked up three books hoping to find a new mystery author I could enjoy. I lucked out in that two of them (this one and Trophy Wife) were thoroughly enjoyable and the third (Murder on Lennox Hill) was passable. The funny thing is that all three have sucky titles. How hard is it to come up with a title that will, if nothing else, help you remember which book you’ve read later?

Live Bait was really entertaining but has pretty much zero to do with live bait. It’s about old people getting murdered because they turn out to be murderers themselves. And the Holocaust. I think the author(s) managed to work the term live bait in there once but it was really a stretch.

This was a continuation of an earlier book with the same characters which I certainly might pick up at some point.

This is the original Dracula and it’s a bit different than I was expecting. Very melodramatic but also very detailed and moving in its way. There’s much more to this story than I ever knew and of course all the movies, plays, and books since then have done their share to corrupt the story so that it turns out I barely knew it. The book is a good read. I thought Frankenstein was idiotic and the Invisible Man is really short, but Dracula turns out to be a good one.

So I’m travelling on business and, having finished The Lamorna Wink, I was left without something light to read. I was in New York City, midtown, where it appears a book store isn’t to be found. I could buy almost anything on earth in midtown but not a book. I thought a drug store might do me. Around here drug stores typically have a paperback section but the ubiquitous Duane Reade offered nothing. Then I found a grocery store with a single rotating wire rack of paperbacks. What were my chances of finding something I’d actually enjoy reading? Hey, No Place Like Home by Mary Higgins Clark. I haven’t read that.

I used to follow her a lot more closely but her books are all the same and I’ve read a lot of them by now. Still, for lightweight travelling entertainment, Mary Higgins Clark can’t be beat. No Place Like Home was OK, nothing brilliant, nothing bad. It wasn’t hard to spot the real bad guy, although which of the subsidiary bad guys would turn out to be his co-conspirator was left more up in the air. The only real trouble with it was I finished it too quickly and still had nothing light to read on the train home.

The Lamorna Wink is subtitled “A Richard Jury Mystery.” Personally, I have no idea who Richard Jury is but if you do, you’ll be disappointed. He doesn’t show up until about three quarters of the way through the book, although the other characters routinely refer to him and their inexplicable longing for his presence. When he does show, he doesn’t do anything but bumble around like all the other characters have been doing all along. Considering the non-importance of this mystery, a surprising number of detectives are assigned to bumble through it.

In the end they manage to link every single interesting event that has ever happened in the town to the same mystery. Someone died 10 years ago? Hey, they must be related! Stupid.

And why do all modern British mysteries seem to have that same gloomy tone. Isn’t anyone in England happy? They all drag around like they expect life to kick them in the teeth and then it does, even the main characters who’s some kind of aristocratic millionaire. You’d think that might give you something to look forward to in life.

Over My Dead Body was typical Nero Wolfe. Wolfe doesn’t want to take the case; he’s maniuplated into taking it anyway; Archie ends up in an incriminating situation; the police threaten to arrest them both; Wolfe magically solves the whole thing without any visible evidence or thought process. I think I’m tired of reading Nero Wolfe books. There are other authors whose forumlas I enjoy more.

Airport, the book that created the disaster genre, was a re-read. I wanted something that would capture my attention, which it did. It starts off slowly and goes into too much detail about actual airport operations at some points, but it does a glorious job of building suspense by converging storylines. You see it coming; they see it coming; but no one can stop it.

The funny stuff is when he pontificates on the future of airports. It’s funny because he’s so wrong. It would certainly be a more exciting book with less airport background, but I suppose Hailey meant it to be a serious book of its time and not the start of a new type of shlock.