PATRIOTIC GRACE (Peggy Noonan)

Peggy Noonan is columnist for the Wall Street Journal and her essays on politics, culture, and current events have appeared in numerous popular and prestigious publications. She is a thinking conservative, a Reaganite whose appearances on various network television news and political shows usually inspire intelligent discussion and respectful debate over the pressing issues of our time.

In Patriotic Grace Noonan does a fine job of analyzing the development of our country's current political attitudes. She emphasizes our need to cast aside the superficial and work together for what is vitally important, the good of our country and the people in it. This book, made up in part of previous essays, was written during the recent presidential election campaign. The author is respectful of each of the candidates as she suggests how they should handle certain issues or deal with specific problems. She criticizes the arrogance and win-at-all-costs attitudes that have been displayed so blatantly in American politics (as well as other arenas) over the past 25 years and suggests that we need to display teamwork and caring and concern for our fellow man in order to return to the greatness embodied in our national history. Overall, her theme is that we as a nation need to get back to basics, to concentrate on again becoming one nation indivisible rather than a melange of warring factions, each out to win at all costs. Patriotic grace is the willingness to put country before self, something that has been sadly lacking in government and industry lately, to the great detriment of our country. Noonan is a thinker and she articulates well what many of the rest of us have been thinking for a long time.

STABBING IN THE STABLES (Simon Brett)

Usually I find that female characters created by male writers are not convincing, so Carole and Jude were a pleasant surprise. These friends, one new agey and plump, the other rather rigid and conventional, make a nice match and strike a realistic chord. When Jude is asked to attempt to heal a lame horse she stumbles upon a man's body in the stable yard. The body is eventually identified as Walter Fleet, retired champion equestrian, stable owner, and notorious ladies' man. Due to the victim's extra-curricular antics, a large number of suspects emerge as Carol and Jude investigate the crime. The police attribute the crime to the "Horse-Ripper", an unidentified killer whose previous crime victims have been of the equine variety, but Carol and Jude suspect that one of the locals is responsible. An interesting cast of characters and village setting make this a very pleasant read.

DEATH AND THE LIT CHICK (G.M. Malliett)

If you long for a worthy successor to Agatha Christie, G.M. Malliet just might suffice. Despite the trendy title, Lit Chick has most of the elements that made Christie the queen of her genre. Attendees at a literary convention are staying in a Scottish Castle, courtesy of Lord Easterbrook, a publisher on the verge of losing it all but for his star author, Kimberlee Kalder. Kalder is the author of a wildy successful chick lit mystery and is honored by Lord Easterbrook with a big bonus, an event that breeds contempt, jealousy, and even rage among her fellow authors. When Kimberlee is found dead in the "bottle dungeon" of the castle, almost everyone is a viable suspect. Fortunately, Detective Inspector Arthur St. Just has been invited to attend the conference as a presenter (shades of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple!), so he is present in the castle when the crime occurs and available to work with local authorites.

Malliet does an excellent job of creating a Christie-like cast of characters and of leading the reader through a complicated series of clues and diversions. St. Just sifts through the facts and eventually calls all of the supects together in the library for the final revelation, and it make sense. Looking back we can see the clues that we missed and how the puzzle fits together. St. Just is a great modern (and more attractive) version of Poirot. I predict that Malliet's St. Just series will be around for quite a while.

HOME AWAY FROM HOME (Lorna J. Cook)

Yesterday I was looking through some duplicate books from our library's collection, planning to discard the extra copies to make room for new acquisitions, when this novel caught my eye. It was short (196 pages) and it looked promising, so I started to read and found that I couldn't put it down. I don't think that this is necessarily "great" literature, but Cook effectively explores the grief and the guilt that accompany the sudden and untimely loss of a spouse. Anna Rainey is devastated when her 36-year-old husband, Dill, succumbs to a brain aneurism. After spending 17 hours at her comatose husband's bedside, Anna adjourns briefly to the ladies' room to wash her face and to apply lipstick so that the first thing her husband sees when he wakes up is not a bedraggled, unkempt wife. When she opens the restroom door she is confronted with the news that Dill has died in her absence. Unable to handle living in their home surrounded by constant reminders of what she has lost, Anna begins her journey through grief by establishing a series of temporary "homes" with friends until she can live on her own.

Some aspects of this book were jarringly unrealistic. I kept wondering if food was decaying in her refrigerator at home or if someone had cleaned it out, or how she managed to complete her taxes (Dill was self-employed), and who was paying her mortgage. Some of these questions (mundane, I know, but being a practical person I couldn't help but wonder) were answered briefly near the end of the story, thank goodness! Overall, though, I found Anna's journey through her first year of widowhood poignant and sad, with touches of humor and spirit thrown in, just like real life! As a counselor for students in a program called Upward Bound, Anna discovers that grief can come in any shape and size or at any age, and that some people are lucky enough to move on with their lives after a loss. This one is worth reading!

KNIT TWO (Kate Jacobs)

Sometimes when you read a book you come to care about the characters and wonder what might have become of them after the story ends.  You can stop wondering about these women!  Jacobs does a great job of picking up the lives of the women of the Friday Night Knitting Club 5 years after Georgia Walker's death.  It was a little difficult to remember the details of the lives of Peri, Catherine, Anita, Dakota, James, and the rest of the cast, but as the story developed it all came back to me.  Dakota is now a student at NYU despite her dreams of becoming a pastry chef.  Her father, James has higher aspirations for his daughter, hoping that she might someday join him in achitecture or perhaps find a successful career as a lawyer.  Peri is managing Walker & Daughter and designing pocketbooks, Catherine has opened a small store, Anita is still, at 78, in love with Marty, Lucie is coping badly with single motherhood and trying to care for her own aging mother, and Darwin is expecting a baby. This is a novel about the strength of women's friendships.  It has a terrific surprise ending, maybe not so realistic, but satisfying nonetheless.  If you enjoyed "The Friday Night Knitting Club" I think you might just enjoy this one even more!

GOODBYE MS. CHIPS (Dorothy Cannell)

One of the most significant details of Cannell's "Ms. Chips", a cozy mystery,  is that the murder doesn't take place until page 200, more than 2/3 of the way through the book!  Interior decorator Ellie Haskell is called back to her childhood boarding school (not a place of happy memories) to help find the missing Loverly Cup, an athletic trophy.  When Ms. Chips, the retired games mistress at St. Roberta's (and whose nose Ellie once broke with an ill-aimed lacrosse ball), is found dead under suspicious circumstances, the search for the pilfered trophy becomes secondary to discovering her murderer.  Ellie and her housekeeper, Mrs. Malloy, are an appealing team.  This is the 13th entry in this series and the reader will have no trouble keeping up with the characters since Cannell does a good job of introducing each of them.  The plot is slow-moving (page 200??), but overall the novel was not bad.

THE WAY WE WERE (Marcia Willett)

For some reason, I am never sure if I have already read each Marcia Willett novel that I pick up.  Some of them have recurring characters, so it is understandable in those cases, but after having read "The Way We Were" I am confident that I HAVEN'T read it before.  

If you've followed this blog at all you know that I like Marcia Willett,  that she is, in my mind, Rosamunde Plicher's worthy successor.  The most compelling aspect of her novels is the setting: sweeping moors, Cornish cliffs, and English cottages with Agas and old sheepdogs are irresistable as far as I am concerned.  "The Way We Were" concerns the present and the past.  Tiggy, pregnant and mourning the recent loss of her true love, travels to Cornwall in the late 70's to stay with old friends Julia and Pete (who is away at sea much of the time) Bodrugan and their 3 small children in the remote, rambling house given to them by Julia's Aunt Em.  Julia is threatened by the constant intrusions of Angela, Pete's former girlfriend, and her unappealing daughter, Cat, whose visits are designed to create discord and doubt in Julia's mind.  Years later (2004) Cat emerges as a central and equally disruptive figure in the lives of the Bodrugan family, creating turmoil and threatening to uncover secrets carefully guarded in the years since Tiggy's death, threatening to break family bonds.  

Family relationships and strong friendships are the heart and soul of Willett's novels, and this one is no exception.  In both the past and the present we see Julia as nurturing mother, vulnerable wife, and devoted niece.  As adults her children make their own mistakes, suffering doubts and conflicts and questioning decisions as their parents and Tiggy did nearly thirty years before.  Willett's characters are both believable and worthy of our sympathy and the Cornish countryside adds the perfect element of meteorological drama (the weather figures prominently in several key events in the novel).  This book would be a great choice for a rainy weekend!