"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it." (James Bryce)

Saturday, November 30, 2013

A KILLER'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (Elizabeth Duncan)

Penny Brannigan and her friend Victoria are preparing for the opening of their new spa in Llanelen, Wales, as Christmas approaches.  When a new man, Harry, arrives in town, he charms everyone, especially widow Evelyn Lloyd, who agrees to invest 20,000 pounds with him and hopes that he might take their romance to the next level.  When Harry falls to his death from a popular local tourist attraction, a historic castle, suspects abound, especially after Evelyn's missing letter opener is discovered to be the murder weapon.  A subplot of petty thefts rounds out this pleasant mystery, the third in Duncan's Penny Brannigan series.  As usual, there is a romance between amateur sleuth penny and the local police chief!  This would be a nice read for a winter afternoon recovering from the busy holidays.

THE VINTAGE TEACUP CLUB (Vanessa Greene)

Any lover of vintage china and novels about women's friendships will enjoy The Vintage Teacup Club. It is a delightful, easy novel full of British charm and cozy camaraderie.  I was sorry to reach the end!

Jenny, Maggie, and Alison meet at a car boot sale when they discover a vintage tea set that each wants to purchase.  Jenny is getting married to Dan and plans an economy tea-party-themed wedding for which the set will be perfect.  Maggie is a florist who needs the set for a wedding she is decorating, and Alison creates and sells handicrafts, including beautiful candles in antique cups.  The three decide to share the set, passing it from Jennie to Maggie and finally to Alison, who will fill the cups with candles and sell them.  Of course the three women, ranging in age from 26 to forty-ish, form a fast friendship and spend time together searching for additional cups.  Jenny is on a budget and still suffering from her mother's abandonment of the family, including her younger brother, Chris, who was born with spina bifida.  Alison and her husband, Pete, are struggling financially after Pete's job loss, and Maggie, divorced for several years, suddenly finds herself rekindling her relationship with Dylan, the ex-husband who left her for greener pastures.

Greene has created a simple, lovely story of friendship and grappling with life's relationships and disappointments.  I was sorry to reach the last page.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

LOVE WATER MEMORY (Jennie Shortridge)

Discovering a new author is always exciting.  I often flip through books before they go out on the shelves in our library, but I seem to come across the most fascinating books when I am changing over records to move books from the "new" area to the stacks.  This novel drew me in from the first page, where Lucie Walker suddenly finds herself standing knee deep in the cold water of San Francisco Bay with no memory of how she came to be there.  She is suffering from dissociative fugue disorder, according to the experts, but why?

You might expect from the opening that this novel is a psychological thriller, but it's not.  It is a lovely story about two broken people finding each other, experiencing a crisis, and each going through the process of finding themselves and working their way back to each other.  Some reviewers were dismissive of Lucie's amnesia as a literary device, but I thought that the way the main characters, Lucie and Grady, interacted and reacted during her period of readjustment was brilliantly and beautifully portrayed.  I enjoyed this novel from start to finish!

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

OSCAR WILDE AND THE DEAD MAN'S SMILE (Giles Brandreth)

This is the first in the Christie Caper's discussion series of fiction featuring real people.  As with Brandreth's other novels in this series, the reader is transported back to Wilde's era.  The mystery is complicated and, at times, convoluted, but Wilde's wit and wile shine through, as always.  Here, Wilde and his erstwhile friend Robert Sherard form a friendship with acting great Edmond LaGrange and Wilde agrees to help LaGrange translate Hamlet into French for performance at his famous Parisian theater.  A large cast of characters, including Sarah Bernhardt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the fictional card sharp Eddie Garstrang, blend together beautifully.  A word of warning, though: if your focus is on the "mystery" you might be disappointed with the progress of the story (where's the mystery?), but the end will make it all worthwhile.  If the Victorian lifestyle fascinates you, however, you will be mesmerized from the first page until the last.  The ending will be the icing on a delicious cake.