Back to Everyday Life

I’m reading a relatively new Leslie Glass. I have fond memories of her books about April Woo and Mike Sanchez, police procedurals with heavy doses of humor, mostly about April’s Chinese parents and their extreme behavior. Her mother, Skinny Dragon, calls her Worm Daughter, just the tip of the iceberg of verbal abuse.

This one, A Clean Kill (2005), was only available in paperback; I’m not sure it was ever in hardcover. It is a decent police procedural (a quote on the back of the book calls Glass “Lady McBain”), but the humor has all but disappeared. Go back to her first ones. They should still be at the library.

In book club news, the next meeting is scheduled for Friday, January 11th, and we’ll be discussing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s a quick read (only three CDs’ worth of an audiobook)--join us!

Our First Guest Post!

Plum Series
by Janet Evanovich

Milissa Woodward (Friend of the Bakerville Library par excellence) writes:

I started reading about Stephanie Plum, the bounty hunter from New Jersey, on a recommendation from a fellow Friend of the Bakerville Library. She told me the author always made her laugh. The series is now 13 books and the latest one was just released in mid-June. Since I don’t get too caught up on starting things from the beginning, I started with book number eight—Hard Eight. From the first few pages, I was hooked. I have since read twelve books and had a period of mourning until Lean Mean Thirteen was released.

The main character is a laid-off lingerie buyer from Jersey who badly needed a job. She blackmailed her cousin, the owner of a bail bond business, into letting her catch one bad guy. It turns out that she has quite a knack for apprehending a variety of criminals in the most unorthodox ways.

She is surrounded by unique family members, including a grandmother who carries a gun and attends viewings at the local funeral home for entertainment. She is pulled in two different directions by men—a cop whom she has known since grade school and a mysterious bounty hunter co-worker. Another colleague is a former prostitute-turned-file clerk who joins her on occasion; her secret weapon is to sit on people if they get out of hand. Her mother serves dinner at precisely 6:00 pm every day and stands at the door at 6:01 listening for sirens thinking the worst if she is late. The list of support characters goes on—none of them disappointing.

The books will keep you laughing from start to finish. Although the story line progresses from book to book you will not be lost if you don’t start with One for the Money. In fact, the books get better as the numbers increase. Enjoy.


[Note: Like most of the books reviewed on this blog (unless otherwise noted), this book is for adult readers.]

A Sure Thing

What could be more sure than this: an Alexander McCall Smith novel, read by Davina Porter? I hyperventilated as I picked The Sunday Philosophy Club, blurbed as a mystery, off the library shelf.

Davina Porter, as you know, is my all-time favorite narrator, complete with various British accents and a generally good grasp of what's going on in a story and who should sound like what.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, a funny set of mysteries that takes place in Botswana. It's the first series in a long time that makes me long for the next one to come out. And the audio versions are narrated by my other all-time favorite, Lisette Lecat, another master of accents and innuendo.

Imagine my confusion as this unfunny book ambled along, paying little attention to the mystery. It features Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher and amateur sleuth in Edinburgh, and the community she moves among. Isabel is given to long philosophical considerations which require patience on the part of the reader (and, apparently, on the part of the other characters in the book), and which sometimes, though not always, end up having a bearing on the plot.

I stuck with it, however, on the basis of my previous experience with the author and the narrator, and decided at the end that it was a good story—the mystery revived itself, and some humor flashed through, including mentions of crushed-strawberry trousers that have made appearances in other books. I liked it enough that I'm listening to the next one: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. It helps that I know what to expect, and I do enjoy the development of the same cast of characters.

Perhaps some of the charm of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is that it takes place in a country completely different from mine, so much more can be considered funny, or at least surprising; possibly someone from Botswana would consider it tedious and completely expected. [No; I've just finished The Kalahari Typing School for Men, and it is genuinely funny.] I'm looking forward to the next one, in any case; The Good Husband of Zebra Drive is due out in mid-April.