Review: One Last Lie

One Last Lie by Paul Doiron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The books are getting better--more focused and more complex at the same time. Also more devoted to Bowditch and his work as a Warden Inspector, although this time he's not on official business. Charley has gone missing and Ora calls upon Mike to find him.

This time the focus is truly on the Franco-Americans and Native peoples of the Fort Kent area--right on the Canadian border pretty much at the nothernmost point of the Maine border. There are plenty of shady characters for Mike to interview in an effort to find Charley and discover why he has disappeared. Dorion also throws in a couple of Haitians so he can make a point or two about how iCE and Border Patrol activies have increased on this border since 9/11 and just to let everyone know that Mike isn't totally out of the loop of current global affairs, there are are a couple of references to Harry and Meghan!

Love life still in flux--Stacy is back , sorta and Dani is getting distant, sorta. Not too much of that thank goodness. I'm rooting for Stacy, BTW.. Worked with fellow female Customs' inspectors with a chip on the shoulder relative to men. Dani sees them as competitors and has ambition -she also doesn't have a real trust of men--note her remark about the rejection of the Florida pilot's application for the Maine Warden opening. No children, either? Not partner material, at all!IMHO!

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Review: Almost Midnight

Almost Midnight by Paul Doiron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Best one so far--more warden investigator than immature boyfriend. Perhaps the situation with Shadow is what appealed most--two reasons, like wolves and my cat is called Shadow--lol Drugs in prisons and involvement of the so called keepers is nothing new but Billy and Aimee Cronk and the Cronkets are always interesting. The passing involvement with the Amish could have been left out--read Linda Castillo if you want Amish mysteries. And while Zane and Indigo were kind of interesting, again not really essential to the story, although they made for a good solution to one mystery.

Dani is the newest disaster--lol

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Review: Roman Blood

Roman Blood by Steven Saylor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If the author had chosen to simply tell the story without superfluous embellishment it may have been told in less than 401 pages. While the descriptions of Rome, the city, its inhabitants, its customs, its political maneuvering were interesting they were so repetitive that the text became as boring as the ancient words of Cicero hated by many enforced students of Latin classes in the modern world.

Sulla, unfortunately, sounds so much like the dreaded next Republican candidate for our Presidency that it strikes terror in the heart of this voter.

The mystery of whether or not the victim was murdered by his son is intriguing but getting to the heart of it was a long and convoluted journey through a sludge of overwrought prose. The best part of the book was the last chapters in which the trial is described and the later developments following its judgement.

Reader, beware, to read this book requires lengthy days of trudging through the unnecessary length of its words.

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Review: Stay Hidden

Stay Hidden by Paul Doiron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These books keep bringing me back not so much because of the mystery that Mike finds himself investigating but because of the settings in which he finds himself. Living in Vermont with many stays all over NH and Maine, I find myself recognizing the people, the places , the attitudes. In this installment Mike is on an island off the coast of Bangor. The two days of constant fog is so well described I could smell the air, feel the damp coldness and suffer the almost claustrophic eerieness of the lack of visibility and the distortion of sounds and direction. And, oh, the attitudes--Mike is a native born maniac but on the Island he is an outsider--not to be trusted, not to be included. My husband is a 7th generation Vermonter but when we moved to mid-Vermont from the Canadian borderlands the locals took a long time to accept him as " not away " and the men in the local grocery store only acknowledged me if I was with him, never alone, and i was for years, Bill's wife. Yup, New England and its people are surely like the people in Doiron's books. Very relateable.

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Review: Murder at the Merton Library

Murder at the Merton Library by Andrea Penrose
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This series is so engrossing. In addition to a murder mystery the books always have historical information about the advances in science and engineering that took place in the 19th century and the development of commerce and business that was coupled with it.

Here there are engineers in all the major Western countries attempting to develop a steam engine that would be capable of driving vessels across the wide and wild waters of the oceans. Steam engines in rivers were well known and used in America and parts of Europe. The complexity of an engine sturdy enough to withstand the strength of turbulence during storms and the need for huge amounts of fuel for such long voyages were daunting challenges to those trying to design such an engine. As the competition in the labs progressed the need for funds, ever a need in such endeavors, led in some instances to fraudulent schemes to wrest money from investors knowing there would be no payoff to them.

So, with the murder of a friend of his deceased brother, Wrex and Charlotte, the Weasels and the rest of the inner circle find themselves not only on the trail of his murderer but also embroiled in the larger events surrounding the advances in the age of Steam

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Review: Knife Creek

Knife Creek by Paul Doiron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yahoo--Bowditch is getting more mature--still a bit impetuous and gets himself in trouble--but more thoughtful and observant. What starts out as a simple morning feral pig hunt with his live-in girlfriend, Stacy, turns into the discovery of a new born infant's body left in a wallow to be eaten by the pigs. In short order, Mike has disobeyed an order from the Maine State Troopers to leave the investigation to them. He approaches a near by home inhabited by a couple of strange women wearing bright red wigs. The younger woman seems familiar to him, somehow but he has no way to insist on entering the home and must leave further investigation to the Troopers after all.

Ah, but when he and the Troopers return the next day, the house has been abandoned and jerry-rigged to explode destroying in and any trace of its inhabitants. By now, Mike is convinced the younger woman is a UNH student who has been missing for the last four years. Further, Mike thinks she is probably the mother of the infant left so inhumanely as food for the feral pigs.

And so the mystery begins with the usual twists and turns and strange rural Maine characters, teams of investigators, including a retired Maine Police detective obsessed with proving the missing girl is dead and prosecuting the young rich guy last known to have seen her as her murderer. His relationships with Stacy and Dani Tate, a former warden who is now a Trooper and who has had a crush on him, also play a part in the story. Fingers crossed Stacy takes a powder--just my opinion--lol

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Review: Hemlock

Hemlock by Susan Wittig Albert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's been a long time since I've read China Bayles--there was a time when I read them as fast as they came out, but got tired of the series and needed a break. This appears to be the last in the series or at least the last published and I decided to go back.
What a refreshing change--China is on her own in North Carolina. She chats with her husband a couple of times and there are references to Caitie and Ruby but the cast of characters is totally new so the geographic location is Eastern Appalachian mountains in place of Texas Hill Country, there is snow and icy roads and small town Southern police and sheriffs.
China has flown in to help out an acquaintance who is the director of a private library, which is in poor shape. The books have no organization, there is no directory of holdings. One tome, however, is missing and the reason that is obvious is because it was kept in a locked, sort of, glass case and it isn't there! A herbal dating back to the 18th Century, incredibly valuable and written, etched and hand colored by a woman. Most unusual. China's friend, Dorothea and her young assistant, Jenna are at the top of the list of suspects. Dorothea has asked her friend to come East to try to locate the book and Jenna is writing a novel based on the life story of the author of The Curious Herbal.
The two plot lines are interesting and the addition of one murder, one suicide and one shooting only enhance the story. Add to that interesting locals, including a slightly ditzy parrot lady and the book just flies along. Glad I came back to finish the series.

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Review: Murder on the Edge

Murder on the Edge by Bruce Beckham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For some reason this book was hard to get through--maybe because it was so convoluted and seemingly unsolvable. Still, as the murders piled up and the victims not only did not seem to be rock climbers nor hikers but also seemed unconnected, the mystery was intriguing. When the case finally breaks it is as sudden and surprising to the reader as to the detectives who doggedly investigated it.

I'm not sure what Jones sees in Skelgill but I like her and Leigton. Skelgill gives me a headache.

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Review: An Irish Country Yuletide

An Irish Country Yuletide by Patrick Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've had this book for almost a year but just did not want to read it because Patrick Taylor is not continuing the series. Having read them all, it was hard to face the end of the series. His reasoning is sound--Ballybucklebo is a wonderful country village in which there is no Catholic/Protestant strife. Indeed, the Catholic priest and Presbyterian minister can be found at each other's services at times and they play golf together on Mondays. It is a place with normal gossip, sometimes neighborly disagreements but more often than not a place in which everyone is willing to help and support each other whenever illness, sadness or financial struggles appear.

There is also the wheels of time in which people die, others marry, sometimes romances bomb, and babies are born. The inhabitants are true individuals with three-dimensional development and the reader loves, admires, dislikes, laughs at and laughs with many of them. Dr Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly is the initial focus of the series and we see him as a medical student,a young naval officer, a new husband, a heart-breakingly devastated widower, and a happy man with a woman who was a love of his younger self who becomes his second wife. In the process, he becomes the doctor in Ballybucklebo living at #1 with is dog, kitten and housekeeper, Kinky. She is wonderful--a widow from Cork who keeps him in line cooks incredible meals. In time, she too, gets married but continues taking care of him and his young assistant, Barry Laverty. And, too, we watch Barry mature, adjust to life in a small town, marry, buy a home, have a child and become a partner in the practice.

As you can see, the reader becomes a resident and over 20 to 25 years becomes a member of the fabric and family. So difficult to leave. Yet, as said earlier, Taylor picked a good time to end the story for he did not want to delve into the troubles that raged in Ireland. He did not want to bring them to Ballybucklebo and it could not have been avoided so he ended the stories.

This Yuletide book sat on the table and finally, reluctantly, at this Yuletide I picked it up to read and say goodbye. It is set in 1965--after some books in the series and before some others. Because of this I gave it only 4 stars. Perhaps it deserves 5 since having read the whole series I felt as though, like Kinky, I had the sight--I am fey--I could see into the future of some characters. For example, Fingle's brother, Lars, meets the sister of the Marquis, John MacNeill, for the first time at the O'Reilly's Christmas evening gathering. But, I know what happens to Lars and Myrna in the future--lol



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