The new series, Main Street Mysteries, features a Wisconsin crime-beat reporter, AnnaLise Griggs. In this new book, Running On Empty, she has come home for a long weekend visit with her mom. Home is a small tourist town in North Carolina.

The town’s residents are used to boating accidents, but when more people than normal are dead, AnnaLise starts to help investigate. Since this is a small town she knows most of the people and that helps her connect with the right people.

Speaking of connecting, I had a hard time getting with AnnaLise in this new series. I was nine chapters in before I felt like anything was happening. It seemed as if the author was taking forever to introduce all the characters, set the time and place, and in general, to get things going.

I decided to stop and download the author’s first novel in her first series. I figured I would read that one and compare it to the new series.

In Uncommon Grounds, Maggy Thorsen is one of those protagonists you want to pull for. She is a never-say-die person. On the first day when she and her two partners are about to open their new high-end coffee shop, one of the partners is electrocuted by the espresso machine. It wasn’t an accident.

Maggy’s coffee shop is also in a small town and she knows most of the people too. She manages to get people to talk to her, share their secrets and help her solve the mystery. I had a couple of people I suspected, but I wasn’t positive until near the end.

After finishing this book I went back and finished reading Running On Empty. What I liked here were the quirky characters, especially “Mama” who owns the Main Street cafe. She loves to serve name-brand recipes and lots of comfort food. AnnaLise’s mom with her memory problem is a sympathetic character. Some of the other characters I couldn’t buy. For me, the story just seemed to ramble around.

Overall, I was disappointed in Running On Empty. It’s probably just me. Sandra Balzo is a good writer and knows how to tell a good story. Her other series of six books is very popular. Will I read the second book in this new series? Probably. I don’t want to give up on a good author.

RUNNING ON EMPTY:  Publisher: Severn House, 2011:   My Rating: C

UNCOMMON GROUNDS:  Publisher: Worldwide Library, 2007:   My Ratings: B

Author

Publisher: William Sloane Associates, 1947

Genre: Western

My Rating: A

Two years ago I read The Way West by A.B. Guthrie. It was a moving historical fiction about one of the first treks of settlers over the Oregon Trail. (My review is HERE.) That book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. I wanted to read the first book in Guthrie’s trilogy so I decided that now, with May’s Western Challenge, would be a good time.

The Big Sky spans the years 1830 to 1843. The story centers around Boone Caudill who ran away from his Kentucky home at 17 with his father’s special rifle. His goal was to head out west where he knows his mother’s brother is a mountain man. He longs to be on his own and to spend his life outdoors.

Boone’s goal was not necessarily to have a lot of adventures but he gets them anyway. Near the beginning of the novel is an interesting frontier trial. Someone steals Boone’s rifle and when he tries to get it back he’s arrested. The impromptu trial doesn’t get Boone off but it was fun to read the crude legal wranglings.

Boone encounters people who take advantage of him but he also meets good people as well. Boone becomes good friends with another young man, Jim Deakins. Together they make it to St. Louis and beyond.

They team up and become good friends with Dick Summers, a master hunter and guide. Boone greatly admires Summers. This is the first positive adult male he’s known and Summers serves as a personal guide for Boone as he matures. (Dick Summers was the trail boss for the wagon train in The Way West so I already knew his good character.)

Boone and Deakins make it to the mountains and learn to trap. They have numerous encounters with Indians and Boone falls in love at first meeting with an Indian girl, Teal Eye.

It’s a jam-packed novel of one scrape after another. It’s impossible not to love the character of Boone Caudill. Even though he did some pretty stupid things and has a hot temper, I was always rooting for him. The dialogue seemed very true to the time period as did the descriptions of people, surroundings and landscapes. It’s a part of the country I’m very familiar with and that boosted my enjoyment of the story.

This is a good historical novel, especially for readers who like stories about the West. It’s not a shoot-em-up cowboys and Indians story. It’s fiction but still a good study of the people who populated the country during the 1830s to 1840s. There was a nice bonus in the paperback edition I read. It was a Foreward by Wallace Stegner. In it he puts the significance of this story in perspective and calls The Big Sky A.B. Guthrie’s best novel.

Check your local library for a copy of this book. The Big Sky is also available at Amazon. (I am an Amazon Associate.)

This is Book #1 for the Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long sponsored by Ready When You Are C.B.

Author

Publisher:

My Rating: A

I wanted to read this book because of the author. I read her newspaper and magazine columns for years and I feel as if I know her. I also think she knows me. Her writing tells me that she has either been inside my head or has had very similar experiences to mine.

Every Last One is the story of Mary Beth, a wife, mother of three teenagers and the owner of a landscape gardening business. Her life is pretty ordinary, similar to my life twenty-five years ago. I identify completely with her concerns about her children.

When your children are babies, you worry about their physical well-being. As they begin to grow you add new types of worries. By the time they are teenagers it’s every worry you’ve ever experienced plus a whole host of new concerns that revolve around that whole big world they’re now moving in. But now you can no longer hover over them and protect them every minute. Mary Beth is going through all this and, in my opinion, handling it very well.

And then – Mary Beth experiences a violent tragedy that is so catastrophic that it’s worse than a parent’s worst nightmare. It’s so devastating that, for a while, Mary Beth is nearly catatonic. Eventually and somehow Mary Beth climbs out of the darkness. As the publisher says, she is able to use “the invisible line of hope and healing that connects one human being with another. Every Last One is a novel about facing every last one of the the things we fear most.”

Anna Quindlen’s writing is every bit as good as it was in her Pulitzer winning columns, her other novels and her non-fiction works. She’s an excellent observer of human nature in addition to her rich imagination. Ms. Quindlen’s website has a video of an interview she did on CBS. It’s excellent. It helped me understand how she could have written such an amazing novel. She also had this to say to readers and potential readers of Every Last One:

It’s always wonderful to be able to introduce the imaginary people of a story to the real people who read books. That’s what publication is to me: readers, meet Mary Beth Latham, her husband Glen, and their three terrific teenage children, Ruby, Max and Alex. Every Last One was not an easy book to write; inside its pages, and my imagination, bad things happen to good people. But I hope you can live in it as completely as I did, and to learn as much about motherhood, marriage, and the connections among us all that make us human.

I highly recommend this novel. It will go straight to your heart. The publisher has generously offered one copy to be given away to one of my readers. (US only.) I’m also willing to pass along my copy of the book. I really want you to read this book. Leave a comment and let me know of your interest. I’ll announce two winners on Wednesdy, March 30th.

Thanks so much to the publisher and TLC Book Tours for my copy of the book. If you’d like to read more reviews of Every Last One the tour schedule is here: TLC Book Tours

Check your library for a copy of this book. It’s also available on Amazon.

Agatha Christie Makes a Mistake

Agatha Christie is well known for her “locked door” mysteries. Death In the Air is a version of the locked door. Passengers are in the air flying from France to England. During that flight a woman is murdered and everyone on the plane is a suspect, includine Hercule Poirot.

The victim, Madame Giselle, was poisoned with venom from a South American snake. The poison was at the end of an Indian thorn supposedly sent via an Indian blowpipe. The how-did-it-happen was, for me, a bigger mystery than the who-dun-it.

In the first few chapters the reader knows the archeologists have pipes, the doctor has a flute, plus there are two long cigarette holders. I couldn’t see how any one of those objects could have been used to send a poisoned dart through the air. Also, wouldn’t someone have seen an object flying through the air in a small airplane? A diagram was provided showing the arrangements of the chairs and the passengers. I studied and studied that diagram trying to figure it out.

I’m not the only one stumped by this puzzle. Readers in the past, many of them experts on the subject, pointed out that this type of poisoned dart requires a very long blowpipe. No way could that be easily hidden in the airplane. Agatha Christie actually acknowledged this blooper. She supposedly makes fun of herself in a future story. For some reason I feel better knowing that the great Agatha was human after all.

There were lots of clues and evidence to be pondered in this book. Death In the Air was a good mystery for the arm chair sleuth. By the time I got to the end, figuring out who the killer was was anti-climactic. Death In the Air is one of the books I read back in my teens when I was really obsessed with all the Agatha books. (Reading all of them again is just a mild obsession.) I remember this book, probably because of Christie’s mistake, but I didn’t remember the ending. As I said before, it was more about how did the killer do it.

I’d recommend Death In the Air to anyone who is interested in a classic, vintage mystery.

My Progress In the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge:

Many of you know I’m attempting to read all of Agatha Christie’s books in publication order. I am now 22 for 87. I’ve noticed a difference in Ms. Christie’s last four or five books. They seem to be a bit more clever, more sophisticated. My opinion is that Agatha was happier and much more confident. By this time she was divorced from Archie Christie and happily married to the archeologist Max Mallowan. Her books were doing well and I guess you could say, she was in her prime. These are certainly the best ones I’ve read so far.

If you’d like more information on joining the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge click the Agatha button above.

For those of us born during or right after World War II, our future in the early sixties seemed positive and hopeful. Yes, there were serious problems in the country, especially in the areas of civil rights and gender rights, but we were beginning to deal with them. We had a young, vibrant president and we were heading toward a future filled with positive changes.

On November 22, 1963 all that changed. When John Kennedy was assassinated we were horrified and we all just stopped. We stood still – not for a moment or a day, but for over a week. I walked home that day in an eerily silent city. Stores and businesses were closed. Government offices and schools all sent people home. Nearly everything closed down that day and many stayed closed until after the Thanksgiving holiday a week later.

People react differently to catastrophic events but, in this case, millions of people felt the need to write it all down. People began to think about the president’s family. How were they handling this loss? From all over the country and around the world people sent letters and telegrams to the White House and to the new widow, Jacqueine Kennedy.

Over one million pieces of correspondence was received from people in all walks of life and all ages. The letters were heart-felt and filled with sympathy. After many of them were read, they were packed into boxes. Mrs. Kennedy promised the letters would be preserved in a future Kennedy presidential library.

And that’s where they have stayed until recently. Now Jay Mulvaney and Paul DeAngelis have complied many of them into this stunning compilation.  Dear Mrs. Kennedy is an example of how people around the world felt on that terrible day in 1963.

A young schoolboy wrote:  I am in the fourth grade. I was in art when the news came. One girl started crying. I couldn’t bring myself to my senses enough to comfort her, as I was immediately heartsick. I am still heartsick. I am only 9, but I know how great he was.

Supreme Court Justice W. O. Douglas wrote: My heart is so heavy that words fail me. A sadness has come over the earth that it never knew.

Leaders from all over the world sent messages of condolence. Here’s one from Charles De Gaulle, President of France: The immense grief that has just hit you touches me and my wife in the deepest reaches of our hearts. Be assured that we are beside you in thought and prayer.

This book is both sad and inspirational. It’s a reminder of how we all felt at the end of 1963. More importantly, it reminds us how much we have in common. I highly recommend this book to those of us who lived through this time period and to younger folks as well. Good history.

Where were you when JFK was killed?

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for allowing me to be the first stop on the tour for Dear Mrs. Kennedy. For more information on the tour, go here: TLC Book Tours. For the author’s website, visit here: Paul De Angelis Website.

Copies of Dear Mrs. Kennedy: The World Shares Its Grief, Letters November 1963can be purchased at Amazon. (I am an Amazon Associate.)

To read The Lumby Lines is to approach a book in a different manner. Reading this book is equal to a visit to a special place and a special group of people. It’s not your typical page-turner and I mean that in a good way. The Lumby Lines is similar to spending an extended amount of time in a small community and getting to know the residents and the various points of interest. This book is meant to be enjoyed over a long period of time.

Lumby is a small town somewhere in the northwest; it feels like Washington state. It’s inhabited by typical folk who tend to be a bit on the quirky side. The area is surrounded by rolling hills, rivers, a lake, orchards and other small towns.

Outside of Lumby is a very old monastery, Montis Abbey. The monastery is vacant and one of the buildings has been severely damaged by fire. It  looks like it will eventually fall in upon itself, and then it is suddenly purchased by some “outsiders,” a couple from the East Coast who want to turn it into an inn.

The physical beauty of the area around Lumby is good but it’s not what kept me “visiting” The Lumby Lines. It was the people. Getting to know the residents is at the heart of the book. Let me tell you about my favorites:

• Mark and Pam are the new owners of the monastery. They’ve walked away from high-powered careers and invested everything they have in the inn.
• Gabrielle Beezer owns a Mexican restaurant in town. Her husband, Dennis, runs the newspaper in a neighboring town. Their teenage son, Brian, seems to love playing pranks that backfire on him. His parents are worried.
• Brother Matthew and a few other monks were former residents of Montis. Matthew is full of wisdom plus a lot of knowledge about the monastery, including the extensive orchards and the beehives.
• Joshua is a former monk who has quite the zest for living and helping others. He and Dennis love betting on all sorts of things.
• Charlotte is probably the oldest resident and definitely the richest. You wouldn’t know it from the dirt under her fingernails or her ordinary life style. She loves to give cashier checks anonymously to various people. She’s a mystery I’d like to know more about.

There are more people to become acquainted with in this book. There are also events in the book that are fun. I enjoyed reading about the construction process on the abbey, an exciting raft race down a swollen river, a budding romance, a new business venture for the monks and the reclaiming of the old orchard.

There are so many other things in The Lumby Lines besides reading the story. The art work you see on the cover is also scattered throughout the book. It’s by the author’s husband, Art Polin. I also liked the occasional listing of the Sheriff’s complaints and the newspaper articles about quirky events in town.

And then, there is the back of the book which contains recipes (a fabulous one for pasta with chicken, brocolli and cheese), an interview with the author, and questions about the book for book clubs. There is a lot to love in this book.

The Lumby Lines is the first book in the series. There is Stealing Lumby, Lumby’s Bounty, The Promise of Lumby, and Lumby on the Air – coming this Spring. I intend to visit all of the Lumby books. There is also a regular newsletter  and a great website, Lumby Books. I love the little moose that walks around the edge of the screen.

My stay at Lumby was so pleasant that I want a return visit. I’ve grown so fond of the residents that I won’t be able to walk away from them. I’ll be sure to tell you about them. I’d love it if you joined me.

Check your local library for The Lumby Lines or any of the other Gail Fraser books. The Lumby Lines is also available at Amazon. (I am an Amazon Associate.)

The Lumby Lines by Gail Fraser  - New American Library, 2005  -  My Rating: A