In the Shadow Garden

In the Shadow Garden
by Liz Parker
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781538708798
Publication Date: September 13, 2022
Pages: 326
Genre: Magical Realism
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

There’s something magical about Yarrow, Kentucky. The three empathic witches of the Haywood family are known for their shadow garden—from strawberries that taste like chocolate to cherry tomatoes imbued with the flavors of basil and oregano. Their magic can cure any heartache, and the fruits of their garden bring a special quality to the local bourbon distillery. On one day every year, a shot of Bonner bourbon will make your worst memory disappear. But the Haywoods will never forget the Bonners’ bitter betrayal.

Twenty years ago, the town gave up more than one memory; they forgot an entire summer. One person died. One person disappeared. And no one has any recollection of either.

As events from that fateful summer start to come to light, there must be a reckoning between the rival Haywood and Bonner families. But untangling the deep roots of this town’s terrible secrets will expose more than they could ever imagine about love, treachery, and the true nature of their power.

Both what I was expecting and what I wasn’t. Elentarri read this recently and liked it and the whole idea of a shadow garden that feeds off pain and sorrow appealed to me.

The story more or less covers three generations of the Haywoods; a family of witches whose gift is to remove some of the pain and sorrow of their fellow townspeople as a way to help them heal. This pain and sorrow is fed into the shadow garden and helps the plants within to grow with extraordinary gifts themselves.

My only, biggest, issue was – and I have no idea why – I kept thinking of the youngest Haywood as a teenager. She’s not, she’s in her latish-20’s. Some of her behaviour probably contributed to this misconception, but either way it was a bit jarring. I also kept mixing up who was with whom in a couple of the relationships – fortunately there was a family tree to reference.

I really like where Parker took the story; it was a direction I hadn’t anticipated, but it worked beautifully, even if some of the characters weren’t as wholly developed out as they could have been. This appears to be Parker’s first book – if her character development catches up to her story and plotting development, she’ll have a lot of very good books ahead of her.

When Gods Die (Sebastian St. Cyr, #2)

When Gods Die
by C.S. Harris
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780451219688
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #2
Publication Date: January 1, 2006
Pages: 338
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: NAL Hardcover

The young wife of an aging marquis is found murdered in the arms of the Prince Regent. Around her neck lies a necklace said to have been worn by Druid priestesses-that is, until it was lost at sea with its last owner, Sebastian St. Cyr’s mother. Now Sebastian is lured into a dangerous investigation of the marchioness’s death-and his mother’s uncertain fate.

As he edges closer to the truth-and one murder follows another-he confronts a conspiracy that imperils those nearest him and threatens to bring down the monarchy.

Much better than the first one, What Angels Fear, in that it is a far less graphically violent story line, which allowed me to thoroughly enjoy this one in a way I could not with the first.

I really like Sebastian, but as I mentioned in my thoughts on the first book, he needs his friends around more; Harris wrote a nice scene at the start of the first book with some banter between St. Cyr and his friend that I’d like to see more of in future books. While this book isn’t weighty and depressing, it could use some lightness that friends would bring to the table. As it is, When Gods Die is a very earnest read that gets a little bogged down in the forbidden-love dynamic between St. Cyr and his love interest, Kat.

The mystery was good though – extremely well plotted and the motivation not at all clear.

I’ll definitely be checking out more of this series from my library.

Buried in a Good Book (By the Book Mysteries, #1)

I saw this in my local bookshop last week and almost fell over in shock – I’ve never seen a cozy – especially not a mass market cozy – for sale in an Australian bookstore before. It sounded promising, and I want to encourage bookstores here to embrace a wider variety of sub genres, so I picked it up.

It wasn’t bad – I’ll happily read the second one – but it wasn’t without its problems. The MC thinks she’s going to be more capable of solving the crime than the local sheriff, which is always a turn off for me. I dislike arrogance in my amateur detectives unless their names are Sherlock Holmes. But on the plus side, she’s humbled a time or two and she’s graceful about it. The dynamic between her and her ex-husband was a bit cliche, as was the tension between herself and the sheriff.

The plotting was ambitious; Berry made it work, but it was just this side of a stretch even for cozy mysteries.

There is a second one out now and I’ll happily give it a try to see if the kinks in characterisation is worked out, but it definitely has potential.

Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop

Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop
by Alba Donati, Elena Pala (translator)
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781399605519
Pages: 196
Genre: Books and Reading, Memoir
Publisher: Orion Books

The diary of a publicist-turned poet-turned bookseller who decided to open a tiny bookshop on the hills of the small village of Lucignana, Tuscany.

'Romano, I want to open a bookshop where I live.'
'Great. How many people are we talking about?'
'180.'
'Right, so if 180,000 people live there, then...'
'No, not 180,000, Romano. 180.'
'Alba... Have you lost your mind?'

Conversation between Alba Donati and Romano Montroni, former CEO of Italy's largest bookselling chain
Alba used to live a hectic life, working as a book publicist in Florence - a life that made her happy but also left her feeling like a woman constantly on the run.

So one day she decides go back to the small village in the Tuscan hills where she was born and open a tiny bookshop.
Alba's enterprise seems doomed from day one, but it surprisingly sparks the enthusiasm of many across Tuscany - and beyond. And after surviving a fire and the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, the 'Bookshop on the Hill' soon becomes a refuge and beacon for an ever-growing community of readers.

Meh. I was expecting, and looking forward to, a diary about a ‘micro bookstore’ in a small village of 180 people in Tuscany. Sort of like Sean Bythell’s books, only sunnier and happier.

Only about half the book is about the bookshop. Those bits were good, as were the bits about some of the villagers. But really, the bookshop just serves as a prop for going off on tangents about the author’s childhood, her family, her philosophising, and her literary criticism about books I’ve never heard of, because most of them were poetry and I’m a troglodyte when it comes to poetry (the author herself is an Italian poet).

The book is supposed to be a diary of the first 6 months in 2021 and that’s the way it’s formatted, but there’s almost no adherence to this structure, as every entry Donati goes ‘off-date’ to talk about something else – how the bookstore got started, the fire that destroyed it only months after opening, it’s rebuilding, her childhood, etc. Since the bookstore opened just months before the pandemic, the entires that touched on how that affected her bookstore and the village were interesting. But all the interesting bits were just that: bits. I craved more detail about the bookstore’s conception, creation, restoration, and operation. I did not crave more information about the house she grew up in that didn’t have a bathroom, but about which I had to hear about a disquieting number of times.

It’s not a bad book, just not the book I was looking for.

Never Home Alone

Never Home Alone
by Rob Dunn
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781541645769
Publication Date: January 9, 2009
Pages: 323
Genre: Science
Publisher: Basic Books

In NEVER HOME ALONE, biologist Rob Dunn takes us to the edge of biology's latest frontier: our own homes. Every house is a wilderness -- from the Egyptian meal moths in our kitchen cupboards and the yeast in a sourdough starter, to the camel crickets living in the basement, to the thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants live literally under our noses. Our reaction, too often, is to sterilise. As we do, we unwittingly cultivate an entirely new playground for evolution. Unfortunately, this means that we have created a range of new parasites, from antibiotic-resistant microbes to nearly impossible to kill cockroaches, to threaten ourselves with and destroyed helpful housemates. If we're not careful, the "healthier" we try to make our homes, the more likely we'll be putting our own health at risk.

A rich natural history and a thrilling scientific investigation, NEVER HOME ALONE shows us that if are to truly thrive in our homes, we must learn to welcome the unknown guests that have been there the whole time.

Another long-term resident of Mt TBR, I decided to tackle this in audio, since it was available. I thoroughly enjoyed it, for the most part. It’s sometimes hard with an audiobook: am I getting too much of the narrator’s personality and not enough of the authors?

I’ve been interested in the beneficial role of microbes since reading Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, and for the most part this one didn’t disappoint. Beneficial microbes is an emerging science so there aren’t any hard answers here, but there are some very intriguing studies including one involving Amish dust. Toxoplasma gondii will continue to give me significant pause, although won’t keep me from snuggling with my cats, and I have another reason not to love sourdough, in spite of it being good for me. So those are some of my takeaways.

As I said, I listened to the audiobook and the narration was competent. I will likely skim re-read the hardcover soon because there are charts/graphs in the hardcover that he referred to in the audio that I’d like to re-visit, and bits I’d like to read out loud to MT – his patience hasn’t been tested in awhile.

For Pete’s Sake

For Pete's Sake
by Geri Buckley
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780425201534
Publication Date: January 1, 2005
Pages: 304
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Berkley

Pietra Pete Lang is a modern-day Southern belle who's busy trying to keep her eccentric family from falling into dysfunction. But her mettle is about to be tested--along with her heart--when fireworks ignite between Pete and her brother's divorce attorney.

This is a re-read I’ve had for so long that I have no notes from the original read, I only remember that I really enjoyed it as a rom-com sort of book.

While it’s definitely a rom-com, it’s also definitely dated. The difference just under two decades can make is startling. I spent a lot of time thinking ‘you could not get away with saying that now’, and the total lack of subtlety often made this a trying re-read. But the Florida setting was still enjoyable, as were the eccentric characters in Pete’s family, even if the plot was thin.

How to Solve a Cold Case

How to Solve a Cold Case; And Everything Else You Wanted To Know About Catching Killers
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781443459372
Publication Date: April 19, 2022
Pages: 339
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins

Get inside the mind of an elite cold case investigator and learn how to solve a murder.

Despite advances in DNA evidence and forensic analysis, almost half of murder cases in Canada and the US remain unsolved. By 2016, the solved rate had dropped so significantly in the United States that it was the lowest in recorded history, with one in two killers never even identified, much less arrested and successfully prosecuted. And the statistics are just as bad in Canada.

As a sought-after global expert and former detective, Arntfield has devoted his career to helping solve cold cases and serial murders, including the creation of the Western University Cold Case Society, which pairs students with police detectives to help solve crimes.

In How to Solve a Cold Case, Arntfield outlines the history of cold case squads in Canada and the US, and lays out the steps to understanding and solving crime. Arntfield shows you what to look for, how to avoid common mistakes, recognize patterns and discover what others have missed. Weaving in case studies of cold crimes from across Canada and the US, as well as a chapter on how armchair detectives can get involved, How to Solve a Cold Case is a must-read for mystery fans and true crime buffs everywhere.

I’ve been in a slump recently and have been re-reading some of the long-timers on my shelves, hoping they will nudge me out of it. They haven’t. This book has been lingering on my library pile, quietly giving me the side-eye while silently reminding me that I’ve already renewed it 3 times and that’s my library’s limit. So I picked it up and gave it a go.

Now, it might be because I’m in a slump and I’m feeling a bit harsh as a result, but I didn’t like this book. It was only about 10% of what I’d hoped, which were case studies and discussion of little known cold cases and how they were solved. The remaining 90% was divided up between first year University level lecturing (60%) and self promotion (20%).

More than half of the lecturing portion of the book was about the sexually deviant nature of serial killers – and he makes it clear that anyone that murders more than once is a serial killer. I won’t dispute this, which isn’t for me to do anyway, but it feels a bit excessive to call 2 murders a serial. I bring it up because this definition might leave readers feeling even more despondent about humanity than they already do. A reader on the more sensitive, or impressionable, end of the spectrum might never want to leave their house again, or allow their children to ever see sunlight. Especially women, of course. Honestly, by the end of the book, a reader would give a lot to read about a good old fashioned murder for inheritance.

Mostly, I think, I just didn’t like his writing. I wanted to DNF it, but I kept hoping for more case studies, which the author included just enough of to keep me on the string, but by the 75% mark there was some heavy skimming because I just wanted it to be over.

Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year
by Neil Hayward
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: July 26, 2016
Pages: 416
Genre: Memoir, Natural Science, Non-fiction
Publisher: Audible for Bloomsbury

Early in 2013 Neil Hayward was at a crossroads. He didn't want to open a bakery or whatever else executives do when they quit a lucrative but unfulfilling job. He didn't want to think about his failed relationship with "the one" or his potential for ruining a new relationship with "the next one." And he almost certainly didn't want to think about turning forty. And so instead he went birding.

Birding was a lifelong passion. It was only among the birds that Neil found a calm that had eluded him in the confusing world of humans. But this time he also found competition. His growing list of species reluctantly catapulted him into a Big Year--a race to find the most birds in one year. His peregrinations across twenty-eight states and six provinces in search of exotic species took him to a hoarfrost-covered forest in Massachusetts to find a Fieldfare; to Lake Havasu, Arizona, to see a rare Nutting's Flycatcher; and to Vancouver for the Red-flanked Bluetail. Neil's Big Year was as unplanned as it was accidental: It was the perfect distraction to life.

Neil shocked the birding world by finding 749 species of bird and breaking the long-standing Big Year record. He also surprised himself: During his time among the hummingbirds, tanagers, and boobies, he found a renewed sense of confidence and hope about the world and his place in it.

Now that I’ve been emancipated from crutches and taxis, and I can drive again, I’m back to being able to enjoy audiobooks, and after a small audio spree, I have quite a backlog to choose from. I started with this one; even if I’m not quite up to bush walking while looking through a camera lens yet, I’m definitely ready to hear about someone else’s adventures.

Unfortunately, this was only a little more than half of what I’d hoped it would be. Neil Hayward’s ‘accidental’ big year was a lot of fun to listen to/read about, and his last minute travel itineraries boggled the mind. I loved every birding minute of this book. But this book is also as much about the angst he suffered in his personal life, at least some of which was due to clinical depression, and not a little also due to an extraordinary pessimism he blamed on his British upbringing. I avoid gross generalisations about people on a nation-wide basis, but Hayward did resemble an old boyfriend of mine, who lived in England, more than a little bit. Regardless, I was in a mood to read about wild and uncommon adventures in birding, not girlfriend/career/mental illness angst, so I found these parts of the narrative tedious. A few times at the start I considered DNF’ing because there was so. much. angst. But once he embraced the goal to see as many birds as possible in one year (limited to US/Canada -Hawaii), the book held my interest more often than not, and ultimately left me satisfied.

The narrator did a very creditable job.

What Angels Fear

What Angels Fear
by C.S. Harris
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9781741753653
Series: Sebastian St. Cyr #1
Publication Date: January 1, 1970
Pages: 421
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

It’s 1811, and the threat of revolution haunts the upper classes of King George III’s England. Then the body of a beautiful young woman is found savagely murdered on the altar steps of an ancient church near Westminster Abbey. A dueling pistol discovered at the scene and the damning testimony of a witness both point to one man: Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a brilliant young nobleman shattered by his experiences in the Napoleonic Wars.

Now a fugitive running for his life, Sebastian calls upon his skill as an officer during the war to catch the killer and prove his own innocence. In the process, he accumulates a band of unlikely allies, including the enigmatic beauty Kat Boleyn, who broke Sebastian’s heart years ago. In Sebastian’s world of intrigue and espionage, nothing is as it seems, yet the truth may hold the key to the future of the British monarchy, as well as to Sebastian’s own salvation….

This series has been popping up on my radar for years and years, and I always thought I need to try those, and then something shiny would distract me. When Jennifer’s books posted about one of the more recent books in the series, it was the motivation I needed to check out the first one from my library.

At 400+ pages, I was wary of what I was getting into, but the pace is fast enough to make the pages fly by. They flew even faster when I started skimming some of the more descriptively verbose sections, the kind you’re either in the mood for, or you aren’t. I really liked Sebastian and was disappointed that his friend (Sir Christopher?) wasn’t around more – I liked the dynamic between them best for its light-hearted banter. I’m reserving judgement about Kat and the rest of the cast as there was an element of … not melodrama, but Very Serious, to the tone of this book that I’m hoping is a natural result of the plot, rather than the series’ permanent tone.

The one thing I categorically did not like was the graphicness. Harris seemed to take particular delight in trying to sicken the reader with the perverseness of the crime, bring it up again, and again, and dwelling on details View Spoiler ». I have speculations about what drove her to write like this, but I’ll keep them to myself, as they aren’t very generous, but suffice it to say I didn’t care for the heavy handedness.

I did like everything else though; the multi-threaded approach to the investigation, with multiple POVs handled gracefully, the intricateness of the plotting and the confidence of the characters. I am definitely interested in reading the next book in what is a very long series. If the heavy handed graphicness continues, well, they’re library loans. God bless libraries!

Disaster at the Vendome Theater (Provençal Mystery, #10)

Disaster at the Vendome Theater
by M.L. Longworth
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780143135302
Series: Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery #10
Publication Date: October 4, 2022
Pages: 293
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Penguin Books

When Jean-Marc Sauvet, successful lawyer and the best friend of Aix-en-Provence’s examining magistrate Antoine Verlaque, accepted a small role in a local theater’s summer production of Marcel Pagnol’s Cigalon, he had no idea that the lead actress would be played by the great Liliane Poncet. But Jean-Marc’s excitement about rubbing elbows with one of France’s legendary film stars is quickly extinguished. The lead actor, Gauthier Lesage, is rude and unenthusiastic, and nobody understands how he got the part. Chaos reigns backstage thanks to the absentminded theater director. And everyone seems to be harboring a secret. When one of the actors goes missing for good, it’s up to the soon-to-be-a-father Verlaque and his police commissioner, Bruno Paulik, to untangle the threads of a mystery that seems to get more complicated every day…

This is one of those series best read for the atmosphere, the setting, and the characters, rather than for the mystery. The mysteries are good and well plotted, but slow paced; not quite back-burnered, but not front and center either. As the latest entry, this one may be the most leisurely one yet, with plotting that, to me, relies on a far-fetched hunch on the part of the police commissionaire. It works, for reasons that are logical in the end, but that first assumption – the bit that causes the cascade towards denouement, felt like too big a stretch. Verlaque, the titular MC, is a bit of a damp twit in this book, which feels contrary to all previous books, and is an obvious sop to the conceit that (impending) parenthood softens even the most hardened heart.

Otherwise, the book was as enjoyable to read as all the rest – a nice mini-break to France from the comfort of my couch. Now that Verlaque and Marine have reproduced, my anticipation of future books is somewhat dampened, as I don’t think parenting and solving crimes a sensible mix, but I will happily read the next one and hope to be proved wrong.

Apparently the BBC has made a TV show of this series, called Murder in Provence, available on BritBox. I watched the trailer the other day and … everyone is British. I mean, I realise the BBC is a British production company, but the setting is in France, and all the characters are French, at least they are in the books. Listening to Verlaque and Marine speak in very British accents was unnerving. But the show did appear to be humorous, and I admit to being intrigued – possibly enough to sign up for the free month trial.