Our cat Rosie passed away on March 23. She had thyroid disease, had lost a lot of weight, and eventually died of renal failure.
Rosie was with us for 12 years and we think she was about 3 years old when we adopted her. She was a very sweet cat and a good companion and we miss her very much.
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| Rosie in my lap |
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| Rosie helping me read |
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| Rosie overseeing the garden work |
This book has been on my shelves for 13 years. Initially I avoided it because I thought it might be too humorous, but my tastes must have changed over time, because I was very happy with it.
It did not really feel like crime fiction though. It seemed like the first 2/3 of the book was about the background of the family. Isabel (also known as Izzy) Spellman tells the story, and she starts at the point when she was 12 years old. Her parents run a private investigation company out of their home, and the two kids began helping out with surveillance when David was 14 and Isabel was 12. Then when Isabel was 14, her mother has another child, a daughter named Rae, who also ends up working for the family business. Eventually the story catches up to the cases that they are working on currently, although there is a good bit of jumping back and forth in the timeline. It was a very strange mystery novel, but I enjoyed it very much.
Comparisons have been made to other series: the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich and the Claire DeWitt series by Sarah Gran. I read 9 or 10 of the Stephanie Plum series before I gave up on it. My husband has read 3 books in the Claire DeWitt series and I want to read those books too.
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Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2007
Length: 353 pages
Format: Hardcover
Series: Spellman Files, #1
Setting: San Francisco, California
Genre: Mystery
Source: I purchased this book in 2012.
The starting book this month is Rapture by Emily Maguire. This is a historical fiction novel, set in the 800s, about a young girl who becomes a monk by disguising herself as a male. I may read this book because it sounds interesting and is not overly long. The book was longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, which celebrates the best writing by women and non-binary authors in Australia.
My first link is to another Australian novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, published in 1967. The story is about a group of young female college students that go on a picnic. Some of the girls don't return.
Using "Rock" in the title of the previous book takes me to my next book, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, published in 1938. I haven't read much by Greene so I was happy to find this old hardback edition of Brighton Rock with the dust jacket mostly intact at the 2023 Planned Parenthood book sale. The protagonist is Pinkie, a teenage gang leader who has murdered a journalist and thinks he can get away with it. The book goes beyond a thriller to explore moral issues.
The Zig Zag Girl by Elly Griffith's is my next link because of its setting – Brighton, in the 1950s. This is from the description at the author's website: "When the body of a girl is found, cut into three, Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick, the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend of Edgar’s. They served together in the war as part of a shadowy unit called the Magic Men." This is the first book in the Brighton Mysteries series, and I have not yet read it.
Another book with "Girl" in the title is Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart. This book is also the start of a historical mystery series, set in the early 1900s in New Jersey. It is based on a real woman who was one of the first female deputy sheriffs in the US.
Again using a word from the title, I link to Gunshine State by Andrew Nette. This is a gritty heist novel set in Australia. Description at Goodreads: "Gary Chance is a former Australian army driver, ex-bouncer and thief. His latest job takes him to Surfers Paradise, Queensland, working for aging standover man, Dennis Curry. Curry runs off-site, non-casino poker games, and wants to rob one of his best customers, a high roller called Freddie Gao. ... Chance knows he can’t trust anyone, but nothing prepares him for what unfolds when Curry’s plan goes wrong."
Gunshine State takes me to State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, a novel that is set in the jungles of Brazil. From the description at the author's website: "Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a pharmaceutical company, is sent to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug. Nothing about the assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission."
My Six Degrees took me from Australia to the UK, then to the US and back to Australia, but ended in Brazil. I have not read any of the books in this post, but I have five of them on my TBR shelves. Have you read any of these books?
If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?
The next Six Degrees will be on June 7, 2025 and the starting book will be All Fours by Miranda July.
For my Short Story Wednesday post this week, I have reviewed a story for the Agatha Christie Short Stories Read Along hosted by Fanda at Fanda Classiclit. Fanda's post for April is here.
"Philomel Cottage"
To be honest, I enjoyed this story of psychological suspense, but when I got to the end I could not figure what had happened.
Alix Martin is the main character. She is in her thirties and for fifteen years supported herself in a clerical job. Then she received an unexpected inheritance which allowed her some independence. Shortly after that, she married a man she met at a friend's house, after a whirlwind romance. When they married they moved into a remote cottage that she paid for with part of her small inheritance.
This all sounds very idyllic but Alix begins to have doubts about her marriage. She has several dreams about her husband dying and she hears of questionable things that her husband has said or done but not shared with her.
Then she hears from an old boyfriend who wants to drop by and visit her and her husband. This confuses her even more because the boyfriend had been in her dreams about her husband.
The ending was abrupt, and I thought that it was ambiguous, although not all reviewers agreed with that. Regardless the story is filled with tension and was very entertaining.
This story first appeared in The Grand Magazine in November 1924. It later appeared in a collection titled The Listerdale Mystery in the UK in 1934 and in The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories in the US in 1948.
Short Story Wednesday is hosted by Patricia Abbott at Pattinase.
I read a lot of good books in February and March, in a variety of genres and different settings.
The Goodbye Cat (2021) by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel
This book consists of seven short stories; all of the stories are about cats and are set in Japan. See my review.
Rachel's Holiday (1997) by Marian Keyes
This book was one of two books I read for Reading Ireland Months 2025. It is the second in Marian Keyes' Walsh family series. The story focuses on Rachel, the third of five sisters, after she overdoses on drugs and almost dies. I enjoyed this book and the preceding one, Watermelon. See my review.
Much Ado About Nothing (1598) by William Shakespeare
I read this play for my Classics Club Spin in February. I haven't written a post about it but I will do one, soon I hope. I was leery of reading any Shakespeare play, so I picked a comedy that I was more familiar with. I read the play in the Folger Library Edition which presents explanatory notes on the left hand page and the actual text of the play on the right hand page. That was useful at first but with the last three acts I found I could pick up the meanings myself and move faster through the play. All in all it was a good experience.
A God in Ruins (2015) by Kate Atkinson
I am sad that I don't have time to review this book, because I loved it so much when I read it. I did not like the ending and I still gave it 5 stars. It is a hard story to summarize and describe. This book is sort of a sequel to Life After Life by the same author. Life After Life was about Ursula Todd, and is a time loop novel, where portions of Ursula's life are repeated over and over with different results. A God in Ruins is about Ursula's brother Teddy. It also has a strange structure jumping back and forth to various times in Teddy's life and focusing most often on his years in the RAF during World War II.
The Ministry of Time (2024) by Kaliane Bradley
This was another book that I rated very highly, even though it was confusing and I was not fond of the ending. The book is advertised as time travel, romance, espionage, and "a workplace comedy." Looking back on it, it does have elements of all of those, but having these thrown into one book diluted each of them. Nevertheless, it was a compelling read and I wanted to get back to reading it every day. The characters were interesting and fleshed out and mostly sympathetic. One thing I especially liked was that I learned a lot about the Franklin Expedition, a failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage. I have never been interested in that story but now I am.
Diving into the Wreck (2009) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
This is the first book in Rusch's Diving Universe series. The protagonist in this story is a woman who makes her living diving into derelict ships out in space. She does these salvage operations to support herself, but her real love is history and she likes to study the ships. See my review.
Silent Parade (2018) by Keigo Higashino, translated by Giles Murray
This book is the 9th book in the Detective Galileo series, but only the 4th book translated to English. It is about two crimes that take place in Tokyo, separated by about 20 years. In both cases, young girls have been killed. The suspect is the same for both but all the evidence is circumstantial. Detective Chief Inspector Kusanagi turns to his old friend, physics professor and sometimes police consultant, Manabu Yukawa (aka Detective Galileo), to help solve the murders. See my review.
Fall From Grace (1991) by L.R. Wright
This is the fourth book in one of my favorite Canadian mystery series. The main character is Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Karl Alberg. I have found most of the books in the series to be more of a character study than a mystery. See my review.
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (2012) by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg, translated by Rod Bradbury
This book is kind of a comedy / heist / romance all mixed into one. (The romance is very low key.) It is the first book in the League of Pensioners series. The main characters are all around 80 years old and living in a retirement home that is going downhill. The owners are medicating the residents to keep them in line and manage costs. Five of the residents, three women and two men, decide to carry out some robberies, sort of a Robin Hood scheme to give money to the poor. I enjoyed reading this book, but it required suspending my disbelief a lot.
I have seen a lot of good reviews of this book, but this review at AnaBookBel was my favorite. The book was published in 2012 in Sweden, then a few years later in the UK and the US, but this was the first I had heard of it. It was an interesting picture of Sweden.
Scene of the Crime (2024) by Margot Kinberg
This is the fifth novel in Margot Kinberg's Joel Williams series. The setting is academia; the protagonist is a college professor in Tilton University’s Department of Criminal Justice. Joel is not a policeman but he was in the past, and he has ties to the police department. Thus, the books are part academic mystery and part police procedural. I have read the four previous books in the series and this was another good one. See my review.
Winterland (2008) by Alan Glyn
This book is another book I read for Reading Ireland Month 2025. It is a thriller, and I don't always like those, but this one worked for me. Very dark and a good bit of violence, but none of that bothered me. Two men named Noel Rafferty die in one day in Dublin. The younger one was part of a gang; the second one was his uncle, who was chief engineer for the development of a high rise building. Supposedly the second death was the result of a car accident, but Gina Rafferty (sister of the older Noel Rafferty) doesn't believe that. And she refuses to stop asking questions. I liked the book; if you are OK with thrillers and enjoy reading about Ireland, you might enjoy it too.
Three Witnesses (1956) by Rex Stout
This book is a collection of three novellas in the Nero Wolfe series. In January, I reviewed "Die Like a Dog." In March, I reviewed "The Next Witness" and "When a Man Murders." All three novellas were entertaining and clever.
The photos at the top and bottom of this post were taken at the Santa Barbara International Orchid Show that we attended in March. I plan to share more photos from the show in a future post. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.
From the description of this book on the dust jacket:
More than fifty years ago, Peter Lovesey published a short story in an anthology. That short story caught the eye of the great Ruth Rendell, whose praise ignited Lovesey’s lifelong passion for short form crime fiction. On the occasion of his hundredth short story, Peter Lovesey has assembled this devilishly clever collection, eighteen yarns of mystery, melancholy, and mischief, inhabiting such deadly settings as a theater, a monastery, and the book publishing industry. The collection includes the career-launching story, as well as three never-before-published works.
The cover of this book is lovely: the cat, the books stacked up, the skull on the window ledge, the old-fashioned lamp and the teacup on the desk.
In February of 2022, I read the first ten stories in this book. My brief notes on those stories are in this post. I have now read the last eight items in the book:
The first six of these are short stories. "The Tale of Three Tubs" is a nonfiction piece on George Joseph Smith and the brides in the bath. "A Monologue for Mystery Lovers" is a humorous poem.
My favorite story in this set is "Remaindered." The story is a bibliomystery, first published by MysteriousPress.com / Open Road Integrated Media in 2014.
Robert Ripple, the owner of the Precious Finds bookstore, died slumped over a box of Agatha Christie hardcover books that he had recently purchased. It was determined that the cause of death was coronary. This event led to the discovery of many secrets about the bookstore and the meetings that had regularly been held in its back room.
"Remaindered" was humorous, somewhat unbelievable and over the top, but a lot of fun. The ending was not obvious, at least not to me, although it was somewhat ambiguous. The story was the longest in the book at 42 pages. Almost novella length.
The other story I especially liked was "Agony Column," the shortest story in the collection at five pages. It consists of letters sent to an advice column by a woman who worries because her husband is taking two hour walks at night and is ignoring her when he is home. She receives answers from Dr. Wisefellow with advice and questions. It is humorous but I cannot say more without spoiling it.
