Tag Archives: Mystery

Book Review: A Bone to Pick

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A Bone to Pick
by Charlaine Harris
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Just as looking at a jumbled pile of Ferrari parts doesn’t hint at the beauty of a finished car, so, too, does the first novel in a series not really give an adequate picture of the entire collection.

I’ve now finished the second in Charlaine Harris’s Aurora Teagarden series, A Bone to Pick, and while I found the first book enjoyable, I’m much more in love with Roe Teagarden in this second installment.

In this book, she inherits a house and a pile of money from her recently-deceased friend Jane, and later finds that she’s inherited a mystery as well. In between dealing with the fact that ex-lover Arthur and his new wife are living across the street from said house (and expecting a baby), and dating the Episcopal priest who performed her mother’s recent marriage ceremony, Roe must also figure out what the mystery is, and why she’s been charged with solving it.

As with the first novel, this book is a cozy story, gentle, and homey, and perfect when it’s raining outside, and you don’t feel very well.

Retro-reading: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

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The Beekeeper's Apprentice
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
Laurie R. King
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I’ve reviewed work by Laurie R. King in this blog before, but finding a couple of her Holmes & Russell novels at Half-Price Books last weekend, and then finding out that she had a new book in the series out this year has spurred me to re-read the entire series.

I’d forgotten how refreshing it could be to immerse myself in a novel where no one had cell phones, or worried about upgrading their computer memory, or complained about having 500 channels and nothing to watch. As well, re-reading these novels with a slightly more mature eye gives me the ability to really pay attention to some of the nuances I’d missed the first time around.

If you’re not familiar with the series, the first novel, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, introduces us to a character who would be a Mary Sue under hands any less deft than Ms. King’s. This Mary – one Mary Russell – is a teenage girl sent from America to live under the “care” of an aunt, who holds her fortune in trust. One of her neighbors in their remote corner of Sussex just happens to be Sherlock Holmes.

The two form a somewhat unlikely friendship, especially considering Holmes’ oft-noted misogyny, that eventually blooms into a partnership of crime-solving equals. Imagine the tag line: He’s a famous detective who retired and took up beekeeping. She’s a young Oxford student studying Theology and Chemisty. They fight crime!

But the thing is, they do.

Of course, they also bicker, banter, and bargain their way through many adventures, and leave the reader – or at least this reader feeling only that the book has ended too soon.

Sex, Murder and a Double Latte

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by Kyra Davis

San Francisco mystery novelist Sophie Katz, half Jewish, half African American, drinks chocolate brownie frappucinos as if they were nutritional supplements and talks to her cat as if he’s a person. In this, the first book about her and author Kyra Davis’s first novel to be published, she also finds life imitating art, as she ends up trying, with her friends (one of whom owns a sex toy store, the other of whom is her gay hair stylist), to solve a murder that seems as if it’s ripped out of the pages of her last novel.

Along the way, she also has to deal with her mother, her sister and young nephew, and the fact that her prime suspect for the murder is also the man who stole her newspaper at Starbucks, and whom she’s dating…sort of.

Davis’s writing is fresh and funny, and manages to blend chick-lit with the mystery genre, her characters are interesting, and her plot works. A good mixture of froth, foam, and fear.