Book 9: The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie novels are the standard against which all other detective novels I read are measured. Within her vast collection, I prefer the stories featuring Hercule Poirot, with his mustaches, love of hot chocolate and omelets, and his "little gray cells", but in a pinch I will pick up a Miss Marple. I always find Miss Marple novels to be a little bit sillier, but they are generally still rather clever and I get a huge kick out of Miss Marple's calling female characters who tend to date/marry often "nymphomaniacs." (Seriously, nymphomaniacs are brought up in almost every Miss Marple novel. It kind of makes me wonder what was going on with Dame Christie.) Sadly, no nymphomaniacs appear in The Body in the Library, but it still managed to be a highly entertaining read.

The Body in the Library begins with the corpse of a mysterious and unknown woman being discovered one morning in the library of a country manor near the English village of St. Mary Mead. The woman is dressed for an evening out in an evening gown and garish make-up, and has been strangled. The proprietor of the estate, Col. Bantry immediately falls under suspicion for the murder, but his wife, convinced of his innocence enlists the help of local spinster and amateur detective, Miss Marple, to help solve the case and clear his name and reputation.

This book was classic Christie fare. There are numerous suspects, both glamorous and crooked, all with motives and opportunities. The location shifts between an English country estate, a quaint village, and an expensive resort. The police bumble things up, and it comes down to Miss Marple to place all the pieces together and solve the mystery. It is comforting in its familiarity, though not entirely predictable. It is all things one expects from the queen of detective tales. Though I wish there had been a nymphomaniac.

Book 8: Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

Grave Sight is the first novel in Charlaine Harris (of Sookie Stackhouse/"True Blood" fame)'s Harper Connelly series.

Harper Connelly is not your average twenty-four-year-old woman. As a teenager, she was struck by lightening and left with a spiderweb like scar on her right leg, a susceptibility to migraines, and the ability to locate and see the last moments of dead bodies. Harper has taken her unique, but genuine ability and made a career out of it. With her step-brother Tolliver by her side as a business manager and , she travels the country and helps people find dead bodies. Though many people they come across think of Harper and Tolliver as charlatans preying on the grieving and broken, and many others find their acceptance of payment for services provided distasteful, Harper prefers to see it just as a job, like any other. Except her job has some unusual benefits and dangers.

Harper is booked for what should be a quick appointment in Sarne, a small town in the Ozark region of Arkansas. A teenage boy from a wealthy local family has committed suicide in the woods outside town, his other-side-of-the-tracks girlfriend is still missing months later, and people are beginning to talk about what the boy may have done to her. The boy's mother is anxious to prove her son's innocence in the girl's disappearance so she calls Harper in to search the are for the girl's body. In just a couple of hours of searching the area, Harper finds the girl and sees that she was running away from someone and was shot. It seems to be a pretty simple case, yet there are some pretty big secrets in Sarne that are trying to find their way into the light. Tolliver and Harper get in over their heads in a mystery that threatens to not only embroil them in crimes that have nothing to do with them, but just might end their lives.

This is the third series by Charlaine Harris that I have picked up. I loved the Sookie Stackhouse series, which is more supernatural romance with elements of mystery. I did not really care for the Aurora Teagarden series, which was more violent/true crime based. I really enjoyed the first in the Harper Connelly series. Harris is an excellent storyteller and she seems to be at her best when weaving in elements of the supernatural. I have read better detective novels, with more surprising surprise endings, but I did not think less of this book or of Harris for not shocking me completely. It was really more about the journey than the destination with this book.

Harper Connelly is an excellent main character. Harris has a way of creating female protagonists who are manage to be strong and resilient, yet vulnerable. It is a characteristic that makes her characters seem realistic. The powerhouse, no-fear, balls-to-the-wall warrior princess character can be fun, but she is not a character I can identify with. And I cannot stand the poor, woe-is-me heroines. They are simply irritating.

Though I will admit, some of the corpse talk in the book (and the second one, which I will review as soon as I can) can be a little on the creepy side, I like how Harper not only does her job to get money, but as a way to help the dead. She says on more than one occasion that the dead want to be found, that they want the mysteries surrounding their deaths to be solved, and in this way, Harper is helping them, all the while treating them with the utmost respect. I look forward to spending more time with Harper and Tolliver in their interesting, if slightly macabre, world.

Book 5: Interred with their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell

I found Interred with their Bones in the high school Reading List section of my local public library. Going into that section makes me feel as though I am a bit of a creeper, but if I am blanking on a book choice, they often have some interesting ideas (that reach beyond the expected reading list choices like Jane Eyre and the Chocolate War.

Interred with their Bones is a work of fiction, taking a whack at a mystery from history. It is stylistically similar to the DaVinci Code, except that it exchanges the works of DaVinci, for the works of Shakespeare.

Kate Stanely,a Harvard educated expert on the occult in Shakespeare, has ditched academia for a life directing Shakespeare's great works on stage. On the evening before the premier of the first play at the Globe, Roz, her mentor from Harvard, arrives at the theater and asks Kate to meet her later in the evening, saying she needs assistance with an important and mysterious task. When Kate goes to meet Roz, the woman is a no show, and Kate notices an ominous glow hanging over the skyline of London. After rushing back to work, Kate discovers that the Globe is on fire, Roz's murdered body has been found inside, and an extremely valuable and rare historical text is now missing.

It is now up to Kate to find the answer to the mystery which Roz died trying to discover. It is a journey that will take Kate to three different countries, and will place her in mortal peril again and again.

I like the idea of pretty much anything that will interest teens in reading or learning. Twilight? Sure, if it makes them actually pick up a book! The DaVinci Code? Why not? There is some (albeit not a lot of) actual art history involved. I was hoping that Interred with their Bones might be such a book, but sadly it is not. The premise is intriguing: a brilliant and brave female progtagonist is searching for what is the essentially the Holy Grail of Shakepearean lore, a surviving copy of Shakespeare's lost play "Cardenio." Along the way she teams up with a strong, and surprisingly sympathetic bodyguard. As they travel and change identities they are followed by a violent lunatic, more people are murdered (all murders mimicking murders from Shakespearean works), and Kate discovers the people she trusts are not always as they seem. It sounds fun, exciting, and vaguely intelligent, and it can be at times, but those times are too few and far between.

I think the biggest problem with Carrell's novel is not Kate's plotline, but instead, the second story she chose to attach. What second plotline, you might ask? Where is there room for a second story? There isn't. The book moves back and forth between the present, and Jacobean times. The plot in Jacobean times does not come up often enough to feel complete or fresh, but rears its ugly head just enough to take the reader out of the mindset of the Kate-story. I understand what Carrell was trying to do, give the book some more serious historical context, but it just feels tacked on and forced, and the sheer number of characters in a story that only comes up every hundred or so pages, leaves it more confusing than enlightening. It makes the pacing of the whole story feel off.

The other major problem I had with Interred with their Bones is that there was no solution to the mystery. Kate races along for over 400 pages searching for an answer, and just as it is within arm's reach it is destroyed forever. I felt like I had totally wasted my time. It is almost as though Carrell was not willing to commit herself to any of the possible answers, just in case she was wrong. But the beauty about a work of fiction, is that you can be wrong, and it is okay.

Book 4: Death of a Snob by M.C. Beaton

Through being an English major, working in publishing and going to library school I have discovered an interesting thing about most serious book lovers: they have some sort of semi-secret trashy tendency. For some its romance novels, for others it is crime thrillers, or sci-fi. But almost every person I have met seems drawn to one genre of "pop" fiction or another. These are the kinds of people who will happily discuss Goethe or Delillo for hours, however, when they think no one is looking, they pick up a mass-market paperback. I do not exclude myself from their ranks. I love detective novels. This is a subject I briefly touched on before. When I am sick, stressed, or traveling I will always pick up a few.

This being the end of the semester with all the projects and presentations that always entails, I skittered over to the library and selected a few mysteries for my (scant) downtime. One of the titles that caught my eye was M.C. Beaton's Death of a Snob. It had a title reminiscent of an Agatha Christie book, and a quick review of the book jacket showed that it looked like a pretty classic type of detective tale. Contemporary detective stories seem to rely too much on science or technology for my tastes, I like a detective who is happy to use his or her brain. Death of a Snob seemed right up my alley.

Death of a Snob centers around Detective Hamish Macbeth, who lives in a small village in the Scottish Highlands. It is almost Christmas, Hamish thinks he is dying from the flu (when all he really has is a mild cold), and his family has asked him not to come for the holidays as an American aunt who can't stand him has made a surprise visit. He is miserable. But a solution for his desolation arrives in the form of Jane Weatherby, a glamorous divorcee who thinks someone is trying to kill her. She is the proprietor of a health spa on a remote Scottish island, where the locals are anything but friendly. As a solution for both of their problems, it is agreed that Hamish will come to the spa for the holidays to investigate. The spa is closed for the winter, but is not empty as Jane has invited some friends and acquaintances to join her for Christmas. Among this unusual lot are a couple of farmers with a shocking secret, Jane's bitter and wealthy ex-husband, a social climbing couple who have fallen on hard times, and a well-meaning cookbook author. Hamish slips into their presence under an assumed name and occupation, and proceeds to look into Jane's concerns. The group does not gel well, and after a particularly nasty afternoon, one of the party disappears and is later found dead, have hit (or been hit with) a large rock, and tumbling off a small precipice. The circumstances make it seem as though the death was an accident, and as it is Christmas, the local police are willing to write of as such, but Hamish is not willing to let the issue be settled so easily. With the assistance of Harriet, the cookbook author, he dives right in.

I liked Death of a Snob, very much, up to a certain point. The period up to the murder was excellent. The mounting frustration of the entire group at the spa was palpable. The characters were perfect for this sort of novel. Interesting, light, and all slightly off. No one could escape suspicion completely. However, after the murder, the plot takes a bizarre and unsatisfying turn. It as almost as though the first half of the novel was pointless. Hamish is a charming main character, both warm and quirky, and I would be happy to give M.C. Beaton another shot sometime in the future. But as for this particular novel? It was ruined by an overworked second half and too much effort in trying to keep the identity of the murderer a huge surprise.