Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Now, on to a different Ms. Lee, Ava Lee. Unfortunately, when I finish The Scottish Banker of Surabaya, I'll be out of Ava Lee books for a while, until Ian Hamilton writes another.
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No, you've still got #6
The Two Sisters of Borneo to look forward to after that. But then you'll have to wait until January for the release of #7
The King of Shanghai. (Apparently he's contracted until #10 or so.)
As for me, I recently finished the first three novels in Canadian author
Melissa Yi's Hope Sze series of medical murder mysteries starring a newbie Ottawa doctor who's just moved to start her residency in Montreal and stumbles across murder, the way that newbie Ottawa doctors starting their residencies in Montreal tend to do.
I got these free as part of a Kobo contest tie-in (freebie offer for one book of your choice
still valid until the end of the year, apparently), and decided to give them a try.
Code Blues was a decent introductory novel with, IMHO, way too much relationship drama (which fortunately got eventually resolved in the "yeah, we're not going to do this again" way, at least for that particular pairing), but enough of a reasonable setup for the main character and her apparent supporting cast that I was interested enough to continue with the 2nd.
I did like the linking of Hope's practice doing medical diagnoses under the tutelage of her supervising superiors to actually trying to figure out stuff from Clues™ for the murder case. And that rather than enabling her in her quest to Solve CrimeŽ as people so often do for amateur sleuths, everyone pretty much gave her the "you're being weird and prying and nobody likes that and you really ought to leave it to the police but we'll put up with it anyway since you're kind of a friend".
Notorious D.O.C was a bit of an improvement in the relationship drama department, but kind of a step down in terms of the mystery plot, as I've never been fond of psycho killer does this gloaty 1st person inner monologue which is meant to drop Hints To The Gentle Reader interspersed throughout the regular text kind of thing because it's so often done really badly.
So, negative points for that. That said, I did like how Hope is suddenly 15-minutes-of-famous for solving the last case, and trying to live it down, and pretty much everyone around her is once again trying to discourage her from taking on the unsolved cold case and begrudgingly helps her out because she's a friend.
Terminally Ill was actually the best of the lot, with a rather clever setup and resolution to the main plot which involved trying to figure out who tried to kill someone who ended up surviving, which would have stood perfectly well on its own without the added extra murders which were apparently thrown in to make things more dramatic.
But it is a step up and hopefully the series continues this trend of improvement.
Mild recommend if you're looking for a newbie doctor settling into her residency in between solving crime sort of series, with bits of Montreal and Chinese-Canadian culture thrown in. Yi herself is an emergency doctor, so there's lots of accurate stuff on how hospitals and the Canadian health system works, and Hope rotates through different departments in each book as part of her residency which helps keep things fresh.
And the current promo freebie price of whichever book of your choice is certainly a point in its favour (by way of thanks, I'm planning to get the 99 cent follow-up novella which apparently retells part of #3 from one of the guilty involved parties' point of view from Kobo since it's cheap and couponable and I got 3 books free and I'm mildly curious as to how much hands-getting-dirty involvement that person had in it). It does help to read them in order, since these build on each other in terms of Hope's character arc and the relationship drama which puts her between two (or more) different love interests.
But despite that last and all the sexy thoughts about sexy sex, these are in no way romantically-inclined books, and it's actually kind of refreshing that the two love interests are both genuinely friendly outside of the attempted courtship and trying to be helpful with her in regards to both her personal issues as well as the sleuthy stuff.
That said, I kind of wish she'd just either angled for a polyamorous threesome with the both of them like she keeps thinking of, or given up on the distraction of romance during her residency and just invested in some sex toys instead, like she'd also been thinking of.
Anyway, now currently in the middle of
James R. Benn's Billy Boyle series of WWII mystery/action thrillers starring a Boston cop turned special agent under his "uncle" by marriage General Eisenhower and thereby gallivanting all over the world solving murders in between enacting special missions usually related to and/or causing the murders.
We got the eponymous first of these free several years ago (it's currently on sale for $1.99 again), and I liked it enough back then to buy the next few at discount pricing, which I've finally gotten around to reading now. I'm really enjoying these (they come with nifty historical notes on the real-life background inspirations for the cases) and I'll probably getting the rest of the books out of the library.