Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'll be curious to hear your take on it. I don't consider myself overly sensitve (and I actually like a bit of grit and/or seediness), but it just seemed the author went out of his way to inject unnecessary ugliness at every turn.

I'm not reading that one. Even The Book of Lost Things has characters you can sympathize with/relate to and some hope.

Meanwhile, I am on a role with female-written SF/Fantasy. I am reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison. It is really good so far (30% in).

As I mentions, I really enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and Rachel Caine's "Great Library" series (2 so far, more to come).

[orlok]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'll be curious to hear your take on it. I don't consider myself overly sensitve (and I actually like a bit of grit and/or seediness), but it just seemed the author went out of his way to inject unnecessary ugliness at every turn.

Just finishing up Dark Places by Gillian Flynn and then I'll move straight onto it. I'll let you know.

[poohbear_nc]

*snip*

Same here (fan of the genre, I mean). Seemed right up my alley from the description. Oh, well. Can't win 'em all. Have you read Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal?

It's in my "To Read" pile -- I moved away from the genre for a while to 'cleanse my reading palate' --
If Hermine rains us in this weekend, I may begin reading it.

Meanwhile, I dove into Henry James The Golden Bowl - indecently, mayhaps, unnecessarily challenging ... but so rich a read ...

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Revelation by C J Sansom. The fourth in his Matthew Shardlake series - a lawyer in 16th century London.

Another excellent mystery set in Tudor London.

Next up: Grantville Gazette #67, edited by Bjorn Hasseler.

[Rev. Bob]

Been a while since I've checked in...

After the Spider-Man Clone Saga graphic novels, I switched over to the first two (of three) books in the School for Good and Evil series. Not bad, had some neat ideas - namely, this is where the characters in fairy tales go to get trained - and once the price drops a bit on the third book, I'll tackle that.

Next up was Shapeshifted, book three of five(?) in an urban fantasy series starring a nurse. I'd read the first two some time back as paperbacks, and one of the highlights of finally getting to this one was discovering that there are at least two more in the series. It's decent stuff, but less my "thing" than other series, so I'm holding off on those for now.

Since then, I've been doing some major series catch-up. Indie author Maddy Edwards has a "13+1" book series (13 plus a side novel) called Paranormal Public, and I'd read and enjoyed the first three in a late-2012 binge, back when there was no fourth book. After plowing through books 4-8 plus the side novel, I'm about to start book nine, which concludes the first arc.

"Paranormal Public" is a four-year college for "paranormals" - an umbrella term that includes mages, vampires, werewolves, pixies, fallen angels, and other such supernatural beings. In true Harry Potter fashion, main character Charlotte has been raised as a human and thus knows nothing about any of this. Also like Harry, she turns out to be a Big Deal who has been covertly watched and protected, discovering in the first book that she is the only known surviving "elemental" - someone able to control the four classical elements. Each book unfolds over one semester, except for one that takes place over the summer break.

I wish I could endorse the series more heartily, but I have to ding it on the editing level. Continuity glitches are rare, but there's a big one where a Deep Secret fact gets casually published in a newspaper in one book before getting treated as a Deep Secret again in the next book. There are a lot of little technical errors, though. Dropped commas are the most common, with other punctuation issues (such as missing quotation marks) close behind, leaving homophone problems and dropped/extra words as relatively rare annoyances. I find the use of ALL CAPS for emphasis somewhat annoying, especially when the author uses italics elsewhere in the book, but I'm mostly used to it by now.

All of that being said, I'm not just reading these for the sunk cost. I genuinely enjoy the story and worldbuilding, and I'm interested to see where this book - which was intended to end the series - ends up. I might take a break after that, though; there's a three-year story gap between books nine and ten, and it might be worthwhile to let a few more books come out before I start in on the second arc. Given that books 11-13 have all come out in 2016, that's not as much of a sacrifice as it might appear...

[ATDrake]

Finished the entirety thus far of Icelandic author Yrsa Sigur∂ardóttir's Thóra Gudmundsdóttir mystery series, starring a (non-criminal specialty) lawyer in Reykjavík, which I finally started reading the #1 & #3 that I'd purchased on sale while running some errands last week, and ended up picking up the rest from the library while I was getting the rest of Michael Ridpath's Fire & Ice series.

Yrsa Sigur∂ardóttir is apparently known as the "Queen of Icelandic Crime", which puts her on authorial royalty footing with Anne Holt, "Norway's Queen of Crime", and Denise Rudberg, "Queen of Swedish Chick-Lit". It's a well-deserved title; these are really good books.

Lawyer Thóra has a mildly unusual profession, IMHO, since usually when authors with their own non-authorial professional careers write contemporary sleuths with non-police professional careers, they tend to "write what you know". Liza Marklund, Thomas Enger, and Árni Thórarinsson have all been journalists, and write journalistic sleuth heroes; Michael Ridpath used to work in London's financial district and wrote financial thrillers before branching out; and so forth. But the author explained in an interview that there were only so many plausible professions she could set her heroine up with so that she would have a believable chance of regularly running across bodies, given Iceland's rather low 1.3 murders-per-year rate, and forensic stuff required more research than she was up for, and she had a lawyer friend she could consult, so lawyer Thóra it was.

Given said 1.3 murders-per-year rate, most of Thóra's cases end up on her doorstep via indirect means to maintain plausibility while still providing "every year, another dead body" as the Amelia Peabody series puts it: she's asked to look into an old investigation with an eye to potentially re-opening it, or an impromptu dead body shows up while she's involved in negotiating property transfer disputes, and the like. We don't see much in the way of actual lawyer/court stuff, as one would in an actual dedicated legal thriller series, but there's low-key tidbits about working within the Icelandic legal system and co-operating with the local police (and occasionally, jurisdiction things when international parties are involved), which provide for a nice touch. Mostly, Thóra does amateur sleuth-type legwork and tries to figure it all out from there.

As for the obligatory complicated personal life, Thóra is a divorced single mother with an uneasy relationship with her ex, two kids prone to domestic crises, and of course the obligatory love interest, about whom I was Not Sure If Want at first, given how cliché it is to pair up people in the course of an investigation or other, but I grew to actually kind of like their relationship. It helps* that it's being done in a mostly casual way with little romantic relationship drama, and that mostly centred around their being two adults with established personal and professional lives that may prove too incompatible in the long term to sustain an ongoing affair with, rather than consisting of Slap Slap Kiss Kiss bicker-fights which are meant to show how Truly Meant For Each Other they are and wondering about How Much Does X Really Care?!?!, as other series fall prey to. TBH, in the end I was more annoyed with Thóra's kids' tendency to enact dramatic domestic crises in the middle of mom's cases. Don't they know she's trying to solve a murder?

Anyway, I read all 6 to date, and they were all worth it, IMHO, with interestingly varied tales and approaches to telling them, although some were rather better than the others. I like that sometimes Thóra has an investigative partner (and the partner varies by book), and sometimes pretty much works solo, and that the format of the storytelling sometimes alters between books, which keeps the series from seeming too repetitive when one binge-reads them in short succession, as I did.

1. Last Rituals which was a freebie for UK & Europe earlier this year. This sets up Thóra's first investigation and the beginning of her interest in crime-solving, as she's asked to serve as an assistant to handle the Icelandic legal stuff for a German security bank security officer who's looking into the death of the bank-owning family's son, who was a student in Iceland.
   
   This one was a bit like Árni Thórarinsson's Season of the Witch, which I bought and read a couple of years ago and really enjoyed. The premise is that the murdered German student had a significant interest in Iceland's unusual witchcraft traditions (as often, Scandinavia and the World has a topical cartoon for this), and the case is as much about trying to establish the character of the deceased and who he really was inside, versus his external reputation and appearance, as solving the actual whodunnit.
   
   While I think that the narrative fell a little too prey to the cliché that people with notably out-of-the-mainstream interests in controversial esoteric areas are kind of damaged and obsessively weird in a potentially murderous way (as we should have all learned from the Rainbow Cake Comment Apocalypse, perfectly conventional-seeming people can get seriously over-invested in absolutely trivial and utterly mundane stuff, sufficient to try to come to blows), I liked the contrast of personalities between the uptight German security officer (who turns out to have a better sense of humour than initially suspected) and the more laid-back Thóra, and the way that they had to negotiate the language barrier between the security officer and obtaining the information he wanted. A good, solid start to the series, even if there were some uneven patches, and a few things I didn't really care for.
2. My Soul To Take has Thóra looking into a compensation claim for a client who insists that the owners of a property which he's turning into a hotel have failed to mention that it was haunted, thereby making him eligible for a discount on the sale price, since he has to pay extra to his staff to compensate for workplace environment issues. It turns out that's not the only thing wrong with that property, as there's also some sort of secret associated with it that someone would like to keep buried, and acts accordingly.
   
   This had a nice interplay of trendy imported New Age beliefs (it's that sort of hotel) and traditional Icelandic folklore. It's probably the funniest of the books, with nicely humorous interplay between many of the characters, which contrasts with some of the horrible suspected secrets being speculated upon and eventually uncovered. SYKM tells me this was a Shamus finalist for Best Novel in the translated edition (the author also has a bunch of Nordic literary crime prize nods for this series and other books).
3. Ashes to Dust incorporates a bit of Icelandic history in the form of the 1970s volcanic eruption at Heimaey, which led to its becoming the "Pompeii of the North" as the residents hastily evacuated while the authorities tried to get the lava flow under control using experimental techniques (once again, Scandinavia and the World has a has a cartoon for this), leading to a surprising discovery as the long-buried basement of one of Thóra's clients is archaeologically excavated decades later.
   
   Without getting into too much potentially spoilery detail (you get the maximum impact if you go into this one utterly cold, IMHO; I didn't even have a look at the back blurb before starting), this one has an Agatha Christie-worthy level of utterly perfect and fitting misdirection as to who the main culprit really is and why they acted, as well as what really went on with the other stuff all this time (I guessed some of it, which seemed obvious, but that turned out to be mild hide-in-plain-sight not-quite-red herring reveal covering even deeper layers of wrongdoing). Maybe there was a little overly coincidental-feeling contrivance in how a certain piece of important evidence showed up, but to be fair, that sequence was narratively planned for and set up well in advance. I also liked that Thóra had to team up with her legal firm's obligatory terrible unfireable eccentric co-worker, the antagonistic receptionist Bella, who was revealed to have more personality layers and provide actually useful help, while not at all changing her attitude towards her employer.
   
   Probably the best actual mystery case of the lot, and if you only read one, I'd recommend either this or #6.
4. The Day Is Dark, which is set in Greenland, trying to discover what happened to some Icelandic workers on an isolated mining project, who mysteriously disappeared. This had a nicely tense atmosphere as Thóra & company investigating on the behalf of the project-funding bank for the insurance claim and a team of strangers from the mining concern, all hiding secrets, have to visit the site to try to gather clues, kind of like Mulder & Scully in that The Thing-inspired episode of The X-Files, and I rather liked it on that basis.
   
   Some parts of this didn't work for me, namely, the partial narration from the viewpoint of one of the local Greenlandic Inuit characters, which felt a bit too magical native in flavour for my tastes. But, points for trying to depict the varying views of the villagers being encroached upon by the mining, and for providing a reasonably cromulent-looking non-folkloric explanation for the apparent local traditional folkloric curse.
5. Someone To Watch Over Me has Thóra reluctantly taking a case from a thoroughly despicable unreformable criminal who wants her to re-open the investigation for one of his fellow inmates, a mentally disabled man who was convicted for starting a fire which burned down his former residence, which he may actually be innocent of.
   
   This was interesting for the depiction of Thóra's struggle with the ethics of the case, as her client performs a number of questionable actions to arrange access for her to certain persons and materials, and also the treatment of disabled persons in Icelandic society. There's also a secondary storyline involving a woman who seems literally haunted by a hit-and-run accident (not done by her, but which she feels responsible for as the deceased party was out on the road at her behest), and a radio host receiving harassing calls, all of which end up making sense together in the end.
   
   While this is another one which IMHO, didn't feel all quite there in certain ways (admittedly, truth can be stranger than fiction, but it just doesn't ring quite true to me that even a self-absorbed narcissistic sociopath would be quite that self-congratulatory and self-pityingly gloaty in their internal narrative), and I'm not sure the apparently real supernatural elements work for me although they are handled in not-too-intrusive way. But the case within it has a strong depiction, and the differing strands of it mostly weave together cleverly in a way that makes it seem obvious in retrospect from the clues previously dropped which you kick yourself for missing when the reveal is made, and like #4, it otherwise deals with sensitive subject manner in a reasonably respectful way.
6. The Silence of the Sea, probably the most narratively adventurous of the lot, and which the author has said was inspired by the case of the Mary Celeste (Wikipedia), where an abandoned ship was found with no apparent reason for everyone on it to go missing.
   
   This is an excellently tense paired story of what Thóra is uncovering in her efforts to prove some family members probably-dead (and not, like, disappearing for the lulz to set up a shiny new life free of pre-existing debt) so that her financially-challenged clients can put forth a life insurance claim for funds to support their possibly-orphaned young relative, and what actually happened on board the ship, told in interleaving chapters. In an Alfred Hitchcockian sense of mystery being not knowing whether or not there's a bomb under the table and suspense being knowing there's a bomb under the table but not knowing when it's going to go off, this does double duty as both sleuth case mystery and psychological suspense thriller, and does it very well.
   
   We get, piece by piece, the clues that Thóra and others investigating the mysteriously abandoned yacht turn up while trying to figure out what happened. But that doesn't really tell us what went on, so we also get the retrospective viewpoint of the vanished characters as they undergo their journey, showing how certain clues were misread or misinterpreted or simply missed, as well as the increasingly tense and disturbing atmosphere of growing distrust and paranoia among the crew and passengers as certain events occur, and how everything got to the point where they all went missing, which is something that only gets partially explained in the A-storyline.
   
   Anyway, either second-best or co-equal with #3 for best of the lot, depending on what your reading preferences are, allowing for the fact that this has a significant downer ending built-in to the beginning, given the premise. (The B-storyline portions as written would make a perfectly cromulent and high quality "terror on the high seas" psychological suspense thriller in its own right, IMHO, although my judgment may be skewed, since I don't normally read such.)

Very highly recommended, especially for #3 & #6, which I'd consider among "best-of-breed" mystery stories. This is a series that starts off well, and generally gets better, with clever, twisty plots with good character and motivation depth and often portraying a suitably disturbing atmosphere to the crimes (the author also writes standalone psychological and supernatural suspense thrillers). The actual cases are self-contained and further books don't reference the previous ones in that respect, although the ongoing family/relationship dramas build from book to book.

But Thóra's personal life is otherwise pretty stable, and if you don't mind knowing in advance who the love interest is going to be before they meet, or the outcome of a certain domestic crisis which was presented as a major surprise in book #1, you could read these standalone if you've difficulty obtaining or no particular inclination to get the whole series in order.

Also, #1 was a freebie a while back, so if you think you might be interested and got it back then, IMHO it's certainly worth your time to try and see if you like it enough to continue.

* It also helps that they're not above quietly trolling each other for the lulz, without ever really letting on.

One of the funniest sequences in #2 is a repeated joke at the expense of the love interest, based on a deliberate misunderstanding initially perpetuated by Thóra on impulse, which just kind of grows among the hotel staff to hilarious effect, in a way she didn't anticipate; especially as the love interest remains utterly baffled about it all and Thóra maintains, with perfect nitpicking accuracy, that she did not in any way say anything to anyone about the particular thing he thinks she might have said.

[Luffy]

Originally Posted by Luffy

After reading Death of a Trophy Wife, I read another book in the same series, called Death by Pantyhose. I absolutely loved re reading that book, and the latter's siblings will get the same treatment, if I may say so. Re-reading Death by Pantyhose, which is a non foodie cozy mystery (the series is called the Jaine Austen mystery series), I picked up little things that escaped my attentions. Things that pointed to the murderer. These indications were subtly written into the book. Like I said, I'm going to re-read my favorite series, however it will be in disorder.

For now I'm reading a smart cozy called Deadly Pumpkin Slice, by Carol Lee. It's a quaint little story. Very much in the tradition of foodie family oriented cozy mysteries, the's a lot of talk about this and that. I'm curious about when will the amateur investigation begin. It's a short story with only 7 chapters, but over 100 pages. I've never read a cozy in this format.

After that it's back to my beloved Jaine Austen, with Shoes to Die For waiting in the wings. That's it for now.

Deadly Pumpkin Slice was a good enough cozy, now I'm going to read a book called Miami Iced, by Susan Sussman. I'm also thinking of re-reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Shoes To Die For was an absolute delight, by the way.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by drjd

Next I'll take up something lightweight, so The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken by Tarquin Hall.

Just finished The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken by Tarquin Hall. A good detective fiction written in humorous way, a real lightweight page turner.

Naturally I would like to take up next The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, by the same author, to continue my present reading mood.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by NicoleMCGuire

- [This is now a BANNED spammer - MODERATOR]

Welcome to MR and to 'What are we reading' thread, NicoleMCGuire. If you are referring to 'The Lost Planet' by Angus MacVicar published during 1950s, I did read it and enjoyed thoroughly a few years ago. Enjoy your stay on the forums, you may find many recommendations which you may like to read.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

I read and enjoyed The African Quest, but Fellowship of Fear was just OK for me. I'm continuing on with both series; next up is The Dark Place (book 2/Gideon Oliver) and The Etruscan Chimera (book 6/Lara McClintoch).

Friday's Child is still at 40% (), and I still want to complete it soon. I also want to try Friday the Rabbi Slept Late; blaming that one on HarryT and pdurrant

I'll be happy if I complete at least two of these this new week!

It was slow-paced (in a good way!) and I figured out the murderer early on but Friday the Rabbi Slept Late was quite enjoyable; I liked the setting and the characters, especially Rabbi Small. Will definitely continue with the series. I also completed Friday's Child, which was good for many LOL moments!

I'm 15%+ into The Etruscan Chimera and haven't yet started The Dark Place; both of these are next up.

[MickeyC]

Just finished The Broker by John Grisham and it was a typically good Grisham read.

Next up The Dark Vineyard by Martin Walker because that damn Apache has got me hooked on cozy mysteries. Okay, okay I really appreciate his (always good) advice.

[WT Sharpe]

I'm doing something I've tried to swear off; reading multiple books at one time. Currently I'm reading four (five, if you include my current audiobook). Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (the current MR Book Club selection), Spanish Mystery Stories for Beginners: El Detective Pepe Sevilla by Alex Diez (no one on the planet is slower at languages then me), The Epic of Gilgamesh (no idea who the translator is for this version), and an impulse buy I couldn't resist: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link. The last is another collection of short stories and I was sucked in by the description on the National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read" project website. The first story in that collection concerns a teenager who, in attempting to dig up his deceased girlfriend's grave to retrieve some of his poetry that he left with the corpse (without making copies first), accidentally digs up the wrong grave. But hey, young love! Who hasn't done silly things like that?

[ATDrake]

Finished The Undesired by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, a standalone psychological suspense thriller with supernatural elements. Like her previous Thóra Gudmundsdóttir series mystery The Silence of the Sea, this has a timeline-switching double-mystery story which alternates between the present day, where formerly deadbeat-ish dad abruptly turned custodial single parent Ódinn (due to his severely estranged ex-wife's seemingly accidental death from a window fall, which his young daughter Rún is having nightmares about) is looking into the conditions of a 1970s era institutional home for juvenile offenders, and the actual goings-on at the 70s home. To complicate matters, the case was inherited from a co-worker who suddenly died of a heart attack in the office while looking into the mysterious deaths of two boys at the home, and there's the possibility that the ex-wife, the boys, and maybe even the co-worker are getting in on some haunting action, which Ódinn keeps trying to dismiss as nerves and anxiety, for Rún's sake.

Rather ambitiously, the story starts off with an Epilogue depicting Ódinn's final fate, with just enough hints to make one wonder if it really is due to supernatural vengeance, or a more human force at work. After that, each portion of the story slowly unfolds both what was suspected to be going on in both present and past (and drops clues about what was really going on, before the obligatory big reveals), in a slowly-building, creepily atmospheric way. The supernatural elements are mild and not quite ambiguous, with some apparent explanations provided for a few of the incidents, but others which seemingly can't actually be explained at all. And the obligatory twists and reveals are indeed mostly surprising but fitting, though a few are a little cliché and obvious, seemingly to disguise the nature of the more unexpected ones later.

Mild recommend if you think you might be into a psychological suspense thriller with a strong depiction of 1970s era institutional abuses and the domestic trials and tribulations of a newly single father in Iceland, both of which are rather dysfunctional. I don't really read much in the way of psychological supernatural suspense thrillers, being squeamish about creepy horror-ish stuff, so I've no real basis for judging, but this seemed like a competently-written but not outstanding one, with a rather niche subject matter appeal in an overall broad subgenre, and probably works best if you're already interested in stuff by the author or in the setting, and can get it on sale or from the library like I did. And there was a pronunciation guide for the Icelandic names in the front, which was a nice touch.

Probably the actual scariest thing in the book is this insight made in the course of investigating the institutional home conditions (apparently it was a common thing in 1970s Iceland, not to mention much of the rest of the world including Canada, to arbitrarily take young children away from disadvantaged families and turn them over to poorly-vetted total strangers to be housed in group homes of dubious responsibility, leaving life-long psychological scars):

But the saddest part was that something equally wrong-headed was almost certainly common practice now, though no one would notice for decades, by which time it would be too late.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Grantville Gazette #67, edited by Bjorn Hasseler.

Which was a quick, fun read as usual.

Now I'm reading Silence by Mercedes Lackey. More in her Serrated Edge universe of Elves and troubled teens.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Which was a quick, fun read as usual.

Now I'm reading Silence by Mercedes Lackey. More in her Serrated Edge universe of Elves and troubled teens.

I read that one earlier this year. I'm not sure if I've lost my taste for these, or if it just wasn't up to earlier ones. But I gave it a grudging 3 stars.

Meanwhile, reading an old one that I apparently missed when it came out. The Death of Sleep, the first of the Planet Pirates series from Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye. It's OK, but not exciting me.