The Medici Return

The Medici Return is the newest and 19th installment of Steve Berry's Cotton Malone spy thriller series. The story is currently in development as a streaming series. In The Medici Return, Cotton travels to Italy in order to solve a five hundred year-old mystery.  

It is always hard to summarize a book with a complex plot so I will let the publisher summarize it for me:

Cotton Malone is on the hunt for a forgotten 16th century Pledge of Christ—a sworn promise made by Pope Julius II that evidences a monetary debt owed by the Vatican, still valid after five centuries—now worth in the trillions of dollars. But collecting that debt centers around what happened to the famed Medici of Florence—a family that history says died out, without heirs, centuries ago. 

Who will become the next prime minister of Italy, and who will be the next pope? Finding answers proves difficult until Cotton realizes that everything hinges on when, and if, the Medici return.

Former Justice Department operative, Cotton Malone, has been asked to assist the Swiss guard with determining whether Cardinal Jason Richter has engaged in bribery and theft. It’s a favor for Stephanie Nelle, once his boss at the Magellan Billet, who is doing a favor for the Vatican. But nothing is as it seems. Four hundred thousand euros are found, a Swiss Guardsman is murdered, and a killer sets his sights on both Cotton and the cardinal.

Together they are thrust into a search for a forgotten document, a 16th century Pledge of Christ executed by Pope Julius II that reveals a debt owed by the Vatican, still valid after five centuries, now worth in the trillions of dollars. But when the trail to collecting that debt leads Cotton to the famed Medici of Florence—a family that history says died out, without heirs, centuries ago—he realizes that two more things also hang in the balance. Who will be the next prime minister of Italy, and who will become the next pope.

From a quiet hilltop village in central Germany, to the ancient city of Siena with its famed Palio horse race, and finally to the historic piazzas, churches, and crypts of Florence, Cotton Malone uncovers the answers, one by one, everything hinging on when, and if, the Medici return.

I have read all of the Cotton Malone books all of them have been good. The Medici Return is one of the best though. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the history of the Medici and Pazzi clans. The Pignus Christi, the Pledge of Christ, referred to in the plot is not real however. While I was still reading, I researched the pledge online and found nothing. "Pignus" is a Latin word that means "pledge" so a pignus christi is translated as the pledge of christ. In Roman law, pignus referred to a pledge given to a creditor to secure an obligation. In this story Pope Julius gave this such pledge to Giuliano de Medici in exchange for ten million flori. The Author's Note at the end of the story cleared up my question whether the Pignus Christi was real. It isn't. Berry made it up. This was creative! By the time Malone is searching for this IOU, the Medici family has died out and a man who believes he is a lawful Medici heir is also searching for it. Others who are looking for it include two powerful Cardinals, one who is striving to be the next Pope.

The pace was pleasant, neither fast nor slow. With so much history written into the novel, a slower than normal pace for a Steve Berry book was appropriate. If there was anything that bothered me it was the part where Cotton participated in a horse race in Siena called the Palio. It did not advance the plot so I am puzzled why it was inserted. Steve Berry stated that he saw this race during one of his visits to Italy and that he was fascinated by it. Maybe that is the answer to my question.

I loved The Medici Return and highly recommend it to mystery fans. 4 out of 5 stars.

First Lie Wins

First Lie Wins is my selection this month for the Key Word Challenge. It is an exciting, page-turning read that keeps you hooked until the end.

The publisher's summary:

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job isn't like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there's still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn't be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge. . . .

It took a few chapters for me to engage in this book. I needed to understand what Evie was about before getting hooked. The story took off around the third chapter. Evie steals high end items such as jewelry and paintings for her boss Mr. Smith. Another character, Devon, assists Evie in planning and executing her jobs. The story has the feel of a spy thriller. No one knows the identity of Mr. Smith or why he is interested in obtaining these goods. Sometimes he just wants information to be stolen. 

Evie uses a different name for each job. These jobs are sometimes quick but can last for months and be in different locales. While she is with Ryan, Evie is introduced to a woman who is using her real name and life history which throws her off her game. Evie cannot imagine why this woman, claiming to be Lucca Marino, was in her path.

The novel is more of a whydunit than a whodunit. I was surprised by the big reveal (how all of the characters were related) and then by the ending. None of it was anticipated.

First Lie Wins is a  fun read. 4 out of 5 stars.

The Pot Thief Who Studied Calvin

The Pot Thief Who Studied Calvin was published last month. It is author J. Michael Orenduff's 10th Pot Thief murder mystery. The series features an antique seller who specializes in ancient works of clay and porcelain. Each installment of the series is titled "The Pot Thief Who Studied.  . ." It’s an interesting premise for a series. 

The publisher's summary: 

An Albuquerque ceramics dealer soon turns amateur sleuth after he gets a 3D-printed pot to die for.

Hubie Schuze usually digs through the dirt—often illegally—to find the ancient ceramics he sells in his shop, Spirits in Clay. But thanks to his nephew, Tristan, a computer science student at the University of New Mexico, Hubie receives a unique 3D-printed pot. And after a photo of it runs in the local paper, it becomes a popular item.

Unfortunately, the pot is sought-after by all the wrong people, and strange characters start darkening the doorway of Hubie’s shop. They’re willing to do anything to get their hands on the pot, and after Det. Whit Fletcher summons Hubie to the morgue, he discovers that includes murder. Now, to get to the bottom of things, Hubie must uncover what's so hot about this pot, before the cold-as-ice-killer strikes again. 

I wasn't expecting this story to be a cozy mystery but that's exactly what it is. Our amateur sleuth sells ceramic pots in between telling one joke after another. He is an expert on Calvin, Ross Calvin that is, but had to learn the finer points on John Calvin's predestination theory for his soon to be father-in-law. Ross Calvin wrote Sky Determines: an Interpretation of the Southwest, one of Hubie’s favorite books. This Calvin was a real-life Episcopalian priest whose 1934 book is a classic of New Mexico literature. He also was an adherent on predestination.

The story opened with a prologue at the local Albuquerque morgue where Hubie was present to identify the body. The story then shifts backwards in time to explain how the body ended up there. The first third of the book did not include a murder and I was getting anxious for it to happen so that I could read about the investigation. However, it came more than halfway through the story. The "investigation" consisted of the big reveal where Hubie explained every part of the case to a group of all the possible suspects. 

I had never heard of 3D-printers before. The author gives a good presentation of how they work early in the story. 

"It can operate in several ways. The one I used sets the printer to run its stylus over the surface of an object you want to copy. The movements of the stylus are stored in the printer’s memory. Then you have it follow the pattern of the object it now has in its memory, but this time it’s laying down soft clay as it goes, so it makes an exact duplicate of the object it traced.”

The book ends with a discussion between Hubie and his new bride whether the deceased's death was predestined. This story began and ended with the merits of predestination, which I had originally assumed given the title of the book. Pretty interesting. 

5 out of 5 stars.

The Art Collector

I received a free copy of this lovely mystery from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I can honestly say that it is spectacular. The book was published last year on August 28, 2024 and it is the second book in author Susan Bacon's mystery series.

The publisher's summary:  

A Warhol protégé, a Manhattan murder and a long-hidden truth. 

It is February 1987. Seal Larsen is a photographer, denizen of New York’s downtown scene and the subject of one of Andy Warhol’s short films. When she dies in a suspicious fall from the 15th floor of her Manhattan apartment building, her friend and neighbor, Emma Quinn, is determined to find out what happened. A history professor at Columbia University with connections to the intelligence community, Emma soon realizes how little she really knows about her friend.

Exploring Seal’s life, her work, her past, Emma makes her way down to Memphis and to rural Tennessee, putting herself at risk. It’s there, on an isolated 2,000-acre farm, that she begins to grasp the tragedy that defined Seal’s life and the truth about her death.

A sequel to The History Teacher, Susan Bacon's award-winning political mystery, The Art Collector is an intrigue, a puzzle, a plot-twister. It is also an exploration of the value of art and the people who make it and of the culture that fueled Manhattan's art boom in the second half of the twentieth century.

This story hooked me from the start. It perfectly blends art and history along with a spectacular mystery. I love art so the phenomenal amount of art history within the pages of the book also kept me interested. However, a reader who isn't interested in art probably won't like it. That said, it was fascinating that Seal’s connection to Andy Warhol, one of my favorite artists, was a main feature of the story. 

I loved the setting too. The 1980s New York City art scene was mesmerizing. I didn't know much about this era before reading the book and learned alot about how artists and their dealers did business. Another setting included in the book is the Deep South during the 1960s. Seal and her mother came from small town Tennessee. They left Tennessee with an African American cook named Merna and opened a restaurant in Harlem. The final leg of Emma's investigation leads her to a remote Tennessee farm where the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

The only complaint I have is that the middle part of the story moved rather slowly. All of the details about various artworks and the artists that created them was probably the reason. 4 out of 5 stars.

The Amish Quiltmaker's Unruly In-Law

When I just want a quiet day of easy reading I reach for an Amish fiction novel. This month I chose two books from the Amish Quiltmaker series by Jennifer Beckstand. In a few days I will review The Amish Quiltmaker's Unconventional  Niece.

In The Amish Quiltmaker's Unruly In-Law quilter Esther Kiem has recently moved to a new Amish settlement in Byler, Colorado. It is a new start for her as well as her husband Levi and baby Winnie. Esther's reckless brother-in-law Ben Kiem is the subject of the story. Mischievous and rebellious, young Ben has been making the wrong kind of name for himself throughout the town of Byler. He and his two buddies, Wally and Simeon, have stolen and destroyed the property of several neighbors. When the story opens Ben attached himself to the back of a buggy owned by the Eicher family and used water skis to ski most of the way on a snowy day. Of course, he gets hurt but he also ruins the back of the buggy.  Mrs. Eicher demands that Ben pay for the repairs but daughter Linda, the same age as Ben, laughed at him for his stupidity. He resents Linda for ridiculing him.

Once Ben and Linda meet, the story takes off. Esther puts her special matchmaking skills to the test. She somehow coaxes Ben into keeping company with the sensible Linda Eicher. Ben can’t see anything that they have in common or that he could ever be good enough for someone like her. Linda has a down-to-earth nature that makes Ben want to live a better Amish life. The suspense in the story is created from the ups and downs in their relationship and there are many.

 

I love the simplicity of Amish fiction but this story read like a mystery novel. There were so many problems that needed to be resolved in Ben and Linda’s relationship. They were complete opposites. Linda followed all the rules of the church while Ben didn't follow any if them even though his father was the bishop. Ben believed if he behaved badly enough times that there would be no expectations of him. There weren't. All of the members of the Byler church steered clear of him. This is Amish fiction so you know there has to be happy ending, and there is.

This was a lovely story to read and I am rating it 4 out of 5 stars.

The Verifiers

The Verifiers was one of the Washington Post's best mystery books for 2022. This debut novel follows amateur sleuth Claudia Lin as she verifies people's online lives, and lies, for a dating detective agency in New York City. 

The publisher's summary:  

Claudia is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls—and that she's just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency. 

 

A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she's landed her ideal job. But when a client vanishes, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate—and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit. Part literary mystery, part family story, The Verifiers is a clever and incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices, and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.

I love Claudia's method of investigation. Claudia is inspired by her favorite amateur sleuths and thinks back to the steps they followed in their own investigations. Likewise, when Claudia becomes stumped she thinks about the villains she has read about and how they committed murder. She particularly loves the 'Inspector Yuan' mystery series. The second book in the series, The Rivals, follows these strategies so I expect that future books will continue in this vein. 

The story opens with Claudia meeting a new client, Sarah Reaves, who has the feeling her latest match may not the wonderful guy that she thinks he is. Claudia's company, Veracity, is a business that performs investigations, both electronic and in-person, for those customers using match-making apps but who are having some doubts about their matches. They are able to access the databases of several dating apps. Claudia determines that Sarah's match, Jude Kalman, has been chatting with three other women. She decides to stake out his home but never finds him coming or going. A week or so later, Sarah's sister Iris visits the Veracity offices to request an investigation into her match. She does not mention that Sarah killed herself. Claudia believes that these are not suicidal deaths but murder and, after being told to close this file, she continues to investigate. 

Author Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore. She holds a BA from Yale University, a JD from the New York University School of Law, and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a lawyer at a global investment company.

This book was a fun read. I am rating it 4 out of 5 stars.

Sleep in Heavenly Pizza

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this Christmas themed cozy mystery while sitting on my couch with some hot chocolate. Christmas is the only time of year that I actually like winter weather and looking outside at the snow with a good book. Sleep in Heavenly Pizza is the fourth book in Mindy Quigley's Deep Dish Mystery series, set in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin pizzeria.

In this installment of the series pizza chef Delilah O’Leary and her staff are serving at a private party where the nation’s premier snow sculpting championship is held. On the eve of the festival though, a too-good-to-be-true Chrismukkah catering gig heralds an unexpected visit from Delilah’s high-intensity older sister. Then one of the town’s snowy sculptures is discovered with a dead body inside. CCTV showed the slightly clad deceased woman being pushed off a balcony and sliding downhill. Delilah’s boyfriend Calvin Capone heads the police investigation. His investigation keeps coming back to two of Delilah’s employees and two of her family members. 

Delilah is a control freak who tries to figure out who could have a motive for murder. She questions her people to get information but doesn't always tell Capone her findings. She wants to protect her friends and family. They have been arguing throughout the story which is unusual for the series. They are normally lovey dovey.  

The whydunnit for the murder was a let down for me. I was expecting something more complex. However, after the big reveal Delilah and her family's sit down Christmas dinner was a heartwarming scene. I wish I could be part of this family. As usual, there are recipes at the end of the story. I will be trying the Christmas tree pizza bread recipe.

All in all, this was a fun read. I am rating the book 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Death at a Scottish Wedding

I have read the other two installments of this series and loved them. Death at a Scottish Wedding was no different. It is a lovely locked room mystery.

The publisher's summary: 

Dr. Emilia McRoy is back on the case in the second book in the Scottish Isle mystery series, perfect for fans of Sheila Connolly and Charlene O’Connor.

Something old, something new, something borrowed and someone’s blue…

Finally feeling like Sea Isle, Scotland is becoming her new home, American doctor Emilia McRoy is delighted when she is invited to a wedding at Morrigan's Castle. Her friends have warned her that it's a three-day party and it's bound to get wild, not to mention the impending snowstorm. Constable Ewan Campbell, owner of the castle, ensures their safety with the blizzard. What he didn’t ensure, is that all of his guests would survive the night alive. When Emilia explores the impressive castle, she finds a dead man in one of the turrets.

The snowstorm hits and the local police can’t reach the castle until it lets up. With no one able to leave, the family insists they carry on with the wedding, which makes Emilia's job as the coroner a bit easier—the suspects are in one place­––and complicated because the killer has Emilia in his sights. The fact no one claims to know the victim isn't helping. Why would someone no one knows be murdered at a castle in the middle of nowhere?

It’s up to Emilia to uncover the mystery who the victim is, so the killer doesn’t get away Scot free.

I love the setting for this series. While I am enjoying reading about Sea Isle, I am also enjoying the castle setting. The rooms where events take place are meticulously described and add to that "locked castle" backdrop. The mystery itself wasn't as fast paced as it should have been. There was alot of pointless dialogue that slowed things down. That said, the twists in the plot kept me guessing at the identity of the whodunnit. I also love the two main characters: Emilia and Ewan. They are complete opposites but work together well. Ewen has an air of mystery about him as his character's identity is slowly being revealed throughout the series. In each installment we have read about him performing some bizarre activity which points to another aspect of his personality. It is fun to read about his exploits. Concerning Emilia, I like that she gave up the rat race for a job in the middle of nowhere. This new job is challenging but primarily because she needs to adjust to a different environment. In each novel the reader sees Emilia continuing to learn about the area that she moved to. and it always has something to do with the mystery.

This novel was not as entertaining as the first in the series. There is a 3rd book in the series which I read and reviewed last year. It too was fantastic. I will definitely continue reading this series but Death at a Scottish Wedding is only 3 out of 5 stars.

2025 Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge

It's time once again to sign up for the Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge. The 2025 challenge will run from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025. You can join anytime and you do not have to post a review of the book. Books can come from any genre.

Additional Rules:

1)  Children’s Books and Novellas are acceptable but they need to be over 50 Pages. 

2)  You do not need to link up each spoonful.

3)  Grab a notebook or make a page or a post or a GoodReads shelf where you will keep track of your spoonfuls.

4)  Crossovers to other challenges are allowed and encouraged!

5)  It’s an alphabet challenge!!! The challenge is to read one book that has a title starting with every letter of the alphabet.

6)  You can drop the A’s and The’s from the book titles as shown below. The first main word needs to be the letter you are counting.

Except For that pesky Q, X, AND Z titles then the word that starts with the challenge letter can be anywhere in the title. This year I have decided to allow book titles starting with EX for the X prompt.

So there are two different ways you can set up your own A-Z Reading Challenge.

A – Make a list from A-Z. Throughout the year, as you go along, add the books you are reading to the list. Towards the end of the year, you can check and see which letters you are missing and find books to fit.

OR

B – Make a list now of 26 books, picking one for each letter of the alphabet, and check them off as you read them.

For example:

A – Abduction of a Slave (Eye of Isis) by Dana Stabenow

B – Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

C – The Crash Kindle by Freida McFadden

7)  As requested – the 2025 Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge has been added to Storygraph as another way to keep track of your reads.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reading_challenges/6cf5d67b-ad85-4139-ba04-801b20bd648c

8)  Books can be read in any order and all formats – print – e-book – and audio – are acceptable for this challenge!

9)  Bloggers can grab the image above and make a post about the challenge to encourage others to join! Non-bloggers you can join too! Just keep track any way you wish. You can even set up a special shelf on Goodreads.com to help you keep track! 

10)  If you post about your books on Social Media please use this hashtag #AlphabetSoupChallenge

11)  Follow Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book as there may be special announcements made about the challenge.

12)  There is also a very active group on Facebook where you can share your books read and converse with others taking part in the challenge. Alphabet Soup Challenge 

13)  Sign up using Google Forms. Sign Up Here.