Salt Houses

Salt Houses is Hala Alyan's debut novel and it is terrific. The story follows several generations of the Yacoub family which originated in Jaffa, Israel and were displaced to Nablus, Palestine after Israel was created in 1948.  With the 1967 war they moved to Kuwait City and with each successive war they were displaced to Beirut, Amman, Paris and Boston.

The story opens in 1963 in Nablus, Palestine with the family matriarch Salma preparing coffee leaves to read for her daughter Alia who is about to marry Atef Yacoub. Salma sees in the dregs a drooping roof and houses that will be lost for her daughter and her future grandchildren but doesn't tell her daughter nor the women assembled what she sees.  Instead she says that she sees a baby coming in the first year.

Alia is a modern Arabic woman.  She does not wear a headdress like her sister Widad and her prayer life is fleeting when she is young.  She, Atef and her brother Mustafa are the best of friends and meet daily to smoke, drink and discuss the politics of the day.  Alia remembers a little about her family's life in the port of Jaffa on the Mediterranean Sea before the Israeli's forced them to leave and remembers her father never recovering emotionally from the loss. The family was middle class and did not end up in a refugee camp. They never would.  Their wealth would take care of them.

In 1965 Mustafa's visits to the local mosque change from being social to religious and political as an imam inspired him. However, when the war drums began pounding in 1967 Mustafa wanted to leave Palestine.  Atef called him a coward and off to war they went. In a few days they were in prison.  Atef never told his wife that it was his doing that kept them in Palestine and that Atef gave up Mustafa's name to the Israelis, who promptly killed him. 

After prison Atef moved himself and Alia permanently to Kuwait City to start a new life and a family of their own.  Each chapter focuses on a different family member at a different time in history to give the reader a seven decade history of this family.

Salt Houses is a different type of story about the displacement caused by war.  This family was wealthy and never ended up in a refugee camp. However, every few years they had to uproot themselves, find a house in a new city and somehow make it feel like home.

They placed importance on material possessions because there was nothing else permanent about their lives. Salma read Alia's coffee dregs in her first purchase as a wife in Nablus, a coffee set.  Salma cherished this set because the design pattern reminded her of the set her own mother gave her when she married, the set she had to leave behind in Jaffa.  This is typical behavior for the Palestinian diaspora; a girl receiving a piece of jewelry owned by an ancestor, etc...

I loved this family saga and while the story takes place in the past 70 years it is historical in that it shows the reader what life was/is like for the Palestinians.

I've Got My Eyes on You

I've Got My Eyes on You is Mary Higgins Clark's 45th novel.  She has also co-authored 9 additional novels with 2 other people. This is a career total of 54 novels, quite the accomplishment.

The story opens with high school senior Kerry Dowling throwing a pool party for her high school graduating friends one night when she is home alone.  Kerry is dating Alan Crowley but was flirting all night with another boy Chris Kobel whom she will be going to Boston College with. She asks her guests to leave at 11 pm so she can clean up before her parents return the next morning.

Her next door neighbor, Jamie Chapman, watches the party from his bedroom window and comes over after he sees a man approach her with a golf club and then sees her entering the swimming pool. Kerry always invited Jamie to swim with her and Jamie does not understand why he was not invited to the party.

When Kerry parents return the next morning with her sister Aline they find her body floating in the pool.  The police are called and begin questioning every teen in attendance at the party in order to determine who her killer is.

The Queen of Suspense wrote another suspenseful novel here.  Each chapter ending pushed you to read the next chapter and the next and so on.  The author's choice of words made this easy reading.  I finished the book in one sitting.

There was some romance involved in the story that I felt was out of place.  Kerry's sister Aline began seeing the police investigator and a fellow teacher her first week back in town.  I cannot imagine any woman being interested in going out to eat with men she does not know right after a family member is killed.  That seemed odd to me. I would expect that a grieving sister would go straight home to her family after a day of work.

Aline was the amateur sleuth of the story, not the police investigator. That surprised me also. I  was expecting this book to be a detective story but the police detective used Aline to locate new information from the students who were in attendance at Kerry's party.  Aline began a new job as a guidance counselor at Kerry's high school the week after she was murdered and used the job to obtain information for the police.  I also thought that was odd, not something a normal person would risk doing.

Even with these anomalies, I've Got My Eyes on You was a great read which was just what I would expect from an author like Mary Higgins Clark.  She did not disappoint.

5 out of 5 stars!

Beyond the Ice Limit

Beyond the Ice Limit is Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 4th Gideon Crew novel and it is a sequel their 2000 book The Ice Limit. It is a stand alone novel so readers do not have to read the first book to understand the plot.

Five years before the events taking place in the book engineer Eli Glinn led a team to southern Chile to retrieve a meteorite.  A combination of a storm, an attack from a rogue ship captain and the strange behavior of the meteorite itself caused the ship to sink, killing most of the people on board.  A working hypothesis was made that the meteorite was a spore for an alien life form.

In the present year, Eli Glinn recruits Gideon Crew to build and detonate a nuclear weapon under the sea in order to kill the alien life form that he is worried might be growing where the meteorite was dropped into the sea. A crew is assembled and board a ship bound for Chile.  Undersea recovery efforts were able to obtain the sunken ship's black boxes and a video of the ship's last moments revealed that as the meteor hit the salty sea water it transformed into a different being.  Further tests showed that while the alien life form was under the sea it also extended 2 miles under the sea bed.  This gave it the potential to threaten the life of the entire planet earth if it wasn't destroyed.

Portions of the story seemed like science fiction with the alien controlling worms that infected the brains of most of the workers on the ship. With the advance of the worms there was a rush to detonate the bomb even though it was not large enough to reach beneath the seabed.

However, this was definitely a thriller.  I was hooked from the first page and could not stop reading until I had finished the book in one sitting.  Each chapter ended with enough suspense to keep me reading.  The scientific rhetoric was minimal so that a layperson such as myself could easily read through the book.

I now feel the need to read The Ice Limit even though I already know how it will end. I am curious about any details of the earlier story that I may have missed.

Highly recommended.

Queen Anne's Lace

Queen Anne's Lace is Susan Wittig Albert's 26th China Bayles Mystery and it is a good one.  Time has not lessened the author's ability to create great mysteries for this series year after year. Queen Anne's Lace is obviously the herb featured in the novel as it is the title of the book.  It was used by many women for family planning in times long past, specifically as an herbal contraceptive and abortifacient.  This usage is detailed in a secondary plot that occurred in the 1800s.

The story opens in Pecan Springs, Texas in 1885 with the death of Annie Duncan's husband Douglas in a train accident.  Annie was so distraught that she miscarried their first child, conceived with the help of an herbal tea, later that same day.  They lived at 340 Crockett Street next to another couple, Adam and Delia Hunt.  The two men had been best friends since childhood and Adam began helping Annie with some chores after her husband's death.

In the present day, China Bayles and business associate Ruby find a chest filled with old photos and handmade lace while cleaning out a storeroom in their Crockett Street shop Thyme and Seasons. After Ruby leaves, China is left alone but hears a woman humming.  When Ruby returns she offers an explanation that the air conditioning turned on and sounded like humming. They consult a friend who is an expert on old laces to determine if there is a story behind what they found in the chest. While running the shop China mysteriously finds that her signs are being changed by someone but no one admits to changing them.

The chapters alternate between the 1800s plot and the present day plot where China's adopted daughter has entered two chickens in the county fair. While the story is basically about the 1800s the only real crime in the book occurs at the end of the story at the fair.  This is most unusual for a cozy mystery series based on solving crimes.  However, the 1800s story is so compelling who cares whether there is a crime, unless you want to consider the moral crimes committed here?

I LOVED this book.  The new characters comprising the 1800s plot were interesting, complex and romantic. If you love digging into your genealogical history, you will enjoy China and her friends trying to figure out who the people are in the photographs as well as what the background is on the laces that they found.  As a bobbin lace maker, I appreciated the information on the different types of laces that China's expert gave.  How they fit into the story is for you to find out when you read Queen Anne's Lace. 

The White Mirror

The White Mirror is Elsa Hart's second historical mystery featuring Li Du as an amateur sleuth. Li is a former librarian for the Chinese emporer and he is in exile.  The series takes place in 18th century China.

In this installment of the series Li Du has joined a caravan heading north and finds the dead body of an elderly monk on a path leading to a manor where his group is headed for the night. The owner of the manor, Dosa, seems to think that the monk, Dhamo, committed suicide over an obsession with the demonic world as an odd symbol was painted on his chest and an image of a mirror was painted on his face.  Li Du believes that the monk was murdered and that someone painted the symbol and mirror on the monk's wounds after he died from a stab wound in the lower abdomen.

Being stuck at the manor house due to a snow storm, Li Du uses his scholarly skills to investigate the circumstances surrounding Dhamo's death.  Some of the suspicious characters Li is stranded with include a female from Lhasa, a Roman Catholic priest and his Chinese translator, the 4th Chhoshe Lasa, Li's old colleague Hamza and a merchant familiar with the mountainous area surrounding them all.

The pace of the first half of this novel was slow.  Since there was more historical detail than investigation of a crime, I was thinking about calling this book historical fiction, not a historical mystery which it is advertised as being.  However, the pace picked up at the halfway mark when the investigation became primary to the plot.  It did take a long time to get going since the murder happened in the first chapter.

The author's knowledge of the geographic area is apparent as well as her knowledge of the era.  She provides the reader with meticulous details on everything from how to cross the Tibetan mountains both in winter and spring to the regional politics of Tibet and from the spiritual beliefs of the mountain people to Hamza's crazy tales on deducing facts.

The White Mirror was a fun read and I rate it 3 out of 5 stars.

Radio Girls

Radio Girls is Sarah-Jane Stratford's first historical novel. It covers the period of time between 1926 and 1932 when the BBC radio station was just beginning.

American Maisie Musgrave lands herself a job in London as a secretary at the BBC.  She is intimidated by her bosses and smart co-workers.  She has difficulty adjusting to the hectic pace of the job but is captivated by this new technology called radio and is thrilled to have this job.  Her insecurities are apparent to her primary supervisor Hilda Matheson who manages the groundbreaking Talks broadcasts where famous people are interviewed for 15 minutes. Everyone expects that Maisie will end up working solely for Hilda as she is doing well assisting with the Talks.

Hilda Matheson was a real person who worked for MI5 during WW1 and received the OBE later in life.  This book seems to be about her contributions to the broadcasting industry and the book has merit for presenting this history.

However, I can't say whether Maisie did or did not end up working for Hilda Matheson because I stopped reading. I have a rule that if a book does not capture my attention within the first 50 pages, I put it down. I gave Radio Girls a 70 page chance but could not get interested in the book.

The writing style was directed toward a British audience.  The dialogue between the characters reflected the slang terminology of the era and some of the words I did not understand. In addition, I did not understand what was meant by a number of sentences.  The way I defined words in some of the sentences could not be what the author intended as the result was nonsensical.

I was disappointed with Radio Girls.  I had high expectations for it based on the back cover blurb as well as other reviews that I read about the book. 

City of Masks

City of Masks is S. D. Sykes' 3rd Somershill Manor Mystery novel.  This novel does not take place in England as the first two books in the series did but rather takes place in Venice in 1358.

The story opens with a Prologue where the main character, Oswald de Lacy, finds the dead body of the grandson of his Venetian host, John Bearpark, an English ex-pat in Venice.  In the next 40 pages not much happens as de Lacy and his mother socialize with their host John Bearpark and his other guests.  Here de Lacy is coerced into nights of drinking and gambling with grandson Enrico and his friends, spending time with boring religious pilgrims Bernard and Margery Jagger, secretly staring at Bearpark's non-speaking young wife Filomena and dealing with the staff at Casa Bearpark. It is after these 40 pages that the body of grandson, Enrico, is found and the story continues with de Lacy being asked to investigate Enrico's death.

The excitement in the book begins with de Lacy's investigation but the author interspersed a few chapters about de Lacy's past from the earlier books in the series. These chapters have no bearing on the plot and I don't know why they were added.  De Lacy gets his first clue from his host who tells him that Enrico sexually preferred men over women. This confused de Lacy as Enrico had tried to get him to go to brothels with him. However, he trusts his gut and begins the investigation with the home's security guard who was not on duty the night of the murder and has since disappeared.

The author displayed her knowledge of medieval Venice in this novel. She portrayed the history of Venice at a time when it was at war with Hungary and how it affected commerce as well as everyday life for Venetians. The political powerhouses of the day were also depicted in realistic terms with their ability to put to death homosexuals upon only hearing an accusation, deciding which families could use the best ships for transport of goods as well as people, and deciding what crimes were worthy of investigation.

I feel that the setting should have stayed in England. This installment of the series was not as exciting as the earlier two, Plague Land and The Butcher Bird.  De Lacy's sleuthing skills were hampered by being in a foreign country.  He not only was unfamiliar with the physical layout of Venice but he did not understand the culture of the city and its people.  Part of what made his sleuthing skills superior in his homeland was his understanding of how his own people's minds worked.  Also, it is difficult to view this as a Somershill Manor mystery when the events taking place are not at Somershill Manor.

I would rate this book 3 stars of of 5.

Story of a Sociopath

Julia Navarro wrote one gripping story in her 2016 psychological thriller Story of a Sociopath.  The book is a character study of sociopath Thomas Spencer, a fictional character. The author writes about events in Thomas' life that took him down a wrong path, beginning when he was a boy, and then in italics she writes a section about what he would have done if he had not been a sociopath.  All of this is written from Thomas' viewpoint, first person.  This is a chunky book with 864 pages.

In the prologue Thomas Spencer muses over his life as he mulls his impending death.  He admits "I am scum...I was born without a conscience, or at least I never knew where to find one, but perhaps one will knock on my door tonight."

Thomas was the black sheep of his family, a wealthy family in the upper echelons of New York society.  He disliked every member of his family and each of them responded by showering love on him because they could not understand why he was different.  He had all the advantages that wealth can give a person including education and the need to not even work if he chose not to.

However, as the oldest son in the family he was expected to follow in his father and grandfather's footsteps and become a lawyer in their law firm. He could not do that for 2 reasons.  One, he despised them and wanted to hurt them and two, he floundered in school.

Thomas ended up at an unheard of advertising school run by a former ad executive who fell from grace.  This educational credential was not expected to help any graduate in the job market but Thomas made it work by moving to London.  There he gave up life of privilege and over a lifetime forced his way to the top working in media for politicians.

It has been a long time since I have been truly interested in reading a novel.  This book gripped me from the first page and kept me reading.  The author, Julia Navarro, is a favorite of mine but I have struggled getting through the books of my old favorite authors.  Perhaps I am simply not interested in the political, spy and treasure hunt mystery subgenres that I have traditionally read and Ms. Navarro wrote a few great mysteries that I enjoyed.  Story of a Sociopath is a different type of novel for both her and me and I loved it.

Nasty characters are fun to read about and Thomas Spencer delivers here.  There are many dark plot twists as you would expect with a character study on a sociopath as well as with someone involved in political campaign management. Thomas accidentally stumbled into this career but he got lucky because it perfectly fit his personality.

This was a great read.

My Kind of Mystery 2018 Reading Challenge

I am rejoining this reading challenge which began at the beginning of this month and will end on January 31, 2019. There are no requirements concerning the number of books you need to read or concerning the sub-genres of the mystery genre.  I like not having rules in a challenge and I think I will read more mysteries without having them.

March - Book 3

The final book in the March series won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016.  As with Books 1 and 2 it was written by GA Congressman John Lewis and it is about the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Book 3 covers the period of time from September, 1963 when 4 girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL to August, 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

The danger that has surrounded the marchers since the beginning of the movement gets pretty violent in book 3, violent enough to get the nation's attention.

The book opens with African American citizens being asked to count the correct number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles in a bar of soap in order to be eligible to register to vote.  Many voter registrars required literacy tests be taken by only African American applicants.  If they were able to pass these tests and actually get registered to vote their names were printed in the newspaper which made them targets for violence and to be fired by their employers.

There was some nasty politics between the movement and President Johnson who wanted total control over the movement so that he could have his moment being nominated by his party for president as well as trying to get votes in Congress for a voting rights act.  In the end, the Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.

The March books are incredibly powerful graphic novels.  They present the civil rights movement with extraordinary storytelling. While the movement began the year I was born, I remember watching many of these events unfold on tv when I was a child.  The book is just as gripping as watching the events as they happened.  Congressman Lewis did a great job at capturing the spirit of the times, a story he told from his memory.

More than highly recommended!

The Vineyard Victims

The Vineyard Victims is Ellen Crosby's 8th Wine Country Mystery and it is a wonderful addition to the series.  The story opens with the main character, Lucie Montgomery, swerving her car to avoid crashing into a car driven by former presidential nominee and billionaire Jamison (Jamie) Vaughn.  Vaughn crashes his car into the stone pillar that is the entrance to Lucie's vineyard.  Lucie does not hear him trying to stop his car and after he refuses her help to get out of his car she believes that he was suicidal. The car caught fire and Lucie heard his screams as the fire consumed his body.  Vaughn, however, told Lucie before he died that he wanted her to "tell Rick to forgive me."

Lucie soon discovers that there might be a connection to Vaughn's desire to die and a 30 year old murder that occurred when he was at college with his wife, campaign manager and a deceased friend.    A handyman, Taurique Youngblood, was convicted of the murder but a civil rights group, the St. Leonard Project, has taken on his case as they believe that he is innocent of this crime.

The author did a good job of weaving in characters and facts from earlier books in the series and anyone would be able to follow the plot without reading the earlier 7 books.  Facts about wine abound in the book which made the book fun to read.  The Vaughn's own a nearby vineyard and were planning to host a fundraiser to eliminate Vaughn's campaign debt by featuring a wine from the 1890s.  They had several bottles of the wine and only a select few people at the fundraiser, $20,000 per ticket, were going to have the pleasure of drinking the wine.  Lucie's winemaker, Quinn Santoro, believed that the Vaughn's tampered with this wine as it should have tasted like vinegar due to its age but that is a secondary story.  Most of the wine lore surrounded this wine, called the Norton wine, instead of Lucie's wines which is a little unusual.  However, it did not affect the enjoyability of this book.

Cozy lovers should take note of this series if they haven't already!

March - Book 2

The 2nd book in Congressman John Lewis's trilogy on the civil rights movement focuses on the period of time from November, 1960 to August 28, 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have a Dream" at the March on Washington, DC.  Rep. Lewis also spoke at that event.  As with Book 1, the story alternated between the 1960s and the Obama inauguration.

Book 2 did not seem to me to be as dramatic as Book 1.  However, some pretty dramatic events took place here.  The Freedom Rides, the killing of 3 Freedom Riders by law enforcement officers/KKK and the beginning of the push for a Voting Rights Act are depicted.  For the uninitiated the freedom rides were organized to protest a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Boynton vs. Virginia where segregation on buses was upheld by the Court.

I am looking forward to reading Book 3 which won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016.

Burma Chronicles

Somehow I missed reading one of Guy Delisle's travelogues, his 2008 Burma Chronicles. DeLisle has traveled throughout Asia with his wife who works for Doctors Without Borders.  He has written 4 travelogues from his travels with her.

In Burma Chronicles DeLisle manages to describe the daily struggles of life in a dictatorship without being political with his use of minimalist black and white drawings and his affiliative type of humor.  Each chapter addresses a different experience DeLisle had.  Some of these experiences include discovering a Time magazine that had been censored by articles being cut out of pages, finding the Rangoon neighborhood where the Army officers live and the supply of electricity and water is plentiful, and being prevented by armed soldiers from walking past Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's home.

This is a serious book written in a humorous fashion but the author gets his point across.  If you haven't read any of the travelogues, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzen, and Burma Chronicles, I encourage you to read them.  For most of these places, society has not changed since the books were published so they should still be timely.