Raven Black

Ann Cleeves's Raven Black is a fantastic story.  Taking place on the main island of the Shetland Islands, it is the first book in her Shetland series.  It has also been produced as a TV drama for BBC1.  There are 5 other books in this series.

It is a cold January morning and Shetland lies buried beneath a deep layer of snow.  Trudging home, Fran Hunter's eye is drawn to a vivid splash of color on the white ground with ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbor Catherine Ross. As Fran opens her mouth to scream, the ravens continue to peck at the body. The locals on the island stubbornly focus their gaze on one man - loner and simpleton Magnus Tait. However, when Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez insists on opening out the investigation, a veil of suspicion and fear is thrown over the entire community. For the first time in years, Catherine's neighbors nervously lock their doors, while a killer lives among them them.

The ice cold setting of Shetland is prominent to the story. Not only does the harsh weather hide most of the body, it also impedes the law enforcement investigation. Experts from other islands, as well as Scotland, cannot travel to the crime scene immediately. They must wait for weather conditions to safely allow them to fly in to the island. Thus, Catherine's body lies in the snow for more than a day. However, the snow and ice prohibit her deceased body from decaying. The Shetlands are only accessible via boat or plane.  They lie several hundred miles north of the Scotland coast.  

I really liked the Magnus Tait character.  He was a lonely person who seemed to be afraid of people but I thought he was lovable. Because he is a recluse, Tait was taunted by the children in their community.  The Jimmy Perez character had a good introduction as the protagonist.  However, without the kooky citizens in town this book would not be as great. They are essential for providing contrast to the serious minded Jimmy.  

The element of surprise in each twist and turn of the plot make this novel a thriller. The ending was also a surprise when the killer's identity is revealed. It was not anyone that I suspected.  5 out of 5 stars.

The Lost Daughter

History tells us that every member of the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, were killed in 1918.  When I spotted this book at the library I thought that it might be interesting, but not great given that the premise for the plot was not believable.  However, it is so well written that I enjoyed spending an entire afternoon reading it.  In this novel Grand Duchess Maria, the third child of Tsar Nicholas, survives the assassination and is carried away from the scene by an admiring guard.  Below is the plot summary from the publisher:

1918:  Pretty, vivacious Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the fallen Tsar Nicholas II, lives with her family in suffocating isolation, a far cry from their once-glittering royal household.  Her days are a combination of endless boredom and paralyzing fear; her only respite is clandestine flirtations with a few of the guards imprisoning the family - never realizing her innocent actions could mean the difference between life and death.

1973:  When Val Doyle hears her father's end-of-life confession, "I didn't want to kill her," she's stunned.  So, she begins a search for the truth - about his words and her past.  The clues she discovers are baffling - a jewel encrusted box that won't open and a camera with its film intact.  What she finds out pulls Val into one of the world's greatest mysteries - what truly happened to the Grand Duchess Maria?  

The setting of Ipatiev House where the family lived and were murdered, showed alot of insight into the family's final days.  It was fascinating to read the descriptions of the rooms and the layout of the building.  It was a decrepit old building that had a sense of foreboding.  The family must have known they were coming to a bad end.  If they were really waiting for European relatives to save them, they had to be nuts.  Royalty is not sent to a building that is practically falling down to wait for repatriation.  

The daily lives of the residents of Leningrad during the Siege of Lenigrad was shown in all its horror. Most people only had 2 pieces of bread to eat per day at its end.  They were all skeletons at its ending and had endured standing in line here, there and everywhere to find food on a daily basis and that was only after a full work day.  While I have read history books on this issue, it only came to life for me from reading this book.  The shear drudgery of trying to survive was clearly apparent as the characters dealt with the war.  

There are many good reasons to recommend this book.  These are only two of them.  I highly recommend The Lost Daughter.  5 out of 5 stars.

Sarawak Sketchbook

I have been trying to find a copy of this book for a year and finally found one on Ebay.  Although it was shipped to me from Australia, it arrived quicker than mail sent to me from within my own city.  The watercolor sketches of this major city on the island of Borneo were drawn by A. Kasim Abas in 2004. Sarawak is Malaysia's largest state and home to a multitude of ethnic groups with colorful material cultures.  It's unique history as the land of the "white rajahs" means that it architecture is varied in styles. Grand colonial edifices stand next to longhouses and modern buildings.  

The sketchbook is divided into the city's geographic areas and include Kuching, Iban, Miri and the coastal areas.  Abas drew prominent buildings and scenery in pen and ink and then colored them with watercolors.  There are handwritten notes by the artist for each drawing that explains what he has depicted.  I was surprised that almost all of these drawings were done in brown tones.  I expected that Sarawak would be a colorful city like other cities in Malaysia.  Another surprise was that there was only one two-page spread and just a few full page drawings.  Most of the pages inside this book were mini-drawings.  I was expecting the opposite as the other sketchbooks that I have in my collection have large sketches.  

I have 29 sketchbooks by various artists and Sarawak is the last one that I needed to complete my collection.  As I said above, it was difficult to find as the artist is from Malaysia. These watercolorists travel to well known cities and spend time there painting famous buildings and landscaping. The books can serve as travelogues as well as artist books. They are all published on watercolor paper to enhance the artwork.

I was a little disappointed that the drawings were small and brownish but cannot expect the artist to draw something that isn't there.  The architecture of the buildings is quite detailed, which is something I love to see.  Not all of these watercolorists are detail oriented.  Later this year Graham Byfield will publish his Menorca Sketchbook.  I am looking forward to seeing this book, even though his style is loose.

4 out of 5 stars.

Stacking the Shelves #3

 

I am anxiously awaiting the publication of books from 2 of my favorite authors: Cleo Coyle and S. D. Sykes. Coyle's next book, Honey Roasted, won't be published until December so I have a long wait. Sykes, who writes historical mysteries, will publish in August The Good Death.

Honey Roasted is the 19th coffeehouse mystery by husband and wife team Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini. They write under the pen name Cleo Coyle. The series takes place around a fictional coffeehouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. The couple also co-author the Haunted Bookshop series, which was originally published under the pen name Alice Kimberly.  I haven't read the Haunted Bookshop series yet but have read every book in the coffeehouse series. This series is probably my favorite series of all time.  Pre-orders for Honey Roasted will begin in a month.  This story opens with Clare Cosi trying to find a romantic, and affordable, destination for her honeymoon. While she searches for a destination, Clare creates a new coffee that will be unveiled at her wedding:  Honey Cinnamon Latte.  An amazing honey was sourced for the drink by her mother-in-law's friend Bea Hastings.  One night, Bea is found dead at the coffeehouse, and this is the mystery to be solved in the novel.  

The Good Death is the 5th Somershill Manor mystery.  These mysteries take place in England in the 1300s, featuring Oswald de Lacy, Lord of Somershill Manor, as the sleuth.  In this installment of the series, Oswald will make a devastating confession to his dying mother concerning the death of a novice monk at Kintham Abbey.  Vowing to find the killer, Oswald's beloved tutor insists that they stay inside due to the approaching plague.  However, Oswald leaves the manor to investigate and finds that there were several women who disappeared.  They were from impoverished families who had no political influence and nobody seemed to care that they were missing. As Oswald closes in on the killer he finds himself in a situation where he either has to kill or be killed. 

So, there are many books to look forward to this year.  These two are just a highlight of things to come.

In a Dark, Dark Wood

Mystery novelist Leonora  Shaw lives a solitary but comfortable life in London.  One day while checking her email she finds an invitation to a hen weekend for Clare Cavendish, a friend from childhood whom she hasn't spoken to or seen for ten years.  After some urging by a mutual friend, Nora reluctantly agrees to go and finds herself at a mysterious house with a group of near-strangers, deep in the forest far from the city.  Quickly, old rivalries and new relationships bubble to the surface and the weekend turns violent, leaving Nora battered and bruised in a hospital bed.  As she struggles to reconstruct the sequence of events that brought her there, secrets emerge about her past and her present that force her to question everything she knows about herself and everyone she has ever loved.

While I was aware of what a hendo, or hen weekend, is before reading the book, it probably would have been helpful to American readers to have this British term defined in the beginning of the story.  You basically know from the start that inviting your fiancé's ex-girlfriend to your hendo will not have a good outcome.  However, the advertisement of this book as a psychological thriller falls short. It just wasn't suspenseful and during the first half of the book there were a few boring sequences.  I was not engaged until the latter third of the plot.  

The assumed wooded setting, taken from the title, is not the true setting.  Most of the events take place in a house owned by a relative of one of the characters.  While the house is located in the woods, all of the action takes place inside.  The plot is revealed through dialogue, both inner and spoken, from the characters.  Speaking of the characters, only one was interesting to me and she was a foil for the main characters.  All in all, this was an OK book, nothing to write home about.

3 out of 5 stars.

Midnight at Malabar House

This is the first book in a new historical crime fiction series that features Persis Wadia as India's first female detective.  It takes place in Bombay during 1949.

The publisher's summary:  

As India celebrates the arrival of a momentous new decade, Inspector Persis Wadia stands vigil in the basement of Malabar House, hone to the city's most unwanted unit of police officers.  Six months after joining the force shw remains India's first female police detective, mistrusted, sidelined and now consigned to the midnight shift.  And so, when the phone rings to report the murder of prominent English diplomat Sir James Herriott, the country's most sensational case falls into her lap.

As 1950 dawns and India prepares to become the world's largest republic, Persis, accompanied by Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, finds herself investigating a case that is becoming more political by the second. Navigating a country and society in turmoil, Persis, smart, stubborn and untested in the crucible of male hostility that surrounds her, must find a way to solve the murder  - whatever the cost. 

The plot could have been interesting but the book seems to have been written as historical fiction instead of the historical crime mystery as it has been advertised.  There were more details concerning what people wore, where they lived and the history of Partition, than clues in the mystery of who committed the crime.  The pace was excruciatingly slow and I found myself skipping pages without missing anything important. Only the final thirty pages were written crisp as Persis began her big reveal of the killer.

Sadly dull. 2 out of 5 stars.

Women Discoverers

 

This small comic book contains the biographies of 30 female scientists. A few of these biographies are merely written in paragraphs while five are done in 20+ page comic strip panels.  The ladies that are featured in the book are:

• Marie Curie (Poland, France) Physics/Chemistry
• Francoise Barre Sinoussee (France) Biology
• Donna Theo Strickland (Canada) Physics
• Dorothy Vaughn (USA) Mathematics/Computing
• Ada Lovelace (Britain) Mathematics/Computing
• Emilei du Chatelet (France) Mathematics
• Emmy Noether (Germany) Mathematics
• Grace Adele-Williams (Niger) Mathematics
• Hedy Lamaar (Hungary/USA) Engineering
• Katherine Johnson (USA) Mathematics
• Marthe Gaetier (France) Pediatrics
• Maryam Mirzakhani (Iran/USA) Mathematics
• Rosalind Franklin (UK) Physics/Biology
• Sophie Germain (France) Mathematics/Physics
• Irene Joliot-Currie (France) Physics/Chemistry
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell (UK) Astrophysics
• Mae Jemison (USA) Medicine/Space Exploration
• Stephanie Kwolek (USA) Chemistry
• Grace Murray Hopper (USA) Computing
• Xie Ye (China) Chemistry

I found the book informative.  Many of these ladies I had not heard of before. Rosalind Franklin stood out in my mind as there is a medical school in my city that bears her name.  I thought Hedy Lamar was an actress.  While she did begin her career in acting she moved into science during WWII. Also, I was not aware that Marie Curie was born in Poland.  She moved to France to study at the Sorbonne and stayed there both as a teacher and a researcher.  

To say that the book will be inspiring for young girls is a given.  Most of these women grew up in societies that did not allow women to work, let alone get an education and a job.  Their trials when they were young can only give hope to today's young girls, who also have personal or family objections to overcome.

A great read!  5 out of 5 stars.

Royal City

I just finished Royal City Volumes 1 through 3.  The comic was written by Jeff Lemire and published in 2017 and 2018.  The comic is about a troubled family, the Pike family, and the town they live in.  The City of Royal City, a once thriving factory town, is slowly disappearing as residents flee for other neighborhoods where they can find jobs.  The comic is a continuation of Lemire's Essex County comic.  

Patrick Pike, a fading literary star, reluctantly returns to his home town after his father suffers a stroke.  He becomes drawn into the dramas of his two adult siblings, his mother, and his browbeaten father, all of whom are still haunted by the death of the youngest brother Tommy.  This family saga covers a span of thirty years.  

I hated for the story to end.  I loved all of the characters and felt like a was a member of the Pike family too.  It would be awesome of the author picked up this story and continued it.  Although this is a comic, the character development and intensity of each family member's reaction to the death of Tommy at age 14 could easily have been written as a fiction novel.  The looseness of the comic format has not hindered Lemire.  The story has a definite beginning, middle and end.  I also liked that the artwork was done in color.  Black and white comics just don't grab my attention.

5 out of 5 stars.

Can't Wait Wednesday #4

I am so glad that March has arrived.  I have been anxiously awaiting fashion designer Jenny Packham's book "How to Make a Dress - Adventures in the Art of Style."  It will be published tomorrow, March 4, 2021.  Packham is a British designer known for her couture bridal dresses.  She has dressed celebrities and royalty since 1988 and works from her London home.  I understand that this book will delve into her search for creative inspiration and show readers her studio.  Instead of being a sewing book, How to Make a Dress is about Packham's design process, how she sketches and selects fabrics.

Stacking the Shelves 2

Earlier in the week I ordered off of Ebay a copy of the Sarawak Sketchbook by watercolor artist A. Kasim Abas.  I have 29 sketchbooks by various artists and Sarawak is the last one that I needed to complete my collection.  It has been difficult to find as the artist is from Malaysia. These watercolorists travel to well known cities and spend time there painting famous buildings and landscaping. The books can serve as travelogues as well as artist books. They are all published on watercolor paper to enhance the artwork.

Sarawak is located on the island of Borneo, which is part of Malaysia.  It is Malaysia's largest state and home to a multitude of ethnic groups with colorful material cultures.  It's unique history as the land of the "white rajahs" means that it architecture is varied in styles. Grand colonial edifices stand next to longhouses and modern buildings.  The artist has handwritten notes for each drawing/painting that explain what he has depicted.  I assume that there will be introductory chapters on Sarawak's history as this is information that has always been in these types of books.

Delays in postal service are awful lately.  The seller has said that I may not receive the book until April 1.  Six weeks is a long time to wait but I just have to have this book.  I will be patient. 

Can't Wait Wednesday #3

 

Can't Wait Wednesday is a meme hosted by Tressa at the Wishful Endings blog. The meme features books you wish to read, preferably ones that haven't been published yet.

Marie Moinard will be publishing a new graphic novel on March 1, 2021.  Women Discoverers: Top Women of Science features 20 female scientists who enabled the world to advance in all areas of science. Christelle Pecout illustrated the comic.

A few of the women featured include astronaut Mae Jemison and chemist Marie Curie. The book sounds similar to Penelope Bagieu's Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World.  I loved this mini-biography of 30 famous and not so famous women. Both books will be inspiring for young girls and older women alike who are thinking about possible careers and career changes. I have pre-ordered a copy of the book. Let's hope the postal service can deliver it without too much delay. Service is awful lately.

The Binding

The Binding is set in a fantasy world where binders have the power to erase bad memories from clients who want to forget.  It took me awhile before I figured this out as our protagonist began his apprenticeship working on actual book binding covers. For some, being able to forget a traumatic event is a godsend. For our protagonist Emmett Farmer, his binding caused tremendous confusion and illness.  The story is written in three parts. The first part shows Emmet's current situation. The second delves into the past and shows how he ended up being sent away by his family.  The third part takes the story forward into his future and the resolution of the plot.

The book begins with teenager Emmett Farmer working in the fields of his family's farm.  A letter arrives that summons him to an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. This vocation arouses fear and superstition in his small community.  However, his parents feel that he cannot afford to refuse the offer.  He has been ill in the past year and the illness has caused the family to be embarrassed by his symptoms.  His father has difficulty understanding how this happened to Emmett because he had kept a pure home.  

Emmett has always been attracted to books, even though they are strictly forbidden.  His bookbinding master, Seredith, tells him that bookbinding is a sacred calling and that he was born to be a binder.  Under this old woman's watchful eye, Emmett learns how to hand-craft elegant leatherbound volumes. Each volume will capture a memory.  If you want to forget something, a binder can help you erase it.  The binders then place the memory inside a book, which the binders always store in a vault owned by the binder.  After Emmett has settled in his new occupation he discovers that one of the books in the vault has his name on it.  He has no idea that he was ever bound or what memory could have been erased from his mind.

This book was amazing.  It has parts of magic and gay coming-of-age that I normally don't like reading about but I could not stop reading this book.  The imaginary past of an alternate England in the 1700s was somewhat difficult for me to grasp.  Fantasy is not a genre that I read and it took some getting used to.  The idea that you can have someone erase a traumatic memory is appealing to me.  If binders were real, I might visit one.  To be technical, The Binding seemed sort of the "don't ask, don't tell" scenario currently playing out in the U. S.  When parents have their kid's memories erased, they leave their children with a sense that they have done something wrong but cannot be absolved of their wrong-doing. This cannot be comfortable for those who have been bound.

4 out of 5 stars.

In the Blood

In the Blood is a genealogical mystery featuring Jefferson Tayte as the geneologist.  The geneological mystery sub-genre is a new favorite for me. This is book one of seven novels to date and it is fantastic.  

Jefferson "JT" Tayte has been working on a project for Walter Sloane. Sloane believes that he is related to a loyalist family that fled to England at the end of the American Revolutionary War.  The family seems to have disappeared after leaving the American shore and Tayte has been tasked with finding a link between Sloane and the Fairborne family. With few clues to the family history left to do via a phone, Sloane orders him to catch a plane ASAP for England and finish the research within a week.  Tayte is afraid of flying but he cannot give up another assignment because of his fears. It will affect his ability to get new jobs. The research leads him to the short life of a woman in Cornwall, a writing box and a possible dark secret about the Fairborne family.

I loved this book!  The mystery is not just about the resolution of Sloane's genealogy but also about why several minor characters were killed. JT believes that everything is connected to his research and he needs to find proof. Each new lead turns into a plot twist that moves the plot along quickly.

The JT character is sympathetic given all of his phobias and difficulties communicating with British record office staff. He is a goofy introvert.  JT's nemesis, Peter Schofield, is hired by Sloane to assist him after JT's first few days in England.  Sloane wants fast results and believes that JT needs assistance. However, JT does not trust Schofield because he senses that Schofield wants to take all of his clients away. On this particular assignment Schofield is trustworthy but  JT does not realize this until Schofield is killed. This is a shame because Schofield could have provided some conflict in future novels. The author has not given the reader any other prominent characters other than JT.  The secondary characters are so far in the background that I would categorize them as third party characters, if there is such a thing.

I can't wait to read the remaining books in the series.  To date, there are six more novels in the series. 5 out of 5 stars.