The Christmas Boutique

The Christmas Boutique is an Elm Creek Quilts novel. This 21 book cozy series returns after a seven year hiatus and the inside cover blurb summarizes the book as follows:

"Just weeks before Christmas, severe wintry weather damages the church hall hosting the Christmas Boutique-an annual sale of handcrafted gifts and baked goods that support the county food pantry. Determined to save the fundraiser Sylvia Bergstrom Compson offers to hold the event at Elm Creek Manor, her ancestral family estate and summertime home to Elm Creek Quilt Camp.

In the spirit of the season Sylvia and the Elm Creek Quilters begin setting up market booths in the ballroom and decking the halls with beautiful handmade holiday quilts. Each of the quilters chooses a favorite work to display, a special creation evoking memories of holidays past and dreams of Christmases yet to come. But while the Elm Creek Quilters work tirelessly to make sure the Christmas Boutique happens, it may take a holiday miracle or two to make it the smashing success they want it to be."

More than half of the writing was backstory, which means of course that there wasn't much to this plot.  The prior 3 or 4 books in the series were also predominantly backstory so I have to wonder if the author  has run out of new ideas for this series. In the interim since the last book was published the author wrote several historical fiction novels. They were OK. She excels, however, in writing cozies so I think she should consider writing another cozy series.

The characters in the series are fascinating but I think the most interesting ones were from the beginning of the series who have now passed away. The series is supposed to be about the Bergstrom family but only one member is still alive and she is not the main character.  In fact, there really isn't a main character. There is a group of women who make up the core of characters in the series.

Quilting was not as prominent in this installment of the series. I am a quilter and would have loved to have read more of the usual so-and-so selected such-and-such pattern to sew and the sentimental reasons why the selection was made.

While I have written some negative comments that does not mean that I didn't enjoy the book. I did. It was nice to get reacquainted with characters who seem like friends to me. Having a significant amount of background is not bad given that there has been 7 years since the last book in the series was published. I had forgotten much of each character's past and needed to be reminded.

4 out of 5 stars.

The President is Missing

Former President Bill Clinton co-authored this political mystery with James Patterson. It is eerily similar to Clinton's presidency.

The synopsis from the publisher:

"As an unprecedented cyberterrorist attack cripples the United States, the president must face an unthinkable truth:

There is a traitor in the White House.
His life is in danger.

And the only way to stay ahead of the shadowy forces tearing at the heart of America is to go off grid, leaving behind his presidential protection. The president must go missing and he may never resurface... Set over the course of three days that shake a nation to its core, The President is Missing
sheds a stunning light on the inner workings and vulnerabilities of the American government."

I expected alot from this book. I heard many friends say they couldn't wait to read it. If I was using my brain I would have realized that no one said anything else about the book.  At the midway point in reading this novel I read a few reviews of it because I was disappointed with it. Most of the reviews were negative. It finally clicked in my brain that the problem was the plot.

In The President is Missing there is something that never happens...the president never goes missing. Why this title was chosen is a conundrum.  The main character, the president, was basically Bill Clinton. This president faced an impeachment, was the former governor of a small southern state, met his wife in the law library at Yale law school, hired his best friend whom he met in kindergarten to work for him in the White House and failed to capture a foreign terrorist. As these details about the character unfolded, I was disappointed. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it just wasn't creative to use the author's background for a character.

The plot wasn't believable. First of all, I kept waiting for the president to disappear. Second, there were several groups of commandos shooting characters and I couldn't tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. The story was confusing. Third, there is no way in hell the Secret Service would allow a president to go off grid and meet someone who is probably a terrorist without protection. In the book the president orders the Secret Service to not follow him and also orders his physician to not treat him for an illness which is about to kill him because the drugs he needs will cloud his judgment.

The story was written with suspense to keep you reading. While I was bored and disappointed at the halfway point, I kept thinking that there was more to this story than I could see. Also, with the synopsis telling me that there is a traitor in the White House, I expected to read about this traitor early in the book. The reader doesn't read about it until the conclusion of the story. Why the build up in the media about a traitor when there's no build up in the story? Finally, it would have been nice for the authors to have written a Note to the Reader describing their writing collaboration.  Who contributed what? I wonder how much writing Clinton contributed to the novel, if any. 

Book of the Month: September

My best book for the month of September is Saving Meghan. This medical thriller was so captivating that it kept me up all night until I finished reading it.  Meghan Gerard has an undiagnosed illness and her mother loves, really loves, taking her to doctors and screaming at them if they don't order tests or additional physician consultations. Meghan's father Carl thinks his wife is nuts. His wife's mother had munchausen's and he thinks she has it too.  So does White Hospital where Meghan is a frequent patient. When the hospital tries to do an intervention, the story intensifies.

Saving Meghan

Daniel Palmer has written another amazing medical mystery with Saving Meghan. With this novel he examines the illness called munchausen's by proxy.

The Gerard family is falling apart due to daughter Meghan's undiagnosed illness and her mother Becky's constant demand for her to see new doctors and have more tests. Husband Carl doesn't seem to believe that his daughter is really sick.  Meghan, a former high school athlete, is now homebound with nausea, cramping, fevers, fatigue and dizziness. However, every medical test keeps coming back normal until the family meets Dr. Zach Fisher who thinks she has a mitochondrial disease. She begins treatment but White Hospital is considering an intervention. They think Becky is intentionally making Meghan sick.

This novel was one heck of a page turner! I had to stay up until 2 am to finish it this morning. The plot moved very quickly and each chapter ended with a bang so I had to continue reading. I was familiar with Munchausen's so I knew what to expect from the mother's character. However, the daughter's character surprised me. By age 15 she had already learned what made her mother happy so Meghan was somewhat complicit in acting out her illness. I had no idea that was normal in these situations.

The plot had incredible twists and plenty of suspense but the final resolution of the story caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting it and I don't think it fit the story well. Still, it was a fun read and I am looking forward to Palmer's next novel. 

A Far Horizon

This is the second book in the Broken Kingdom Series about the English Civil War of the 1640s where Charles 1 is on the throne with his Catholic wife Henrietta. A Far Horizon primarily is about three women trying to survive on their own during the war.  Caroline Pendleton leaves her home for London after her husband is killed in battle. Lucy Hay is a widow who takes care of the two youngest royal children while their mother is in exile in France. Queen Henrietta is always on the run from her husband's enemies.

The book had a slow start. I had a difficult time getting interested in it as I couldn't find a storyline. The characters were reacting to news about the war and that's about it. Most of the historical characters bored me and there were many of them to keep track of. However, at the midpoint the story picked up. This is where the author used created characters to enhance her story. These characters were appealing and they carried the book.

I can't figure out why Vantrease wrote this kind of book. It's drastically different from her historical mysteries which I think were fantastic. I hope she returns to writing the mysteries because that is where she shines.

The Concubine's Tattoo

The Concubine's Tattoo is the fourth Sano Ichiro mystery by Laura Joh Rowland. It takes place in Tokyo in 1690 under the reign of Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi.

In this installment of the series Sano gets married to the feisty Reiko who wants to  help him with his criminal investigations. Before the wedding celebrations can begin, the body of the shogun's favorite concubine, Harume, is found dead. The shogun decides that he needs Sano to begin investigating this death ASAP. The honeymoon is abruptly cancelled as Sano and his assistant Hirata begin their work to determine how the concubine died.

I was surprised at the amount of sex in this book. Prior books in the series did not have any sex.  This one had explicit descriptions of sexual encounters, including kinky sex and gay sex. Every character was described having sex. Even the concubine's tattoo is in a sensitive area. You don't expect that in historical fiction.

Aside from that, the author presented a colorful picture of life in the women's quarters at Edo Castle. It was noisy, vengeful, had rich appointments and extravagant kimonos but the women were kept behind screens so that they would not be seen by men. My impression was that they were prisoners. I don't know if that is what the author intended but wealth never makes up for freedom.

Sano wanted a compliant wife but Reiko was raised to be independent and refused to sleep with him until he relented in making her a work partner. I didn't see this as plausible. It just wasn't Sano's character to be anything but a traditional samurai. In prior books he never had thoughts about treating women differently than society dictated. It didn't fit his character to suddenly jump into being a women's rights samurai.

The investigation and resolution of the murder was outstanding. There were plenty of suspects and red herrings. However, as I write this review I cannot escape my overall impression that I just read a romance novel, not a historical fiction story.  It's romance in feudal Japan. When I bought this book I expected to read the 20+ novels in this series.  Now I am not so sure. I like history, not romance.

Pandemic

Pandemic is Robin Cook's 36th medical mystery novel. The plot was inspired by a 2012 article in Science magazine concerning bacterial immunity. In his Preface the author stated that the article also introduced the world to a biologically active chimeric molecule called CRISPR/CAS9.  This molecule can be custom-tailored to alter genes in plants and animals.  With CRISPR/CAS9, any gene whose sequence is known can be replaced, removed, turned on and turned off and this can be done by anyone, even a high schooler in his garage. You don't need to be a molecular biologist to know how to do this. Therein lies one of the dangers. Another danger is that this technology is unregulated.

The story opens with a woman suddenly dying on a New York subway. Medical Examiner Jack Stapleton performs her autopsy and is astonished to find that she had a recent heart transplant but was not on any immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection of the heart. Her DNA also matched the DNA of the transplanted heart which would be impossible unless it came from a twin. A lung virus is the expected cause of death and the woman's short period of illness is reminiscent of the 1918 flu epidemic.

With troubles at home that he wants to avoid, Stapleton throws himself into this case. He tries to identify the woman by visiting a  tattoo parlor to determine the origin of her unusual tattoo of a puzzle piece with the name Helen on it. He locates the hospital that performed her transplant and is led to a Chinese billionaire who owns a hospital and research facility that uses CRISPR/CAS9. Then, a second woman ends up in his morgue with a puzzle piece tattoo with the name Carol in the middle.

I loved this book. It was fast paced and the search to identify the cause of death was interesting. When the plot came to what the Chinese billionaire was doing with his transplant business, I was astonished that anyone would even think about doing what he was doing. I won't be a spoiler here but it was shocking.

The relationship between the two main characters, Jack Stapleton and his wife Laurie Montgomery, was quite different from prior novels. Laurie is now Jack's boss. She has no problem yelling at him. He cannot handle it though. Jack is usually the dominant person in this relationship and this mixup feels awkward. To make things worse, they have a new child who was just diagnosed as being autistic. I am not sure where these two characters go from here. Is this 11th book featuring them the last one?

4 out of 5 stars.