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Tag: mysteries

Review: Arsenic and Adobo, Mia P. Manansala

I am constantly endeavoring to get myself into mystery novels, after a lifetime of reading almost no mystery novels, and my results have been… mixed. Not because I’ve read mysteries that were my enemies, but more because I have a hard time, when I’ve picked up one mystery novel, remembering to go back and pick up another. But I am undeterred! If I keep trying, eventually I will alter my reading habits and then I will love mysteries. It worked with spinach and it’s going to work with mystery novels. Arsenic and Adobo was a perfect mystery to help me…

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Review: The Caretaker, A. X. Ahmad

Mm, at last, a thriller set in Martha’s Vineyard that takes into account the bloody conflict between India and Pakistan (and sometimes China) over who rightly owns Kashmir. I read about author A. X. Ahmad in NPR’s 2015 Book Concierge, and yes, I am embarrassed that it took me over a year to finally read The Caretaker. But such is the life of a reader. I was kind of joking before — I have not been specifically yearning for a mystery novel set in Martha’s Vineyard that also incorporates the Kashmir conflict. But it’s kind of great that one exists.…

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Some books I have read before

REREADING IS AMAZING.  Sometimes I forget how many amazing books I have already read, because I am busy reading new books, which are also (sometimes) amazing.  But this is what I’ve been reading lately. Magician’s Ward, Patricia C. Wrede Much like Mairelon the Magician.  Too many names of people, but I don’t care because I am more interested in Kim’s learning magic and having a Season and Coming Out at a ball and having Offers of Marriage to turn down.  In pretty dresses.  Can there be more pretty dresses?  And God, pretty shoes?  I need new shoes so much.  My…

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Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn

My fourth book for the RIP Challenge, because apparently I just cannot get it together to read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher right now.  Silent in the Grave is the first of (so far) three mysteries with Lady Julia Grey, whose husband passes away at the start of this book.  After his death, private investigator Nicholas Brisbane tells her that he believes her husband was murdered.  She rejects this possibility out of hand; but a year later, after her mourning time is over, she finds clues in her house that make her wonder – was he murdered?  And if so,…

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Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers

A few days ago, my friend tim mentioned Gaudy Night, and I realized that I wanted nothing in the world more than to read Gaudy Night.  I know I refused to read it or even think about it earlier this year when I was reading Strong Poison, but I have rarely enjoyed a reread as much as I did this one.  Reading Gaudy Night this time was like eating cilantro – you know what it’s going to be like, and you are thinking, man, this is going to be great, but no matter how high your expectations are, you find…

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River of Darkness, Rennie Airth

Woohoo!  Between-the-wars-in-England stories are my favorite kind!  Plus, this is a mystery (I sometimes like mysteries), and although I read the end, I didn’t need to read the end necessarily, because the killer’s identity is known to the reader for most of the book.  Lovely.  Only way to do it.  See, the suspense then wasn’t about who done it, but whether he would do it again!  (I will just tell you – he would.) In River of Darkness, Inspector John Madden, a copper scarred by his time in the trenches in the recently-over World War I, is called in on…

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Have His Carcase, Dorothy Sayers

Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, together again, hooray!  Harriet Vane has gone off for a vacation in a watering-place (watering-place.  Brits are so weird.), and she happens upon a dead body, all throat-cut and bloody.  The corpse is dancer Paul Alexis, who is engaged (slightly sordidly) to an extremely rich older woman called Mrs. Weldon, and appears to have been part of a strange Bolshevik type plot.  All of the possible suspects have unbreakable alibis.  Harriet will still not marry Peter, but he carries on badgering her to marry him anyway. I am mildly bothered by Peter’s continual badgering of…

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Lovin’ on Tom Stoppard

Speaking of The Mousetrap, here is a Tom Stoppard anecdote.  If you have never seen The Mousetrap and you don’t know whodunit and you don’t want to, don’t carry on reading this paragraph. You have been warned.  Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of The Mousetrap and those country house type mysteries, and it’s also a parody of theatre critics.  And it steals lots of plot elements from The Mousetrap, as the title The Real Inspector Hound suggests, which might have caused the Mousetrap people to object.  But!  But but but!  They couldn’t!  Because if they…

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Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers

So apparently?  Dorothy Sayers did not write her Harriet Vane books all in a row.  Murder Must Advertise happens after Peter has already met Harriet, but Harriet doesn’t feature in it at all.  In between wooing Harriet and solving mysteries with her (and getting woefully rejected), Peter still finds time to gallivant around infiltrating advertising agencies to sort out other problems.  I didn’t know this.  I thought that the books with Harriet just came one after another in direct sequence. This makes me feel better about Peter and Harriet.  You know how the Doctor asks Donna to come traveling with…

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Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers

Strong Poison is a comfort book of mine.  I bought it at Bongs & Noodles one time on the way back from a doctor’s appointment regarding my tendonitis.  It was a very trying year – I was doing four AP courses and two honors ones, and I was very stressed about getting good grades so I could get into college – and anyway, we stopped by Bongs & Noodles and my mother suggested Strong Poison if I was after a new book.  I read it under my desk in calculus (bad, I know, but trust me, nobody was learning anything…

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