Book Review: The Proof of the Pudding by Rhys Bowen

 

The Proof of the Pudding is the 17^th book in the Lady Georgie mystery series written by prolific authoress Rhys Bowen.  It is a perfect choice when you are looking for something frothy and funny. Lady Georgiana Rannoch and her husband Darcy are two cash strapped royals in the 1930’s. Her Ladyship is a long way down the succession ladder, but royal she is and that does give her a cachet, a bunch of relatives, and a lot of wannabe friends. 

Georgie is now expecting her first child and the couple is living in a country house belonging to her Godfather. A klutzy servant called Queenie is doing what passes for the cooking, but her husband thinks they need a decent chef and she finally decides to hire a French waiter she met in a Parisian Café. His cooking turns out to be so impressive that a neighboring author who dresses like Dracula and lives in a ghastly old mansion hires him out to cook for a special dinner party he is giving. The highlight of the party is a tour of the author’s garden of poisonous plants.  You can guess where that leads. Although the dinner goes well, some of the guests start to feel unwell after they depart and when one of them expires, a police investigation points to the new French cook.

For added spice the guest list at the party just happens to include the mystery writer Agatha Christie and her husband and the young Laurence Olivier and his first wife Jill Edmonds. Given that Mrs. Christie is already a recognized authority on poisons, the two women team up to help solve the case.

Bowen writes with the accurate air of someone born to the Brit gentry and her gentle satire is present throughout the book. Take this description of one of the characters.  His accent was “so frightfully clipped and posh it makes the royal family sound like barrow boys.”  You also need not worry about recommending Bowen’s work to just about anybody. The most vociferous language used is in phrases like  “Oh Golly” or “How jolly.”  What more is there to say?  It is a sentimental and funny mystery by an accomplished author set in the colorful world of Downton Abbey and Noel Coward.   

A good solid four out of five.       

Sometimes You Just Gotta Brag!

 

BOUNDARY WATERS by William Kent Krueger

 

I found this gem in paperback at a used book sale.  It was originally published in 1999 and was the third in a now lengthy series of Cork O’Connor mysteries. Though the arrival of GPS and DNA testing invalidated two of the issues in this novel, the plot, the boundary waters setting, and the characters continue to ring true.     

O’Connor, as we meet him here, is a former county sheriff with a checkered matrimonial past living in the small northern Minnesota town of Aurora. He is drawn into the search for a young and famous pop western singer named Shiloh, who has gone missing in the Quetico-Superior Wilderness. The singer’s mother was a Native American who left town years before to find her future on the west coast.  She was subsequently brutally murdered ten years before the story opens and now the daughter, whose parentage is complicated, has returned to a solitary cabin in the deep woods and may possess memories that could solve the old murder.  O’Connor is hired to join a party of searchers composed of FBI agents, an older man who claims to be the girl’s father, and a local native American and his son.  They in turn are being tracked by a mysterious and cruel assassin. Shiloh, the part native American singer, who is the object of the search has luscious long black hair and Krueger's descriptions of her reminded me of a young Joan Baez.

There ensues a series of cat and mouse games on the remote forest trails and lakes punctuated by killings, narrow escapes, fascinating uses of native survival techniques, and a continued revealing of the complicated backstory that has plunged all of the characters into a “Deliverance” style adventure minus the banjo music.   

Krueger’s descriptions of the natural beauty, the climate, and the dangers of the boundary waters are first rate. His integration of these elements into the lives of the participants and the legends of the First Peoples who settled this area reveals both deep research and great compassion for native Americans.   

 The First People inhabitants bring with them the glorious voice of the Old Ways while emphasizing how the re-telling of those stories can merge the past and the future into a unified myth of survival. The ending ties up the threads but leaves more than enough on the spool to inhabit the several more Cork OConnor adventures that have come after this one.  The only caution I would have is that Krueger  writes out of the hard-hitting Mickey Spillane/Mike Hammer tradition and if you find physical and gun  violence disturbing, you may want to take a pass.    

I still give it a 4 out of 5  

      

Short Review Death of a Spy by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green

 

Death of a Spy by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green

Snuggle up by the fire with a glass of good single malt and check out the most recent Hamish Macbeth murder mystery.  The Scottish background is enticing and the pairing of an American agent named Bland with good old Macbeth can’t be beat. These are short books and there are almost twenty of them. Hamish Macbeth is the main sleuth and though he is often funny and a perfect boob with the women in his life, he is a shrewd investigator.  Another plus is that you can polish off one of these good-humored novellas in an evening.

Though Macbeth’s home base is a fictional northern Scottish town, the places he visits are often real. In this outing Macbeth and his visiting CIA sidekick are looking to put a long running Russian spy ring to rest and that means finding the mole who is trying to eliminate all the rest of the players in the cell he created. Along the way you roam the landscapes and lochs of Scotland and find excitement from flooding rivers, wild pub brawls, and a high stakes conclusion in the middle of a British Military Firing Range.

Beaton and Green are aiming for escapist entertainment and they clear that bar easily. I’d recommend having one or two of their yarns on your library shelf just waiting for those days when all you want to do is kick back.  

 

Book Review of The Exchange by John Grisham

 

I recall reading and enjoying John Grisham’s THE FIRM (and the movie made from it) a long time ago. When I saw that The Exchange was a story of Mitch and Abby McDeere fifteen years after their youthful adventures with the Bendini firm, I was eager to find a copy of it.  I found out that Mitch was now a partner in a major international law firm based in New York City and his wife was editing and publishing cookbooks. They had a fancy apartment overlooking the park and two sons in a selective private school. For all the world they were Mr. and Mrs. Successful in the rarified world of high-level Wall Street lawyers.

I was pleased with the couple’s success, but still feel you may want to exchange The Exchange for some other title.  It has a tired overused central plot that cannot make the wonder world of mucho-money and international intrigue seem enticing.  For the record a mysterious cabal of terrorists kidnap a young lawyer from Mitch’s firm and demand an outrageous ransom or they will kill their hostage. After 200 pages of private jet travel, splashy hotels, fancy meals at Michelin starred restaurants, chauffeured black limos, and committee meetings with stuffy partners who appear only marginally less venal than the villains, the dough is raised and the bad guys are paid off. We never know who they were and what they were really angling for. Maybe that’s the point—the rot is everywhere. I remain perplexed that all that money and access can’t manage to find out anything about a group that can seemingly track countless highly personal details and blow up things in cities around the world without leaving a trace. The hostage is kept in a series of hovels and caves in the remote Libyan Sahara and yet can be miraculously delivered alive and spiffed up to the Cayman Islands a day after the ransom is paid.  The cracks in the plot are wider than the Grand Canyon. I wish it were not so, but this is not Grisham at his best.         

Quick Review of a Loser

 

Dorment, Richard.  Warhol After Warhol

I picked this up on a whim as it looked like I might learn a bit more about Andy Warhol and the modern day art market.  Although the jacket promised an exciting read full of action and miscreants, I found it started to get tedious quickly.  The prose plods, the constant meetings, texts, and restaurant tete a tetes with moneyed dolts and venal Warhol executives left me with a bad taste for artists who phone in their work, the critics who are eager to exploit it,  and the people who have too much money who buy it.  If you should see it on a library shelf, leave it there.   

 

A review of FROM A FAR AND LOVELY COUNTRY by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Andrew McCall Smith is up to his old tricks again with this, his twenty fourth, No 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel.  All of the familiar characters are present from Mma Ramotswe to Grace Makutsi, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and Mma Potokwane. The arch villain Violet Sephotho does not appear, but still has a prominent function in the plot. With a deftness that comes from long experience, McCall Smith sets up a series of life’s problems and then ties them together in a satisfying conclusion that once again bespeaks the need of human beings for love and forgiveness.

The first problem is that several important people seem to have forgotten Mma Ramotwse’s birthday.  A more serious one emerges when the daughter of one of Mme Potokwane’s house mothers is victimized at a local singles club. A third complication and the title reference comes in the form of an American woman who arrives in Botswana to find, in Alex Haley fashion, her lost uncle’s African roots.

Along the way McCall Smith continues to sprinkle nuggets of wisdom like cherries on an ice cream sundae. I loved the humor when J.L.B. Matekoni went on an extended metaphor linking types of chocolate to the varying viscosities of motor oil. On a more serious note comes an observation about the nature of home. “We all have somewhere that we think of as our place-and that place stays with you, I think, all the way through your life.  We all have history in our veins.”  When things get really serious, Mma Ramotswe puts things back into balance by observing that lamenting and blaming wastes the time that might be better used to find solutions or at least minimize the damage. “There are always going to be problems”, she says.  “They are a natural background to human affairs.” 

Nearing the end, Mma Makutsi laments that there are just too many “extra low-grade people in the world” and McCall Smith has Mma Ramotswe agree that there are “many people indifferent to the feelings and interests of others, who behave with nastiness and selfishness, and who simply do not care about the effect of their actions.” She goes on to admit that these people are often “. . . conspicuously successful. They even get into high office, sometimes even the highest of all offices, and while they were there continued to lie and cheat in the way that they had always lied and cheated.”  I don’t normally think of McCall Smith as a political writer, but it’s hard not to see a contemporary politician who might fit to a tee that description.

The ending remains as usual, upbeat. There can be no life without trust and without trust no real friendships. When you have found your special friends, you have indeed found your home.

    afrika

          africa  africa           

     africa  africa  africa

                                                                      africa  Africa

                                                                            africa

               I give this a solid 4.5 of 5