Single Malt, and Cask Strength (Agents Irish and Whiskey #1 and #2), Layla Rayne

The summer of reading tons of romance novels and Dunnett continues! I liked the first book so much! I love a romance novel that's also action-adventure, and this has lots of mystery and clues and sudden reveals of bad guys. Both protagonists were well-drawn and complex, and it made sense for them to want each other, and to have serious challenges getting together. Aidan's husband was killed mysteriously eight months earlier, and he's not over it yet. Jaime's handsome and charming and a little famous, and being in a relationship will be public and uncomfortable. As I finished this book I said out loud to myself, "How many of these are there? I'm going to read ALL of them."

There is a little telling instead of showing in the first couple of chapters, and a few too many uses of nicknames (something that bugs me a lot because romances seem to rely so heavily on it), but overall I liked this a lot, and I immediately bought the sequel, so...

I liked the second one even more. There are amazing tropes here. Aidan and Jaime have gotten together, but promised to keep it casual (and Aiden is sleeping with a bunch of other dudes, to remind himself not to get too attached to Jaime, which is breaking Jaime's heart a little). Jaime has to go undercover as himself; he was previously a basketball player, and the FBI asks him to be himself, as a coach, to bust an online gambling ring. Jaime misses his old life and of course runs into the ex-boyfriend who broke his heart, while Aidan is pretending to cozy up to a suspect. The pining is magnificent, as are the dark secrets. 

When I got to the end I immediately pre-ordered the third one, which luckily is coming out next month. This is just what I wanted on my summer vacation. 

Grade: B 

#59 and #60 in 2017

The Furthest Station (Peter Grant #5.7), Ben Aaronovitch

Always a pleasure to spend time with Peter. I wish it were longer, but I always wish novellas were longer. I liked the ghosts and the mystery -- now can we get back to the main plot? I am dying to know about [spoilers redacted].

Grade: A

#51 in 2017

Soho Dead, Greg Keen

This is a perfectly nice noir, if that's your thing. I like my noir mysteries to have something original about them, or really evocative language. This did neither. On the other hand it didn't go down endless rabbit holes where I forgot all the characters, either. If you want a classic noir this is certainly one.

Grade: C

#50 in 2017

Fair Play/All's Fair, Josh Lanyon

I accidentally read book 3 before I read book 2, and honestly it didn't strike me as that weird. It was confusing. When I realized i was out of order I thought, "ohhhh, that's why their relationship is so different here," but other than that it wasn't too much. I liked three better than two, but that might be because of mistakenly reading three first.

Anyway, these books are pretty dark. People are murdered by serial killers, animals are injured, etc. I like the romance a lot (although there's a slightly odd undertone about one of the main characters being submissive and what that means for him). I enjoyed it a lot overall, though.

Grade: B
#38 and 39 in 2017

The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

What a delight. I know I read it in late elementary school and loved it, but I didn't remember anything about it. It's sincerely great -- the diverse characters, the nuanced interactions, the really fun mystery. And a spunky pre-teen who solves the mystery an becomes a successful business woman. No wonder it stuck with me.

Grade: A
#36 in 2017

The Adrien English mysteries #1-6, Josh Lanyon

Fatal Shadows, A Dangerous Thing, The Hell You Say, Death of a Pirate King, The Dark Tide, and So This Is Christmas

I liked this a lot. It's got kind of an old-school flavor to it, with the (eventual) romantic interest being a guy who hates himself for being gay and maybe hates Adrien for it, too, and nearly every side character turning out to have a problem with Adrien being gay. But that's not unrealistic for ten years ago, so it didn't bother me. I love this kind of genre -- amateur sleuth gets involved with murders and the cops -- and my favorite thing is "genre I love, and it's gay." I actually liked this book a lot, but with a couple of caveats. The whole "Native Americans trying to scare away settlers with ghost stories -- could they be real???" subplot feels very worn out and mildly racist (I believe it was done with the best of intentions but I winced a couple of times). Also, it's rough reading a romantic interest who hates being gay and hates gay men, even if he's actually secretly pretty kind to Adrien. Not entirely unrealistic, just a little painful. Jake is a total dick in this book, and the plot is confusing. Adrien, honey, go find someone who actually likes you. I like his adopted extended family, though. Just lots and lots of characters all thrown into this story. (This is probably my fault for reading three books in two days, though.) FINALLY, Jake is forced to admit he really likes Adrien, and do something about it. Adrien believes for a hot second in this book that Jake will murder him to keep it secret that he's gay. I didn't, but it was still a very cathartic moment when Jake is finally like, "No, this is who I am, and I do actually have a line I won't cross to keep my life intact." Jake's self-hating homophobia in the series reads like it should be set in the early 80s, and Adrien's inability to shake Jake off and date someone else (he does date someone else, but he doesn't REALLY like him) is a little weird until Jake starts to get more emotionally mature in this book. But it is a very satisfying arc. Big finish! Jake and Adrien have to decide if they're going to get it together or not. Jake is finally on board with being out and dating another man. Will Adrien be able to get over everything that's happened and make this romance work???? (...I mean, spoiler, yes, he will.) And finally, the "meet the family" Christmas story, where Adrien and Jake get a very cute happily ever after. This series is so great, and the ending is so satisfying. #17-#22 in 2017 Grades: Eh, mostly Bs but the ending is so good it goes to an A

Fair Game (All's Fair #1), Josh Lanyon

I enjoyed this a lot. Kind of my dream book -- a genre I really like (bitter ex-FBI guy struggles to adjust to civilian life and also catch a serial killer) but gay. Which made it even better. Grade: B #15 in 2017

The Final Deduction, Rex Stout

So this lady comes to Nero Wolfe and says her husband has been kidnapped, and she wants his help. She pays the ransom, the husband is returned, and then he winds up dead. What could have happened???

The charm of these books, as always, is in Archie Goodwin's narration and voice. I'm going to start putting in cute quotes or something from these books, because the patter and the flavor is just so good, and otherwise every summary is "oh hey, another book! Wolfe ate some stuff, Archie was sarcastic, Cramer chewed on a cigar." (That is not a complaint.)

#93 in 2016
Grade: B

Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia Grey, #1) , Deanna Raybourne

** spoiler alert ** Eh. I love a good mystery, but there's barely any mystery here, and I knew who the bad guy had to be. The hero was too rude to be charming, and not in a Mr. Darcy way, and the heroine's big modern family felt forced. (They are cool with EVERYTHING, including encouraging her to have affairs, her sister having a female lover, venereal disease, prostitutes... awesome, but jarring every time it's just shrugged off. The heroine will never speak to her family doctor again after learning that he's anti-semitic. Oh boy, I wish people reacted like that.) 

The heroine was fine, but didn't do much, and I didn't like the hero enough to root for them to get together. Also, the book keeps dropping really heavy foreshadowing -- "Would I have gone that night HAD I REALIZED HOW TERRIBLE THE SITUATION WOULD GET????" when nothing terrible ever really happens.

Oh, and then on the last page someone mentions that the hero turned into a cat, and the heroine says, "Of course; I should have realized it was him."


Grade: D
#92 in 2016

Too Many Clients, Rex Stout

In this book, written in 1955, Archie Goodwin describes the area around 82nd street and Columbus Ave in NYC as just about the worst neighborhood anyone can imagine. You can't imagine how loudly I sighed, pretending I could afford an apartment there now.

A man is murdered! It turns out to involve a sex attic, which I hadn't really considered as a thing. Nero Wolfe agrees to somehow solve the mystery without telling the cops about the sex attic where the murder happened. Archie barely argues with any police, nor does he spend the weekend with Lily Rowan. (Nor does he take her to the sex attic, unfortunately.)

Grade: B
#91 in 2016

The Hanging Tree, Ben Aaronovitch

I have this book because one of my bffs lives in London and shipped it to me in hardcover when it was released in the U.K. It'll be released in mid-January in the states. (Allegedly. They pushed this release back over a year, and it's been driving me nuts.)

I love this series! I really should have reread all the books before I sat down with this one, because it heavily references earlier books and characters. I don't want to talk about what happens, because it's a mystery series (and this one deals with the ongoing reveal of the Big Bad) so I'll just say it's a delight to spend another few hours reading about Peter Grant. Although, thematically the whole thing didn't come together at the end the way I expected. And now I need the next one, so PLEASE don't push it back another two years, Ben Aaronovitch.

Note: I haven't read a real hardcover book in a long time and I forgot how annoying it is compared to my kindle. I needed a way to mark my page, I couldn't carry it around from room to room nearly as easily, and when I went to bed I had to leave the lights on to read it. I love turning the lights on and using the backlight on my kindle to read until I fall asleep. Also, I found I skipped paragraphs more often while reading actual paper, and had to go back and make myself read more slowly. All around kind of a weird experience.

Grade: A
#86 in 2016

And Four to Go, Champagne for One, Plot it Yourself, by Rex Stout

Three Nero Wolfe books! They are my comfort food books.

And Four to Go has four holiday-themed stories. What do I remember... Uh, the Christmas one is hilarious nonsense -- zero percent chance Wolfe dresses up like Santa Claus. Be serious. The easter one is something about cameras that shoot poison darts. Okay, what I really remember is that one of these stories gives us actual Archie backstory -- that he tried college, dropped out after 2 weeks, became a guard on the docks, shot a guy, lost his job, and got hired by Wolfe. I would swear we didn't know that before. This is also about where Doll Bonner starts showing up -- an actual female private detective! The late 50s sure were something.

Champagne for One is about someone being poisoned at a party that Archie was invited to, and even though there's an obvious solution for the police (the poisonee was suicidal and poisoned herself) Archie was watching her and knows she didn't do it. It's great.

Plot It Yourself is about books and publishing. Authors with popular books are being sued for having ripped someone off, and they need a way to prove they haven't. The book is great (Archie spends the weekend with Lily Rowan, glad to hear they're still doing well) although the ending is a little silly. It's great when a murderer decides to make a full confession just for fun.

Grade(s): B
#83, 84, 85 in 2016

Three for the chair, Rex Stout

It's so hard to remember which short stories were in which collection. Hang on. ...okay, after reading a bunch of goodreads reviews I got it. There's one here about a guy who had pneumonia and managed to die under possibly mysterious circumstances -- Wolfe is hired to decide if it was murder or just illness. The second one here is about Wolfe making dinner for some diplomats and the state department. It features Archie saying angrily, "Well, this is a great way to serve your country. Not!" Which I was not expecting in a novel from 1957. And in the third one a whole lot of private detectives have been summoned to testify about illegal wire-tapping activities. They were all tricked into it by the same guy, and that guy has just wound up dead, which looks pretty incriminating. The third one is great, mostly because Wolfe basically sends Archie off to do useless errands the whole time, while letting everyone else help him, and Archie is in suuuuuch a bad mood because of it.

I need some kind of different rating scale for these books, because they are all basically the same thing, but that's the joy of the series. In a week when I really needed a way to turn my brain off and stop looking at twitter or the news, a nice reliable murder mystery with a nice reliable set of characters and a nice reliable plot was exactly what I needed.

Grade: B
#78 in 2016

If Death Ever Slept, Rex Stout

I swear this book is a repeat of an earlier book in the series, but then again, WHO KNOWS. This is the 29th Nero Wolfe book, and a lot of those are three-story collections, so I've lost track. Anyway, I'd swear there's another book where Wolfe and Archie are in a shitty mood (this time it's over Lily Rowan, my favorite socialite) and so someone comes in with an absurd job and they both sort of dare each other into taking it, and Archie ends up going undercover to pose as someone's secretary to collect information. I think the other one was in Westchester, though (it's the book where Archie gets roofied), and this one is set in a duplex on Fifth Avenue.

I liked this one; there's lots of sassy dialogue, lots of Archie flirting and going to the Flamingo Club and being a pain to the police, and lots of suspects. On the other hand, it felt like a retread of an earlier book, and when the murderer was revealed it was pretty ".... eh. Okay, sure. Fine. Why?"

Grade: C
#76 in 2016

Three Witnesses, Rex Stout

I had a dream about Archie Goodwin so I figured I was time to finally get back to my Nero Wolfe read-through. Also, I wanted a palate-cleanser of fiction that would be comfortable and easy and charming and funny. Murder mystery series are that for me. Enough formula that I don't need to worry about how it's all going to play out, enough surprise that I want to keep reading.

Not gonna lie; I had to check goodreads to see what stories were in this book, and I just finished it yesterday. They are all very standard fare; in one a soldier who was presumed dead in Korea comes home to find his wife has remarried, and then he is murdered (for real this time). One of them is all about switchboard operators. And one of them involves Nero Wolfe adopting a dog, which was great from start to finish. Archie, of course, thought he'd make Wolfe mad by bringing the dog home, only then Wolfe wanted to keep the dog, and it was just adorable.

One fun thing about these books is that Archie and Wolfe stay roughly the same age but the books are set in the year they're written. Archie was a Captain in World War II, and now here he is, still about 30, during the Korean War. Another fun thing is that they are really of their time. I knew switchboards were a thing, and I knew sort of how they operated, but a mystery set around ladies and switchboards was super fun to read, since I got a much clearer and more vivid idea of how they worked.

Grade: B
#75 in 2016

Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, Bill James

I love true crime stuff, and I love baseball, so when I learned that Bill James (the guy who invented the theory behind moneyball) had written a true crime book I knew I was going to read it. And there are several sections where he attempts to say, "Okay, if it requires 100 points to convict someone, this evidence should be about 30 points, and this evidence should only be 5, and we shouldn't include this kind of evidence at all." It's hilariously Bill James-ian, trying to quantify the legal system in that way. Make stats! Find averages! Set up a system!

So about 2/3 of the book is about different crimes, from very early crimes in New York when the US was brand new, through to discussions of cases like the JonBenet Ramsey case and OJ Simpson. He does a great job of describing what happened without getting gory or too excited about the gross details. He attempts to explain why he thinks various people are innocent or guilty. (Lizzie Borden: not guilty. The guy who confessed to being the Boston Strangler: not guilty of most of it.) He also talks a lot about why "true crime" is considered so lurid and such a waste of our time, and so destructive to our morality. He argues in favor of true crime reporting, books, and even TV movies if they're well done. And at the end he has a list of 100 best true crime books. I'm going to check out a bunch.

The other 1/3 is, frankly, weird. Every few chapters James stops to tell us, the audience, why the Warren Court was way too liberal and destroyed American society's ability to keep criminals in jail. Or he argues that Miranda Rights and giving suspects access to legal libraries created our super-sized industrial jail complex. He says he's not liberal or conservative on the issue, and he has a long, long, long explanation at the end about all the ways he'd reform prisons to make them places that would create good citizens ready to go out into the world, rather than locking them up forever. But his ideas about how to fix prisons seem, honestly, bananas. (24 person prisons? Tiny prisons on one floor of an office complex?) These chapters were interesting, but not at all persuasive, and you could skip them without losing much. They felt a little -- sorry Bill James, I swear I still love you -- Old Man Yells At Clouds.

Anyway. Excellent true crime stuff. I had to check the closets and make sure no murderers were lurking in them, but the book also made me laugh out loud.

Grade: B
#61 in 2016

Three Men Out, Rex Stout

Eh. As Nero Wolfe trilogies go, you can skip this one. Only one reference to a date with Lily Rowan, and the mysteries are mostly things you couldn't possibly guess or solve -- someone just confesses at the end. Eh.

Grade: C
#59 in 2016

The Black Mountain, Rex Stout

Normally when the Nero Wolfe books go outside the standard formula I love it. This one, though, removed all the mystery elements and turned it into a travelogue. It ended up being "Archie and Wolfe go on an international adventure," which was so different that it threw me off. Because of a murder, Wolfe has to go home to Yugoslavia, and Archie goes with him. It's a lot of description of airplanes and hiking and boats, and almost no actual mystery.

Here's what I liked: I liked that Archie thinks about Lily Rowan four separate times. (Just get married.) I liked reading what it was like in Yugoslavia under the Tito regime. Archie was funny as always, although severely hampered by only speaking English, so he couldn't argue with anyone. I liked Wolfe's secret plan that comes to fruition in the last couple of paragraphs of the last page.

Otherwise.... eh. Not a lot happens except walking around the mountains.

Grade: C
#53 in 2016

The Golden Spiders, Rex Stout

I gasped out loud at a plot twist in this book. 22 books into the series I am pretty delighted that they can still surprise me this much. The villain, when they are revealed, turns out to be someone we haven't spent much time with, which sucked, but this is one where you really feel the murder victim and care about Wolfe solving the mystery.

Grade: B
#52 in 2016

Triple Jeopardy, Rex Stout

I have the worst book hangover. How does one get past the end of the Lymond Chronicles? Last night me and a couple of friends, whom I've made read Game of Kings, went out and drank, and basically performed an episode of Drunk History about Scotland in the 1500s. But they haven't read the whole series and there are a lot of things I can't yell about yet. Sigh. Makes getting excited about other books hard.

Anyway. This Nero Wolfe collection of short stories was published in 1952, and wow, is it VERY 1952. In the first short story, a family finds out their murdered son was a Communist, but he claimed to have been undercover for the FBI, infiltrating Communists. In the second, Wolfe helps two illegal immigrants escape the police. The immigrants met in a concentration camp in Russia, which is why they don't have papers. And in the third, a man who writes comic books frames Archie for murder. Commies, concentration camps, and comics. You'd guess this was published in the 50s, for sure.

Anyway, I guessed the answer to the first mystery, I really liked the second one (Archie does some spectacular lying) and I loved the conceit of the third, with Archie framed for murder, and Wolfe so angry about it that he sort of loses his mind, briefly. Rex Stout writes a very satisfying short story.

Grade: A
#48 in 2016