Shills Can't Cash Chips

 

Super fun Hard Case Crime from Erle Stanley Gardner, featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. An insurance company hires Cool and Lam to find out if Vivian Deshler really has whiplash. Their client has admitted he hit Miss Deshler's car, but she's disappeared and now they're suspicious. They want Donald to find her and see if he can get some good snaps of her running on the beach in a bathing suit to show she doesn't really have whiplash. 

Tough job, but someone's got to do it. 

Donald goes to the small L.A. suburb where the accident took place and starts poking around. It doesn't take long before he figures out something bigger is going on. Typical Gardner, there are about 10 car accidents on the day in question (I'll never forget that Perry Mason book where 10 different people were in one swimming pool one night--all without running into each other or the owner of the house). It was a super quick read. 

Home Before Dark

 

Riley Sager's latest, "Home Before Dark", was a little disappointing. I was surprised, because normally I really enjoy Sager's books. The premise was interesting: Maggie Holt has lived her life in the shadow of The Book (always in caps). When she was five, her parents bought Baneberry Hall in Bartley, Vermont. They only lived there a few weeks before fleeing in the middle of the night with only their clothes on their backs, claiming that the house was haunted by malevolent spirits who were trying to kill Maggie. Maggie's dad, Ewan, got a big book deal out of it, and "House of Horrors" became a huge bestseller. Unfortunately, it's plagued Maggie her whole life, more so because she thinks it was  all a big fat lie. She doesn't remember anything her dad recounted in the The Book. Her parents got divorced a few years after The Book was published and refuse to discuss it. 

Maggie's father dies, and Maggie discovers that he never sold Baneberry Hall and now she owns it. She's determined to get to the truth of the matter so she decides to move in while she fixes it up to put it on the market. The house certainly does seem haunted: lights and record players turn on by themselves, Maggie keeps seeing shadows of people both inside and outside, and things keep disappearing. Since her dad recounted all the same things in The Book, it's starting to look like maybe it all wasn't such a big lie, after all. It all made sense in the end, but it was disappointing. I think I would have preferred if the house had actually been haunted. 

Fortune and Glory; Peachy Scream

 

Janet Evanovich dropped the number naming convention for book 27 of her Stephanie Plum series. It wasn't bad. I think she's getting tired of writing Stephanie, she introduced a new character in this one, a treasure hunter named Gabriela Rose, and it looks like Ms. Rose is going to be in the next book, so I think maybe she's ready to move on. I don't blame her, she's been writing Stephanie for a long time.

Stephanie is trying to help Grandma Mazur find the treasure that her late husband, Jimmy, left her clues for. He and the five other wise guys he was supposed to share it with each have a clue. Put the six clues together with the keys Jimmy left and the fortune is all theirs. Too bad two of the other wise guys are after Grandma and Stephanie. Stephanie and Joe are on the outs, so she hooks up with Ranger in this one, but it seems like Joe wants her back, and she gets jealous when she thinks Joe is dating someone else (seriously, just marry Joe already. This back and forth between him and Ranger is getting tiresome). 

"Peachy Scream" by Anna Gerard is the second Georgia B&B mystery, after "Peach Clobbered". It's Cymbeline's annual Shakespeare Festival, and Nina Fleet is hosting a group of amateur Shakespeare actors who will be performing Hamlet, including Harry Westcott, her nemesis from the first book. One of the actors, Len Marsh, dies under what might be suspicious circumstances (his glass had a weird residue in it that Nina takes to the coroner and has tested). Like the first book, Gerard did a good job of planting red herrings so not only was I guessing who the intended victim was, I wasn't sure who was innocent or guilty. 

And seriously, the town of Cymbeline sounds awesome and I wish it was real.

Fool Me Twice

 

Lindsay's second Riley Wolfe book was really good. Riley is kidnapped after stealing a Fabergé egg from a Russian museum and taken to a remote island where he meets Patrick Boniface, the number one scary badass illegal arms dealer in the entire world. Boniface would like Riley to steal something for him: a fresco that currently lives in the Vatican. Steal an entire wall from the Vatican? Riley knows damn well it can't be done, but what choice does he have? Boniface will kill him if he doesn't, so he agrees. As he's headed to the airport to head home and try to figure out how to steal a wall from the Vatican, Riley is kidnapped again. This time it's Bailey Stone, the number *two* scary badass illegal arms dealer in the entire world. Naturally Stone would like to be number one, so he needs Riley's help to take out Boniface. Another impossible request that Riley is forced to say yes to or be killed. 

I won't spoil it, but there were a lot of good twists and turns. I like Riley, like Lindsay's other dark hero, Dexter Morgan, I know he's a bad guy and I shouldn't root for him, but of course that's why Lindsay writes the way he does.  

O Jerusalem

 

I've been reading a ton of nonfiction lately, so it was a nice break to get through a fiction title. Laurie R. King's fifth Mary Russell book, "O Jerusalem", goes back to the time of "The Beekeeper's Apprentice". In the first book, Mary and Sherlock go to Palestine after Sherlock has been injured by the bomb in his beehive. This book tells us what happened during that time, before Mary and Sherlock were married. 

While in Jerusalem, they uncover and thwart a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock (at least, I think that's what was happening. I got lost a few times). It was actually pretty good, I enjoyed it (despite not really knowing what the heck was going on most of the time). Not as good as the first one, but definitely better than the last few.