I feel like I might be coming out of my book funk. I've been reading, just not finishing anything, over the last few weeks, and I finally buckled down this weekend and finished three that I was *almost* done with. So it feels like I read a lot all at once, but I really didn't.
First up, "The Babysitter" by Liza Rodman. Liza had a terrible childhood. Her mother was vain and self-absorbed and literally didn't care who was watching her two young daughters. As a young, pretty divorcee in the 1960s, all she wanted to do was party, so she would leave her girls with anyone who stood still long enough to be roped into watching them.
Liza was just a little girl when she met Tony, the son of one of the maids who worked at the same hotel her mother did. Tony did odd handyman jobs around the hotel and used to keep an eye on Liza and her little sister. Tony seemed like a pretty nice guy and while he didn't try anything with her, he did murder at least four other young women and dismember them, burying their bodies in the woods nearby. One day Tony just disappeared out of Liza's life, and even though she asked about him, none of the adults told her anything. It wasn't until many years later when she was an adult that she learned that one of her childhood babysitters was a serial killer who went to prison for his crimes. Her mother, typically, didn't understand why she was so upset when she learned the truth. "After all, he didn't kill you," she said nonchalantly. I think the amazing thing about this book is that Liza survived her childhood and didn't murder her own mother.
I haven't read any of Marie Benedict's other books, but because this one was about Agatha Christie and how she mysteriously disappeared for 11 days back in 1926 I was interested and checked it out. I almost quit right away: I wasn't a big fan of Benedict's back and forth, jumping through time writing style, but I hung in there and I'm glad I did. It was good. Not great, but good.
In this fictionalized account (no one knows what really happened, Agatha declined to talk about it) Benedict has Archie Christie asking his wife for a divorce so he can marry his girlfriend. Agatha tries desperately to save her marriage for the sake of their little girl, Rosalind, but Archie won't meet her halfway. He's determined to get out. So Agatha, queen of mysteries that she is, devises a plan and sets it in motion, culminating with her disappearance. Archie looks suspicious from the start and his attitude about the whole thing doesn't help. The police are able to find plenty of evidence that Archie murdered his wife so he would be free to remarry. Eventually Agatha is found, safe and sound, and pleads amnesia about the whole thing. In real life she was shipped off to rest and when she returned she and Archie got divorced and she went on to marry again, a man she stayed married to for 46 years until her death. I'm glad she got a happy ending. I don't know if Benedict's portrayal of Archie was accurate or not, but if it was the guy was a big jerk.
And finally, I checked this out because I enjoyed Edgar Cantero's previous two books, "
Supernatural Enhancements" and "
Meddling Kids". I'm not really sure how I feel about this one. It wasn't bad, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. I think the premise was a little too far out there for my taste: Adrian and Zooey are twins who didn't separate properly at birth (and in real life this wouldn't happen, since Adrian was male and Zooey was female. The twins would have been separate eggs, not the same one). They both inhabit the same body and they're both very different. Adrian is total left brain and very analytical while Zooey is all right brain and very impulsive. The only career they could both agree on was being a private detective. A drug lord in a nearby town is upset when his son is brutally murdered and the police ask Adrian to help because one of their officers is deep undercover in the organization and they don't want to blow his investigation. So Adrian, reluctantly dragging along Zooey, goes to investigate. The book was mostly about the two of them arguing over every little thing and trying to knock the other one out somehow so they could get some peace and quiet to work. It was a little too weird for my taste.
