A Murder in the Making

 

The second Dovey the mystic book was fun, I enjoyed it. 

Dovey has been avoiding gorgeous FBI agent Grant Barlow (or Gib, as she calls him) for the last few weeks. Her friend, Ursula, encourages her to tell Elric (her binder) how she feels. Ursula is sure Elric will understand and agree not to kill Gib. 

So Dovey comes clean and tells him she's developed feelings for Agent Barlow and would like to explore a relationship with him. Elric agrees not to harm him, but makes Dovey promise that she won't bind him. And then he very publicly breaks up with her so no one can accuse him of being a cuckold. 

Dovey is actually very devastated to lose Elric. She still loves him, despite her budding attraction to Gib. But she hardly has time to mourn the lost of her 180 year relationship. There's a mystic on the loose with a powerful trinket who is murdering FBI agents and seems to be coming after her next. 

Things get intense fast, as Dovey does her best to protect Gib from the rogue mystic as well as keep herself safe. Bits (her hedgehog) had a starring role in this book. He was a hero! Go, Bits! 🙌 Book three is set to be published this fall, so something to look forward to. 

Mayhem at the Halloween Wedding; A Letter to the Luminous Deep

 

The second book in the Lazy Bones Bookshop series was disappointing. 

One year after her disastrous first literary festival, Bailey is back. Her second festival went much better, but now she's gearing up for her friend Raven's Halloween wedding (oh, and the potential love interest from the last book? Got a throwaway sentence about how they went on a few dates but it didn't work out). 

Raven and her fiancé, Emmett, are excited to have a Halloween themed wedding. Raven's parents are fully on board, but Emmett's parents aren't happy and would have preferred a more traditional wedding. So would Raven's sister, Harmony, who's a social media influence (ugh). Harmony is bitter that Raven picked her friend Ivy to be her maid of honor instead of her and is picking fights with everyone in the wedding party, including Bailey and Colby. But then again, so is Ivy. Honestly, none of these people were likable, even Raven sounded awful. And why is Colby antagonizing people? It felt like everyone was at a level 11 on the stress meter. Even the poor Boortio cart lady got dragged into it somehow. It was wild how everyone in a ten mile radius hated Ivy and Harmony. 

Suffice to say, when Ivy turns up dead there's a whole bunch of potential suspects. Bailey eventually figures it out and Raven has a nice Halloween themed wedding. 

Meanwhile, I fear these books are going to start to suffer from Miss Marple syndrome, where all these random murders keep happening in a quiet little town. In the first book, a police officer made a statement about how there hadn't been a murder in decades (or something like that) and now between these two books there have been at least five in a little over a year. I can't imagine those crime stats look great for their tourism agencies. 

It took me months to get through this one. I should have given up, honestly. It wasn't worth it. But I wanted to like it so badly. On paper, it sounded perfect. A fantasy set in a world where everything is underwater. 

It's told in epistolary format, a series of letters from one person to another. It starts out with E. (her full name is Erudite, she goes by E. No one blames her for this) hopefully writing to a scholar named Henerey Clel about the sights outside of her home, the famous Deep House her mother built. Henerey starts responding back, and before long a sweet sort of blossoming romance begins to form between the two very shy people. 

A seaquake destroys the Deep House while Henerey is visiting E., and both are presumed lost. While going through their siblings' belongings, Sophy (E.'s sister) and Vyerin, Henerey's brother, discover their correspondence and start trading letters, hoping to understand their siblings better and potentially figure out what might have happened to them. And that's where the book ends. 

So why didn't I like it? Well, the letters were extremely formal in tone and she used a lot of made up names and words, too many for me to keep track of. I have a hard time with names I can't pronounce (I had a lot of the same issues while reading "The Song of Ice and Fire" series). The pacing was absolutely glacial. Nothing happened. At all. For hundreds of pages. 

It's unfortunate, because I liked the premise but the execution was just not what I needed it to be in order to keep reading the rest of the series.   

A Trinket for the Taking

I 100% checked this book out because there's a hedgehog on the cover. I love hedgehogs, and I'm still sad that my state doesn't allow them as pets. I have a friend at work who is Finnish, and she told me hedgehogs run wild in the forest there. Between that and the fact that Finland loves black licorice and saunas, I think I should have been born Finnish. 

At any rate, on to the actual book! It was fun, I liked it. Dovey is a two hundred year old mystic. Mystics are a type of magical being. They can cast spells and have trinkets that they infuse with their essence. 

Dovey is bound to Elric, a very old and powerful mystic, meaning she can't ever break free from him. Dovey loves Elric very much, so she's okay with this...until Elric asks her to track down a powerful trinket that's been stolen. Dovey goes to work and in the process of her investigation meets a handsome and charming FBI agent named Grant Bartholomew. Sparks fly between them and Dovey realizes she's toeing a dangerous line. The bound can't have relationships with the  unbound (the common people) without causing major problems. Not to mention Elric would have him killed if he so much as suspected Dovey had feelings for him. 

Dovey puts that aside to concentrate on finding the trinket as more members of a powerful Greek pharmaceutical family keep dying in horrific ways. 

And Dovey has a magical pet hedgehog named Bits who helps her choose her daily wardrobe 😀

It was the first book in a series and I'm excited to read the second one. 
 

Lombardi and Landry

 

I'm not well-versed enough on the logistics of football games to have really appreciated this book. It got pretty technical with formations and plays. I understood some of it, but a lot of it went right over my head.

The parts I did understand I enjoyed, so there's that 😊

Before he coached the Packers, Vince Lombardi was an offensive coach for the New York Giants under head coach Jim Howell. Tom Landry was the defensive coach for the Giants at the same time, before he went on to coach the Dallas Cowboys. Both coaches helped propel the Giants to winning seasons and championships (before the Super Bowl). Lombardi left to go to Green Bay, and a few years later Landry went to Dallas. Both coaches became legends in their respective towns (and of course, as we know, the Super Bowl trophy is named after Lombardi, since the Packers won the first two matchups). Landry led Dallas through the raucous '80s when the moniker "America's Team" was hung on the Cowboys (unjustly so, in my opinion). The Giants faltered and it took them a long time to return to their former glory. Most people blamed the Mara family for letting Lombardi and Landry get away. 

History is full of hindsight, so it's hard to know what might have happened "if". 

Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop

 

This was a fun, quick read. Cozy mysteries are a nice change of pace from some of the heavier, more graphic things I tend to gravitate to. Plus, a dog was a main character. 

Bailey runs her granddad's bookshop in a sleepy little town in Oregon. After a popular horror movie was filmed there a few decades earlier, the town leaned into the "spooky" vibe and created a Halloween all year around theme, with shops naming themselves things like "Ghostly Gouda" (a local artisan cheese shop). Honestly, this town sounds right up my alley and I wish it was real because I would visit in a heartbeat. 

Bailey is holding the town's first annual Literary Festival. While there are a few hiccups, for the most part the festival goes well. Until Bailey discovers a dead boy in the hay maze. The police peg her as a suspect because she'd had an argument with the deceased and kicked him out of her shop for causing damage. Bailey is determined to solve the mystery and clear her name. 

I do have a few small qualms with this one. I didn't love the ending, it felt rushed. And she has all of the older folks in town ("older" meaning "my age") using very current slang, like "dipped out". I'm sorry, I don't talk like that, and I find it hard to believe other people my age would either. I use slang that I learned as a teenager/twenty-something (which really wasn't that long ago, honestly). But other than those two minor nitpicks, it was a decent read. It's the first in a series, so I might check out the second one just to see what happens with Bailey and the hinted at love interest. 

And So It Is...

Jamie Lynn Sigler has been living with MS for over half her life, she was diagnosed at 20, while she was still working on "The Sopranos". It's amazing to me that she was able to keep it together to film all of the shows she's worked on, and on stage, too. 

Jamie landed the role of a lifetime as Meadow Soprano and she realized how lucky she was to work with such great actors. She spoke highly of everyone involved, but her memories of Jim Gandolfini were especially nice to hear. She married young and got divorced not long after, but eventually found her soulmate, Cutter. They've been together for a long time and have two sons. She's had a lot of hardships in her life: her own illness, her older brother passing away unexpectedly, and her son's life threatening illness. Her story is very inspiring and I enjoyed reading it. 
 

Western Star

 

I can't really believe Larry's been gone for five years. I remember when I heard the news and I was devastated. Even though he'd quit writing for several years before he passed, it was still sad news. 

Larry was born into a family of cowboys at the end of the cowboy era. His uncles and dad all worked with horses and cattle. He grew up in a small, dusty town, devoid of books, desperate to escape, and did, often for years at a time, only to keep coming back. He got married and had a son, James, but cheated on his wife and they ended up divorced. He also ended up raising James, since his ex-wife wasn't really interested in being a mother. I imagine that was a rather interesting and commented upon arrangement in the 1960s. He knew a lot of writers from that era that you wouldn't necessarily connect with him, like Ken Kesey. 

He wrote, but he also was a book scout and would go on long road trips and just buy books. He ended up opening Booked Up in Archer City, a giant four building bookstore (sadly, when he died, the bookstore went under, which I didn't know, I thought he'd sold it a few years earlier. But Chip and Joanna Gaines bought it and used some of the books to "furnish" their hotel in Waco. That probably hurt more than anything else I read in this book). He continued working for as long as he was able. 

It's hard to sum up a complicated, mesmerizing, incredible life like the one McMurtry led, but Streitfeld did a great job and I think Larry would have liked it.