How to Sell a Haunted House; The Queen; The Lindbergh Nanny

Okay, I got three books read over the weekend, so I'm pretty proud of how productive I've been!

First up, Grady Hendrix's latest, "How to Sell a Haunted House".

Sigh.

I *love* Grady Hendrix. "My Best Friend's Exorcism" was brilliant. I've enjoyed pretty much every book he's written, some more than others, of course, but they've all been fun. 

And then we have this one. I really wanted to love it. It totally creeped me out at first. Such a promising start. And then...I don't know. The whole storyline with the puppets and ghost possession and...yeah. It just did not gel for me. I was super disappointed. 

My disappointment continued with "The Queen: her life" by Andrew Morton. In case you don't remember, Morton is the one who secretly interviewed Princess Diana and published her jaw dropping memoir in the early 90s. Part of my disappointment was that I've just read so many books about the late Queen that there's really nothing new in any of them anymore. The second piece of it was that he wrote it before she died and didn't update it (I can't imagine it would have taken that long to add a quick epilogue). So he talks about her in the present tense at the end, saying when she does finally exit the world stage, things like that. It jarred me a little. And the pictures were disappointing. 

And finally, "The Lindbergh Nanny" by Mariah Fredericks. I read everything I can get my hands on about the Lindbergh case, fiction or nonfiction. I liked this one quite a lot, actually, it was a quick read. 

Betty Gow was hired to be little Charlie's nanny (or "nurse"). The book is told from her point of view. The only thing I disagreed with Fredericks about is Bruno Hauptmann's guilt. She said in the epilogue that she doesn't believe in "conspiracy theories", therefore she believes Hauptmann is guilty. 

Well, it's obviously a little more complicated than that. "Suspect No. 1" makes an excellent case for Lindbergh himself having been more involved in the kidnapping than anyone thought. There is another book I haven't read in ages called "Scapegoat" that makes a compelling argument that Hauptmann was framed. I really just don't think the facts of the case fit the theory that Hauptmann kidnapped the baby. Matching a piece of wood from the ladder to a floorboard in his attic is ridiculous. Hauptmann always claimed that a friend gave him the ransom money to hold onto when he went to Europe, and it seems quite plausible to me. At any rate, Fredericks posits that while Hauptmann was guilty, he had help from someone on the inside.