Where I list what I read and my reactions. Mystery is my genre, leaning towards traditional mysteries and police procedurals. Bitter hot tea is the perfect companion.
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Summary from the back of the book : Welcome to the Grand Abeona Hotel: home of the finest food, the sweetest service, and the very best views the galaxy has to offer. All year round it moves from planet to planet, system to system, pampering guests across the furthest reaches of the milky way. The last word in sub-orbital luxury—and an absolute magnet for intrigue. Intrigues such as: Why are there…
The latest Classics Club Spin has been announced. To join in, I choose twenty unread books from my classics list and list them in a post before Sunday, August 16th, 2026 . On Sunday, the Classics Club will generate a random number between 1 through 20 and post it at the Classics Club website. Then I will read whatever book falls under that number on my Spin List by October 4th, 2026 . So, here is…
I was initially attracted to Midsummer Mysteries: Short Stories , edited by Martin Edwards, because of its striking cover and the lovely sprayed edges. I am a sucker for beautiful books. But it did not hurt that the book was a Crime Writers' Association anthology, and that I was familiar with some of the authors. In the Introduction, Edwards notes that he endeavors to include authors that have not…
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl . The topic for Top Ten Tuesday this week was to go back and list the books I was reading on August 11th in the previous ten years. I used Goodreads to find the books but I did find that in some cases it was hard to determine exactly what I was reading on that day, and I just winged it. 2025 Perplexing Plots by David Bordwell…
Summary from Goodreads ... Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration…
I discovered this story accidentally when I ran across some short story collections by Katherine Mansfield on Amazon. I had not read anything else by Katherine Mansfield and I looked for one of her stories to try out online. This was the first one I found. "Feuille D'Album" The setting is Paris. The story was published first in The New Age in 1917, under the title of "An Album Leaf." A revised…
The Toby Peters mystery series is set primarily in Hollywood, California. Each book in the series is centered around a celebrity. Toby is a perpetually down-on-his-luck private eye; the books are humorous and clever. There are 24 books in the series. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road is set in 1940, and Judy Garland is one of the primary characters. Toby gets a call from Warren Hoff at M.G.M., who…
I read "Kill Now—Pay Later" in June, I think. Or it may have been early July. I have been having trouble reading short stories lately. This is one of the mystery novellas starring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The length was 70 pages. It is one of three stories in Trio for Blunt Instruments by Rex Stout, published in 1964. This is how the story begins: That Monday morning Pete didn’t give me his…
The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century is an anthology edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler and published in 2000. The anthology contains 46 short stories, and is 813 pages long. This is my husband's book, which he purchased in 2025 at the Planned Parenthood book sale which we attend every September. In addition to the short stories, the book has a Foreward by Penzler, an…
I read nine books in May, more than I expected to, but it is a good thing, because with only 3 days left in June, I have only read three books. Plus I thought all of the books read in May were very good reads. Graphic novel, Nonfiction My Cat is Such a Weirdo, Vol. 1 (2023) by Tamako Tamagoyama (Writer and Artist) This is the first in a manga series about cats. In this case the stories are true,…
My son read this book first. He liked it, with reservations. (More about that later.) The subject interested me, so I decided to read it also. It is science fiction, about life on a colonized planet, where half of the planet is perpetually cold and in the dark, and the other half is always in the light and hot. This summary is from the back of the edition I read: Humanity clings to life on…
This story is about a young woman, Mary Grey, who bears a strong resemblance to the heiress to a fortune, Annabel Winslow, who disappeared several years before the story starts. Mary Grey lives in Canada but is visiting Scotland because her ancestors lived there. As soon as I read the first few pages of The Ivy Tree , by Mary Stewart, I was pulled into the story. It is rare that I get interested…
The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest . The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point. The…
Murder and Other Acts of Literature is an anthology of 24 short stories that include a crime but are written by authors who are not crime fiction authors. Some examples are William Faulkner, W.S. Gilbert, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, Rudyard Kipling, and Naguib Mahfouz. The stories are not whodunnits or puzzle mysteries, just stories that often include a death. This is my husband's…
The story I am featuring comes from the collection Killer Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury . It was published by Hard Case Crime in 2020; the stories were selected by Jonathan R. Eller. Bradbury wrote three crime novels in 1985, 1990, and 2002, but most of his short stories were in other genres. About half of the stories in Killer Come Back To Me are from the 1940s, and the…
This is my eleventh year of participating in the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. The event was originally hosted by Cathy at 746Books . This year, Annabel from AnnaBookbel is hosting the event. The challenge is very flexible. You don't have to aim for the full 20 books; instead, you can opt for 15 or 10. Here are some of the rules... The #20BooksofSummer2026 challenge runs from Monday June…
Basically in April I read four mystery novels and one graphic novel. So, not a lot of variety. But I enjoyed all the books, and that is what matters. Two of the mysteries were in the spy fiction genre, plus Death in a Darkening Mist , a historical novel set in Canada immediately after World War II ended, bordered on spy fiction. Here are the five books I read in April. Graphic novel Over Easy…
The latest Classics Club Spin has been announced. To join in, I choose twenty unread books from my classics list and list it in a post before Sunday, May 17th, 2026. On Sunday, the Classics Club will generate a random number between 1 through 20 and post it at the Classics Club website . Then I will read whatever book falls under that number on my Spin List by July 5th, 2026 . This list is very…
A brief overview of the Nero Wolfes series by Rex Stout: Nero Wolfe is a genius who supports himself (and his household) as a private detective. Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories, is both his assistant and a private investigator, and he does most of the legwork. Nero Wolfe's main interests are good food, raising orchids, and reading books. Usually, he will avoid working on a case unless…
In late April, I read Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith, the eighth book in the Arkady Renko series. This is sort of a police procedural set in Russia; I say this because Arkady is a police investigator, still working for the Procurator in Moscow, but really going his own way in an unsupervised investigation. So there is not much procedure involved. Journalist Tatiana Petrovna has fallen from a six…
The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest . The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point. The…
Description on the back of the book: Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin evokes the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles. I was disappointed when I read…
March was a very good reading month for me. I enjoyed every book I read. There was enough variety to make me happy. A nonfiction graphic novel, an epistolary novel, science fantasy, a book of short stories in the historical fiction genre, a vintage mystery and two contemporary mysteries. Here are the books I read: Graphic novel / Nonfiction Do Admit! (2025) by Mimi Pond (Writer and Artist) My…
A few weeks ago I transferred a group of books from one wire cube to a new improved one. In the back of the cube, I discovered some books I had forgotten I had. One of them was A Woman's Eye , an anthology of short stories published in 1991 and edited by Sara Paretsky. That book consists of 21 short stories by women; the stories all feature female sleuths. The first story in the book is "Lucky…
These stories came from Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories ; the collection has 867 pages and was published in 1999. It consists of 51 short stories; the short stories are in chronological order. "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" This story was first published in the USA in Collier's Magazine , November 9, 1940. Later published as "Poirot and the Regular Customer" in The Strand , March 1941.…
This is the story of Margaret Murry (called Meg) and her younger brother Charles Wallace Murry, and their friend, Calvin. Calvin just shows up one day, out of the blue. Calvin is two years older than Meg, and Charles Wallace is much younger than either of them, but the three children become friends almost immediately. As the story opens, Meg is very unhappy because she is having trouble in school;…
