Review of The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey

Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Franchise Affair

by Josephine Tey

Scribner Paperback Fiction (Simon & Schuster), 1998. First published in 1949. 300 pages.
Starred Review

After discovering Josephine Tey’s mysteries with her classic The Daughter of Time, I’ve been reading all the other Josephine Tey books I can find. If you like cozy mysteries, these remind me of Agatha Christie’s, but seem more unpredictable, much less uniform.

The Franchise Affair is a mystery completely different from any other I’ve ever read. The crime is not a perplexing murder this time. No, a woman and her elderly mother have been accused of a crime. Marion, the woman, asks country lawyer Robert Blair for help when Scotland Yard shows up at her house. They have a sixteen-year-old girl with them who claims that Marion and her mother abducted the girl and kept her locked up in their house for two weeks, treating her like a slave and abusing her. Marion has never seen the girl before in her life, but the girl has descriptions she couldn’t have come up with if she hadn’t been in the house — could she?

The case is unusual and definitely intriguing. If Robert believes Marion, how can he find out what really happened? How did the girl come up with such plausible testimony? And where was she really for those two weeks?

Josephine Tey presents the case beautifully and even throws in a bit of romance. An ingenious and delightful mystery. If you’re in the mood for a good old-fashioned cozy that yet isn’t quite like any other, I highly recommend The Franchise Affair.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of I, Librarian: Rex Libris, Volume I, by James Turner

Adventure, Fiction Review, Graphic Novel, Science Fiction 0

I, Librarian
Rex Libris, Volume 1

by James Turner

SLG Publishing, 2007.

I apologize to my readers, but I do have a soft spot for Super-Hero Librarians. And that’s what Rex Libris is all about!

This is a graphic novel of the adventures of the amazing Rex Libris, who travels through the galaxies if someone doesn’t return a book. It’s incredibly silly, but quite clever, and definitely diverting fun.

The caption at the beginning will give you the idea:

“Welcome, adventurous reader, to the first issue of Rex Libris, Public Librarian. Here you will find, for the first time in print ever, the tumultuous tales of the public library system and its unending battle against the forces of evil. This struggle is not just confined to our terrestrial sphere but extends out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos… and beyond! The librarian has faced patrons so terrible, so horrific, that they cannot be described here without the risk of driving readers mad. But enough prattle and preamble! Settle back with a cup of coffee and a donut (or other pastry if you prefer), and prepare to enter the secret world of…

REX LIBRIS.”

The other librarians at the Middleton Public Library are quite interesting, too. I love it when Circe explains to her co-worker:

“Oh, we all mellow with age, dear.

“I’m over 2000 years old. My trouble-making days are long behind me. Wreaking havoc and seducing adventuring heroes is for young people. These days I like to curl up with a good book and a hot cup of tea.”

Meanwhile, Rex is taking on space beings in an effort to get back a copy of Principia Mathematica.

Like I said, it’s all very silly, but we librarians need to be aware of how we are portrayed in literature, don’t we?

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Sheen on the Silk, by Anne Perry

Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Sheen on the Silk

by Anne Perry

Ballantine Books, New York, 2010. 518 pages.
Starred Review

I have enjoyed Anne Perry’s Christmas mysteries, and have been meaning to read more of her work. However, I wasn’t sure if I should tackle her different series at the beginning, or just dive in with her latest. So when I saw she’d written a stand-alone novel set in ancient Byzantium, I decided this would be a good time to start. I knew she is good with historical fiction, and I was not disappointed.

The book is set in thirteenth-century Constantinople. Anna Zarides has come to the city disguised as a eunuch with the goal of clearing her twin brother’s name. He has been charged with the murder of a political figure and exiled to Jerusalem.

Anna stays in Constantinople for years and gets embroiled in the politics and intrigue. The whole city expects Rome and Venice to attack Constantinople as part of the next Crusade — unless the city can compromise their religious convictions and convince Rome they are all one church.

Anna gets a patron early on in the powerful Zoe Chrysaphes, whose heart is set on vengeance. She was there when Constantinople was first overthrown and is determined to get revenge on the families of the people responsible. But Zoe also seems to be embroiled in the attack which Anna’s brother was exiled for.

Anne Perry shows us Anna solving the mystery, but also gets us involved in the currents and cross-currents of the plans to attack Constantinople — or divert the attack. We also get caught up in the story of Venetian Guiliano Dandolo, whose ancestor led the earlier attack on Venice, but whose mother was Byzantine. Anna makes friends with him, yet all the while she’s holding on to the secret that she is a woman. If her masquerade is discovered, especially after she’s served as physician to the Emperor, she could be executed.

The beautifully woven saga in this book will draw you in to a world far removed from our own. Anne Perry makes you feel you understand it, in all its complexity. You’ll root for Anna to clear her brother’s name, and even more, for Constantinople to be saved.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

Amy Einhorn Books (Penguin), New York, 2010. 326 pages.
Starred Review

I had the library book of The Postmistress actually sitting on my bedside table with my bookmark right in the middle when I saw a line at ALA Annual Conference where the publisher was giving away copies of the book for you to have the author sign. I was enjoying the book very much, so I eagerly got in line and got her signature.

This is a story of World War II and lives that intertwined in England and in America.

Frankie Bard, an American radio reporter in London during the war introduces the story:

“There were years after it happened, after I’d returned from the town and come back here to the busy blank of the city, when some comment would be tossed off about the Second World War and how it had gone — some idiotic remark about clarity and purpose — and I’d resist the urge to stub out my cigarette and bring the dinner party to a satisfying halt. But these days so many wars are being carried on in full view of all of us, and there is so much talk of pattern and intent (as if a war can be conducted like music), well, last night I couldn’t help myself.

” ‘What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?’ I asked.

” ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ a woman from the far end of the table cried in delight, shining and laughing between the candles. ‘I’m hooked already.’

“I watched the question take hold. Mail, actual letters written by hand, being pocketed undelivered. What a lark! Anything might happen….

“Never mind, I thought. I am old. And tired of the terrible clarity of the young. And all of you are young these days.

“Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, people would turn to good as they would to the light. I believed that reporting — honest, unflinching pictures of the truth — could be a beacon to lead us to demand that wrongs be righted, injustices punished, and the weak and the innocent cared for. I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of the angels.

“But I have covered far too many wars — reporting how they were seeded, nourished, and let sprout — to believe in angels anymore, or, for that matter, in a single beam of truth to shine into the dark. Every story — love or war — is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.

“Or so it seems to me.”

The Postmistress is a story of a postmistress who is new to a small New England town in 1940. It tells what happens that results in a fine upstanding conscientious woman not delivering a letter.

It’s also the story of the other people of the town: a young doctor and his wife, a man who watches for German submarines landing off the coast, and what people in the town think of the war “over there.” It’s the story of a war correspondent writing stories for the radio that catch people’s imaginations back home. And it’s the story of why Frankie Bard came to visit that little town.

This story is richly textured and intriguing. It gives you a taste of what it must have been like in London during the Blitz. But mostly, it tells you the story of fallible humans trying to do what’s right in extraordinary times, humans who each have their own stories, but whose stories become intertwined.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a signed copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Review of The Man in the Queue, by Josephine Tey

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Man in the Queue

by Josephine Tey
Read by Stephen Thorne

Chivers Audio Books, 2000. First published in 1929. Complete and Unabridged. 6 cassettes.
Starred Review

After listening to Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, I’m on a Josephine Tey binge. It turns out that this one, The Man in the Queue, was the first one she wrote, while The Daughter of Time was the last.

The Man in the Queue, naturally enough, is not about a historical mystery like Daughter of Time. However, it’s a good classic whodunit. The detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, is the same one who solves the mystery in the later book. Already we see his “flare,” his sense of people, knowing who’s telling the truth.

The mystery is intriguing. There’s a large queue to get into one of the last nights of a play in London. When the queue starts moving, and gets up to the front of the line, a man falls over on his face, and it turns out that he is dead, stabbed in the back.

The man has no identification on him, but he has a revolver in his pocket. No one comes forward to identify him. So Grant must not only figure out who killed him; he must also figure out who the man is and why he was in the queue with a revolver in his pocket. No one in the queue with him noticed anything, not even if someone had left the queue. They all claim to have never seen the dead man before in their lives.

The only trouble with my Josephine Tey binge is that these audiobooks always make me feel like I’ve gotten to my destination much too quickly, and I want to sit for awhile in the car and hear more.

The book is not politically correct — the main suspect is called “The Dago” for most of the book. But it’s fun to have discovered a classic mystery author of the same style as Agatha Christie, but whose books are all new to me.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/man_in_the_queue.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Baking Cakes in Kigali, by Gaile Parkin

Cross Cultural, Fiction Review, General, Literary, Starred Review 0

Baking Cakes in Kigali

by Gaile Parkin

Atlantic Books, London, 2009. 361 pages.
Starred Review

This enjoyable yet surprisingly deep book reminded me of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith. Both books are set in Africa, though this one in war-torn Rwanda instead of peaceful Botswana. But in both books, the main character’s profession lets her get to know people from a wide variety of backgrounds and help solve their problems and bring people together. Precious Ramotswe is a detective, but the protagonist of this book, Angel Tungaraza, bakes cakes.

We learn quickly that baking cakes in Kigali is a much more artistic endeavor than baking cakes in America:

“In the same way that a bucket of water reduces a cooking fire to ashes — a few splutters of shocked disbelief, a hiss of anger, and then a chill all the more penetrating for having so abruptly supplanted intense heat — in just that way, the photograph that she now surveyed extinguished all her excitement.

“‘Exactly like this?’ she asked her guest, trying to keep any hint of regret or condemnation out of her voice.

“‘Exactly like that,’ came the reply, and the damp chill of disappointment seeped into her heart….

“‘As you know, Angel,’ the ambassador’s wife was saying, ‘it’s traditional to celebrate a silver wedding anniversary with a cake just like the original wedding cake. Amos and I feel it’s so important to follow our traditions, especially when we’re away from home.’

“‘That is true, Mrs Ambassador,’ agreed Angel, who was herself away from home. But as she examined the photograph, she was doubtful of the couple’s claim to the traditions that they had embraced when choosing this cake twenty-five years ago. It was not like any traditional wedding cake she had seen in her home town of Bukoba in the west of Tanzania or in Dar es Salaam in the east. No, this cake was traditional to Wazungu, white people. It was completely white: white with white patterns decorating the white. Small white flowers with white leaves encircled the outer edges of the upper surface, and three white pillars on top of the cake held aloft another white cake that was a smaller replica of the one below. It was, quite simply, the most unattractive cake that she had ever seen. Of course, Mr and Mrs Wanyika had married at a time when the style of Wazungu was still thought to be fashionable — prestigious, even. But by now, in the year 2000, surely everybody had come to recognize that Wazungu were not the authorities on style and taste that they were once thought to be? Perhaps if she showed Mrs Wanyika the pictures of the wedding cakes that she had made for other people, she would be able to convince her of the beauty that colours could bring to a cake.”

Angel and her husband are from Tanzania. They lost both their adult children to AIDS, and now must take care of their five grandchildren.

“It’s only that we won’t be able to provide for these children as well as we did for our first children. But we must try by all means to give them a good life. That’s why we decided to leave Tanzania and come here to Rwanda. There’s aid money for the university and they’re paying Pius so much more as a Special Consultant than he was getting at the university in Dar. Okay, Rwanda has suffered a terrible thing. Terrible, Mrs Ambassador; bad, bad, bad. Many of hearts here are filled with pain. Many of the eyes here have seen terrible things. Terrible! But many of those same hearts are now brave enough to hope, and many of those same eyes have begun to look towards the future instead of the past. Life is going on, everyday. And for us the pluses of coming here are many more than the minuses. And my cake business is doing well because there are almost no shops here that sell cakes. A cake business doesn’t do well in a place where people have nothing to celebrate.”

Although Angel herself is dealing with some heavy losses, and so are the people around her, she is able to touch people’s lives — from convincing a mother to give her daughter a better name than Goodenough to providing family for a couple getting married who have lost all of their own families. This is an uplifting book and provides enjoyable and interesting reading.

One fun note: I was watching the DVD series of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which is filmed in Africa, and the first episode happened to have someone selling cakes. I noticed happily that those cakes were indeed far fancier and more colorful than cakes I’d see in America. So apparently I’ve learned something true about baking cakes in Kigali.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Casting Spells, by Barbara Bretton

Chick Lit, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Mystery, Romance, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Casting Spells

by Barbara Bretton

Berkley Books, New York, 2008. 308 pages.
Starred Review
2010 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #6 Fiction

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today I’m appropriately posting the review of a romance, but this one is a paranormal knitting mystery romance! The combination is delightfully original and a whole lot of fun.

Here’s how we meet Chloe Hobbs:

“By the way, I’m Chloe Hobbs, owner of Sticks & Strings, voted the number one knit shop in New England two years running. I don’t know exactly who did the voting, but I owe each of those wonderful knitters some quiviut and a margarita. Blog posts about the magical store in northern Vermont where your yarn never tangles, your sleeves always come out the same length, and you always, always get gauge were popping up on a daily basis, raising both my profile and my bottom line.”

Chloe’s store seems magical because it is. She’s the daughter of a sorceress who fell in love with a human. But her father died in a car crash when she was six years old, and her mother chose to leave this world to be with the man she loved. Chloe inherited several things from her mother including a basket of roving that remained full to overflowing no matter how many hours she spends spinning it into yarn. But she also inherited a responsibility to the town.

“Over three hundred years ago one of my sorcerer ancestors cast a protective charm over the town designed to shield Sugar Maple from harm for as long as one of her line walked the earth and — well, you guessed it. I’m the last descendant of Aerynn, and if you thought your family was on your case to marry and produce offspring, try having an entire town mixing potions, casting runes, and weaving spells designed to hook you up with Mr. Right.”

Unfortunately, the protective spell seems to be weakening. And there’s more than just protection from accidents and crime at stake. Because Sugar Maple “wasn’t the picture-postcard New England town our Chamber of Commerce would have you believe, but a village of vampires, werewolves, elves, faeries, and everything else your parents told you didn’t really exist.” However, Chloe’s mother really came into her powers when she fell in love, so maybe that’s all that Chloe needs.

But then a visiting beautiful stranger dies. The first tourist or nonvillager ever to die within town limits. Aerynn’s spell is definitely waning, because that’s not supposed to happen.

Sugar Maple doesn’t have any police force, since it doesn’t have any crime. So a policeman from Boston, who knew the deceased, goes up to the scene of the crime to investigate.

What follows is funny and quirky and full of surprises. Can the whole town hide the truth from him? And what will happen to the town if the spell fails? What will happen to Chloe?

I must admit, the romance is not exactly subtle. As Chloe begins to have magick, it basically throws her into the guy’s arms. But it is humorous to read about her trying to explain it!

This book is a light-hearted romp through a most imaginative situation. Definitely the best paranormal-romance-knitting-mystery I’ve ever read! And there are knitting tips at the back! How can you go wrong?

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/casting_spells.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Coronets and Steel, by Sherwood Smith

Adventure, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Romance, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Suspense 0

Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

DAW Books, 2010. 420 pages.
Starred Review
2010 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Fiction

I love Sherwood Smith’s books, and this was my favorite novel for adults I read in 2010. It’s got a touch of fantasy, with grad student Aurelia seeing ghosts during her European adventure, but mostly it’s swashbuckling action, intrigue, and romance in modern-day Europe, in the style of Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda.

Aurelia is in Vienna trying to track down her grandparents’ families. Her mother was only two when she and Aurelia’s grandmother left Paris during the war, and her grandmother never talks about her life before Paris. Then she starts meeting people who act like they know her. A handsome young man, who looks like Mr. Darcy, sits next to her at the opera, and the next day runs into her again.

She thinks he’s quite charming, until he drugs her drink, abducts her, and sticks her on a train.

This book has mistaken identity, family secrets, hidden treasure, and royal plots to take over a small country. It’s tremendous fun, and I was delighted to read that Sherwood Smith has planned more books in this series.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book I ordered from Amazon.com

Review of The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Daughter of Time

by Josephine Tey
Narrated by Derek Jacobi

BBC Audiobooks America, 2002. Book originally written in 1951. Complete and Unabridged. 6 compact discs, 5 hours, 19 minutes.
Starred Review

I read about this book in a list of Ten Classic Mysteries. (I think it was a posting by Booklist.) Later, it came up with my son, and he said that he had really liked it a lot. He said this rather defensively, and it turned out that it had been assigned reading in his 10th grade English class, covering World Literature. They had also studied the Shakespeare play Richard III. It turned out that not everyone in his class liked it, but the fact that Tim did was recommendation enough for me.

I listened to the audiobook version, with an absolutely brilliant narrator. (His American accent wasn’t great, but that was only one character. Everything else was superb.) The amazing thing is that in this book there is absolutely no action. The main character is lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling. Yet the book was so engrossing, I hated to get out of the car when I reached my destination, and kept thinking about the story all day.

Alan Grant, Scotland Yard inspector, had an accident while on duty that has put him in a hospital bed. People are bringing him annoyingly cheerful popular books to read, and he’s not interested. So when a friend, knowing his interest in faces, brings in several portraits of historical figures who have mysteries associated with them, he is intrigued in spite of himself.

The face that he can’t stop thinking about is the portrait of Richard III. Yet there was no mystery associated with him, was there? He was the embodiment of the wicked uncle — having his two nephews in the tower killed. Doesn’t everyone know that? Yet, before he knew whose face that was, why did Grant think it was the face of a judge? He usually wasn’t so far wrong about people’s faces.

Grant begins investigating — getting some books about Richard III and then some primary sources and the help of an American researcher. He draws a very different conclusion about the murderer of the princes in the tower — and builds an extremely convincing case. (Assuming that all the sources he refers to are actually as described — and I see no reason to think they wouldn’t be.)

I love it that Josephine Tey wrote this as a detective story featuring her own detective. As a book of history, it would probably get dry and boring, and I’d never pick it up — as a detective story, you share with the detective the thrill of discovering the truth. And the writing had me on the edge of my seat. It’s the sort of book, if I hadn’t been listening to it in the car, I’m sure I would have read in one sitting. Yet how she pulled that off with her detective flat in bed, is beyond me!

Absolutely brilliant!

The title is from this quotation by Francis Bacon: “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” There is much exploration in the book of how “history” is made.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/daughter_of_time.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Double Comfort Safari Club, by Alexander McCall Smith

Fiction Review, Light Reading, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Double Comfort Safari Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

Pantheon Books, New York, 2010. 211 pages.
Starred Review

This is now the eleventh installment of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Though I think it would be an enjoyable book as a stand-alone, I still recommend that people start at the beginning, and they will be all the more touched by these developments in the lives of old friends.

In The Double Comfort Safari Club, we again have a nice tangle of cases for Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s premiere detective, to solve. One of them necessitates that she and Mma Makutsi take a business trip to a safari camp, which is where the book gets its name. (I love the titles in this series!)
As usual, the solutions to the mysteries don’t really involve intellectual puzzles, as in traditional detective tales. These are more a chance for Mma Ramotswe and her friends to reflect on human nature and draw wise conclusions about life.

In this book, a terrible accident happens to Phuti Radiphuti, and his aunt tries to use it as an opportunity to keep him from Mma Makutsi. The reader’s heart will be touched, but be glad that she has friends like Precious Ramotswe to find a way to help in a bad situation.

As always, reading this book is like spending time with wise and kind friends. And the variety of cases keep things interesting. Always fun.

“Mma Ramotswe thought about this. Having the right approach to life was a great gift in this life. Her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, had always had the right approach to life — she was sure of that. And for a moment, as she sat there with her friend, with the late-afternoon sun slanting in through the window, she thought about how she owed her father so much. He had taught her almost everything she knew about how to lead a good life, and the lessons she had learned from him were as fresh today as they had ever been. Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

“She closed her eyes. You can do that in the company of an old friend — you can close your eyes and think of the land that gave you life and breath, and of all the reasons why you are glad that you are there, with the people you know, with the people you love.”

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.