Review of Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto, read by Eunice Wong

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

by Jesse Q. Sutanto
read by Eunice Wong

Books on Tape, 2023. 10 hours, 40 minutes.
Review written July 26, 2023, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review

Here’s a delightful cozy murder mystery with a modern Miss Marple as the sleuth. But instead of knitting, Vera Wong is an expert in teas. She lives alone in San Francisco’s Chinatown above the tea shop she established with her late husband, “Vera Wang’s World-Famous Tea House.” She gets up at 4:30 every morning, texts her lawyer son, and goes for a brisk walk before spending her day in the shop. Unfortunately, Vera only ever has one customer, a lonely old man whose wife is bedridden. But Vera always concocts the perfect tea for him.

Then, one morning, there’s a dead body in her shop, with the shop window broken. Vera calls the police and leaves things as she finds them — well, aside from cleaning up the broken glass. And drawing an outline around the body. And, well, taking a flash drive out of the dead man’s hand.

The police don’t do anything like Vera has seen happen on CSI. They don’t seem to take the murder seriously at all. They don’t even take fingerprints or look for DNA evidence! So Vera figures she’s going to have to investigate herself. She cleverly puts an obituary in the paper right away, being sure to mention that the body was found at Vera Wang’s World-Famous Tea Shop. Sure enough — the next day four people show up at the tea shop, and Vera has her suspects.

This is where the unsolicited advice comes in. Vera meets the dead man’s wife and daughter, as well as his twin brother. And two young people who claim to be journalists. And, naturally, she gets to know them, serves them tea, and gives them unsolicited advice.

What follows is a delightful story as a lonely and interfering old lady investigates a murder – and finds a family. Except there’s that little problem that one member of her new family is likely the murderer. Which one? Vera is certainly clever enough to find out!

I had given up expecting murder mysteries to be amazingly heartwarming! This one’s delightful.

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Review of Zero Days, by Ruth Ware

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

Zero Days

by Ruth Ware
read by Imogen Church

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2023. 14 hours, 10 minutes.
Review written July 17, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Okay, if you like thrillers at all, this is one of the best I’ve read. I started finding excuses to keep listening to the audiobook (which I usually do while doing chores) because I was completely invested in the story.

It begins with a young woman named Jack breaking into a large office building. And it takes subtlety, strength, planning, and attention to detail. I found myself hoping it was like the beginning of the Scarlett & Browne books, showing a successful heist to start off, so that we’d understand how capable our main characters are. Because it was super tense, and I was already afraid she was going to get caught.

Speaking to her through her earpiece, helping direct her movements and evade security, was her husband Gabe. They clearly have a great working relationship and deep fondness for one another, with a little flirting along with the danger. I found myself thinking that it’s very unusual for a main character to be in a great marriage right at the start of the book. I had a bad feeling that situation wouldn’t last.

I won’t even tell you how those gut feelings were fulfilled or not fulfilled. If you read a description you’ll find out, because it’s the very beginning — but I did enjoy the suspense right from the start.

What I will tell you is that Jack ends up being on the run from the police while trying to solve a mystery — and pretty much everything is against her and she doesn’t know whom she can trust.

And she’s a character I couldn’t help but admire, incredibly good at tight situations, so I was invested in her making it, but not at all sure how or if she would. The tension doesn’t ever let up.

I have to say that Imogen Church is the perfect narrator for a young British woman in a tense situation. I’ve listened to quite a few of her audiobooks by now and she adds to my enjoyment. I’d had the audio sped up with the previous audiobook I’d listened to, and had to slow it back down to normal, because she speaks quickly and keeps the tension going.

I’m currently on the Morris Award Committee for YA debut novels, so only have time to “read” novels for adults in audio form, and the only problem with this thriller is it made me want to spend all my time with it, not reading the award-eligible books I needed to read. So good! Give it a try!

ruthware.com

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Review of Premeditated Myrtle, by Elizabeth C. Bunce

Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Starred Review 0

Premeditated Myrtle

by Elizabeth C. Bunce
read by Bethan Rose Young

Recorded Books, October 2020. 8 hours, 12 minutes.
Review written September 25, 2022, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review
2022 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #9 General Children’s Fiction

I am so happy I finally listened to this book! I’ve meant to read it since it came out in 2020. But October is when I’m reading for the Cybils Awards, and that year I was reading for both Young Adult Speculative Fiction and Young Adult Fiction, so I put off reading Myrtle, but finally found it again now that I listen to eaudiobooks. I’m afraid my Cybils reading is starting up again this year, but some time I look forward to reading three more books about Myrtle, the 12-year-old detective from the 1890s.

Premeditated Myrtle is the first book about Myrtle, a girl who lives in England in the town of Swinburne with her widower father and her governess, a very capable young lady from French Guiana. Myrtle’s father is a prosecutor, and Myrtle is very interested in his work. So when their next door neighbor is found dead in her bath, Myrtle is curious about her death.

The neighbor, a grumpy old lady named Miss Woodhouse, always took a bath at the same time each morning. So why would she have taken one in the middle of the night? And why is there pollen and mud on her nightgown? And whose tracks are in the mud by the pond? And where is the cat named Peony? Worst of all, why is Mr. Hamm, the gardener, burning Miss Woodhouse’s collection of prize lillies and lying about it?

The mystery takes several twists and turns, in some ways reminiscent of the penny dreadful books that Myrtle enjoys. But she finds an actual case more challenging than what the book characters navigate.

Myrtle’s a kid, but the author does a nice job of giving her a believable amount of agency in this story, with Myrtle also being aware when her detecting goes against the rules for what “young ladies of quality” should be doing.

The whole thing is lots of fun, and I’m glad that the fourth book about Myrtle was recently published, so I can enjoy more of her adventures.

elizabethcbunce.com

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Review of Cold, by Mariko Tamaki

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Mystery, Teen Fiction Review 0

Cold

by Mariko Tamaki
read by Katharine Chin and Raymond J. Lee

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2022. 4 hours, 37 minutes.
Review written August 19, 2022, from a library eaudiobook

Cold is told in two voices, and one is the voice of Todd, a boy who just died. He’s hovering over his body, in a park naked and frozen in the snow, when his body is found by a dog. Detectives come and begin trying to figure out what happened to him and who killed him.

The other narrator is Georgia, a girl who didn’t even know Todd. But as she learns about him, she feels like they have some things in common. They’re both queer and don’t have many friends at their respective high schools. It turns out that Todd was a Senior at the boys’ school where Georgia’s big brother Mark is also a Senior. Mark tells her he didn’t know Todd, but something’s bothering her about that statement.

Meanwhile, while Georgia is thinking about Todd’s death and what might have happened, Todd’s ghost is following the investigation. The detectives are interested in the one teacher who was kind to him. Todd didn’t have a lot of friends, and maybe if he hadn’t wanted one so badly, things would have turned out differently.

This isn’t really a detective story, as the mystery isn’t solved so much as slowly revealed. When Georgia and the reader find out the answer, all the pieces fall together.

Todd’s ghost watching events takes some of the sting out of the story of a 17-year-old being murdered — but not entirely. I was left with a sense of sadness, as Georgia’s left thinking about what it all means.

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Review of How to Raise an Elephant, by Alexander McCall Smith, narrated by Adjoa Andoh

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Mystery 0

How to Raise an Elephant

by Alexander McCall Smith
narrated by Adjoa Andoh

Recorded Books, 2020. 8.5 hours on 8 compact discs.
Review written October 7, 2021, from a library audiobook

Here’s the latest installment of the adventures of Mma Ramotswe and her associates with the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana. This audiobook has a new narrator, and I wasn’t crazy about some of her character voices, but I did love the way she rolls all her Rs and of course her delightful accent.

If you haven’t read any other books in this series, I do recommend beginning with the first book, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. That one is better written as a detective story, but the main point of these stories are not the cases the agency must deal with, but the relationships between the delightful characters and their observations on life and human nature.

In this one, there are three main cases to be considered: a distant cousin of Mma Ramotswe’s asking for money, new neighbors moving in next door who seem to be having marital troubles, and Charlie borrowing Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van for a mysterious purpose.

The cases aren’t solved by figuring out puzzles, but as we see the ins and outs revealed, we gain insights on relationships and approaching life with compassion. Though Charlie’s story – which is not too surprising because of the title – ends up involving an orphaned baby elephant.

I’ve taken to listening to these books on my commute because I don’t quite have patience for the rambling and meditative observations on human nature when reading an actual book. But stuck in traffic, they never fail to make me smile. The books are anchored in Botswana, and I’m starting to feel like the country itself is a beloved friend.

recordedbooks.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of State of Terror, by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, read by Joan Allen

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Mystery 0

State of Terror

by Hillary Rodham Clinton
and Louise Penny
read by Joan Allen

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2021. 15 hours, 41 minutes on 13 CDs.
Review written May 27, 2022, from a library audiobook

Normally I would never check out a novel written by a celebrity, but the pairing with Louise Penny, a distinguished mystery writer, was enough to intrigue me. Surely a former Secretary of State can write very convincingly about plausible terrorist threats.

Actually, it’s a little too convincing. The story begins with a female secretary of state recently appointed by her political rival. The new president appointed Ellen Adams essentially to ruin her political power, and they don’t like each other very well. The narrator sounded a lot like Hillary Clinton, and the set-up got me wondering if Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had disliked each other as much as the two characters do.

But the characters are in a very different situation. The previous president was “Eric Dunn,” and they go on about what an incompetent buffoon he was. There’s another scene that includes the president of Russia, I guy named Ivanov, who is portrayed as pure evil. Mind you, the secretary of state gets the better of both of them! How much is that wish fulfillment fantasy and how much is it just rational commentary on what the world could be like after our last president?

I didn’t think the writing was stellar, and the plot had things about it that I can nitpick and also that I did see coming, but it certainly held my interest and kept me awake on my commute.

Shortly after the book starts, a large bomb goes off in Europe, followed by another. And then they get evidence there will be a third bomb, and it’s going to happen on the same bus in Frankfurt where Ellen Adams’ reporter son has been following a lead.

But that’s only the beginning. Who is responsible for the bombs? And what are their plans now?

It was probably a little self-indulgent of the author to make it the female secretary of state who figures out the answers and deals with tyrants and saves the day. I mean, why not write a book where the hero reminds everyone of you?

I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I reveal that some of the villains are right-wing idealists in the United States, even in positions of power. They’re willing to work with Al Qaida and bring terror to American soil if it will put a liberal president out of power and start things fresh, back to “real” America.

This was published in October 2021, and would have been written well before that. I thought it was interesting that even in this scenario, the authors didn’t think of having the right-wing talking about election fraud. And they talked about the danger that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan when they had to pull out troops based on the deal made by “Eric Dunn.”

So it was all rather disturbing. And probably a touch too realistic.

I don’t think there’s any danger that people who are politically conservative will want to read this book. If you pretty much agree with Hillary Clinton’s assessment of Donald Trump, I mean “Eric Dunn,” then this book emphasizes how many bad results could still come to pass from his presidency.

But try to listen to it as a realistic thriller of what could have happened, but is not happening in real life.

simonandschuster.com

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Review of Good Girl, Bad Blood, by Holly Jackson, performed by MacLeod Andrews and a full cast

Contemporary, Mystery, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Good Girl, Bad Blood

by Holly Jackson
performed by MacLeod Andrews and a full cast

Listening Library, 2021. 10 hours, 48 minutes.
Review written May 24, 2022, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review

Big thanks again to my coworker Lisa who recommended the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series to me! This is Book Two. Each book has a complete case, but you’ll want to read them in order so you don’t have the surprises in the earlier books spoiled.

Pip is a high school senior and spent the last book solving a cold case of murder and disappearance as her Senior Project. She told about the case in a wildly popular podcast. But now her parents want her to slow down and focus on school. Her life was in danger at the end of the first investigation, and she was obsessed with finding out more. So when one of her best friends comes to Pip about his missing brother Jamie, Pip tries to say No.

But when the police don’t consider Jamie’s disappearance to be high-risk, Pip feels she has to get involved. Jamie’s mother and brother beg Pip to use her new notoriety to spread the word about Jamie’s disappearance and get more people looking.

And so a new case begins, and a new season of Pip’s podcast. Pip herself saw Jamie at a memorial service for the victims of her last case. So now her task is to trace Jamie’s movements after that event. But getting answers brings more questions. And yes, some of the answers bring danger to Pip and others.

Being a teenage sleuth sounds like a lot of fun, but this author explores how investigating affects Pip’s life and relationships. Besides a gripping mystery, these stories make us care about Pip and her family and friends. And we think with her about what it takes for justice to be served.

listeninglibrary.com

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Review of The Murder of Mr. Wickham, by Claudia Gray

Austenalia, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Murder of Mr. Wickham

by Claudia Gray

Vintage Books (Penguin Random House), 2022. 386 pages.
Review written June 30, 2022, from my own copy.
Starred Review

A huge thank you to my sister Becky, who sent me this book for my birthday — such a perfect gift!

The Murder of Mr. Wickham is about a house party that brings together characters from all of Jane Austen’s novels. Emma and George Knightley are hosting the party, and they’ve invited Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy, along with their oldest son Jonathan. From Sense and Sensibility, we’ve got newly married Marianne and Colonel Brandon, who it turns out is Emma’s cousin. Much to my delight, it turns out that Catherine Tilney has become a novelist, and her daughter Juliet has been invited to provide another young person. And Hartfield was being rented to tenants Captain Frederick and Anne Wentworth — but a staircase collapsed, so they’ve been invited to join the party. On top of everything, Knightley’s clerical relative Edward Bertram is coming with his wife Fanny.

So we see all these characters we know and love, a varying number of years after their marriages. But then on a dark and stormy night, Mr. Wickham turns up, and it turns out that all the characters gathered there have reasons to hate him, mostly because he’s been investing other people’s money, but for some other dark reasons as well.

So when young Juliet Tilney finds the dead body of Mr. Wickham, it turns out that one of the other guests is probably responsible. Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney are the only ones without a strong motive, and they begin doing a little investigating together. The magistrate, Frank Churchill, seems to be overlooking some evidence, after all.

I found this book completely delightful, and the author even managed to pull off an ending that satisfied me. I loved the look at all these beloved characters as married couples. All of the marriages were having some strain when thrust into this difficult situation — and the specific tension in each marriage was consistent with the characters of the people involved. Claudia Gray really made me believe this is how the futures of these couples might turn out. And it was tremendous fun to read about their interactions.

This is a must-read for all Janeites.

claudiagray.com
vintagebooks.com

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Review of To the Land of Long Lost Friends, by Alexander McCall Smith

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery 0

To the Land of Long Lost Friends

by Alexander McCall Smith
read by Lisette Lecat

Recorded Books, 2019. 9 hours on 8 compact discs.
Review written June 16, 2021, from a library audiobook

Okay, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series seems to me like it’s getting more slow-moving than ever. But I have come to love the people who inhabit the pages, and I’m happy to spend time with them. My impatience with the pace is mitigated by listening to Lisette Lecat’s lilting accent during my commute. And I have to say that I did enjoy my time spent listening to this book, visiting with old friends. This is the 20th installment.

The first book in the series had some very clever solutions to cases. This one did cover a few cases, but the solution ended up having some fairly large coincidences bring about a solution. It’s fun, but doesn’t necessarily highlight their detective work.

Mma does reconnect with some long lost friends in this book, which gives the title. As always, this book is loaded with charm and philosophical musings about things such as meeting up with long lost friends.

And Charlie! Charlie, who for a long time was just a “young apprentice” as a mechanic, is now jostling for respect as an “apprentice detective,” and he wants to get married! He has to come to terms with what he’s willing to do to make that happen.

recordedbooks.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of One By One, by Ruth Ware, read by Imogen Church

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

One By One

by Ruth Ware
read by Imogen Church

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2020. 13 hours and 8 minutes.
Review written November 13, 2021, based on a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

One By One is a mystery and thriller designed with nods to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The setting is a ski chalet in the Alps. Soon after a ski outing where a guest goes missing, there’s an avalanche that cuts them off from civilization.

The guests this week are from Snoop, a U.K.-based app that lets you listen to the music other people are listening to. But Snoop’s in trouble financially, and they have to decide whether to take a buyout offer or try to turn things around with new technology. Tension is high because of that decision, and millions of dollars are at stake.

But the new technology is location-based and using it shows them the missing founder is in the bottom of a gorge. And may not have landed there by accident. When deaths follow that are definitely not accidental, we know that a killer is stuck in the chalet with them.

As is traditional, we start the book with ten people in the chalet — eight from Snoop, plus the two staff for the chalet, Erin the hostess and Danny the chef. We get alternating perspectives from Erin and from Liz, who was once a personal assistant at Snoop, and is now the smallest shareholder with two shares. But that means she’s the deciding vote for whether the company should take the buyout or not, which puts her under lots of unwanted pressure.

We get a window into the complicated relationships among the Snoop coworkers from Liz, who thought she’d left it behind long ago. Erin has an outsider’s perspective, but we get hints of some secrets of her own.

As time goes by, their phones have no connection, their power goes out, the temperature drops, the snow keeps falling, and the police fail to come. All while more deaths happen and tension builds.

I wasn’t surprised by Whodunit — I’ve read enough Agatha Christie mysteries to suspect this person — but I still thoroughly enjoyed the way it was unveiled. And yes, as is traditional with thrillers, figuring out the solution puts the one who figures it out in terrible danger.

I had to find things to do that would let me listen to this book to finish it as quickly as possible. Too much suspense to set it aside! Wonderful!

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