★★★★☆ Myrtle's cold case

Cold-Blooded Myrtle

Elizabeth C. Bunce

The title of the third Mrytle HardCastle mystery is, as usual, a pun exploiting the assonance of Myrtle and murder. (This HAS to be the reason Elizabeth C. Bunce chose the name Myrtle, right?) This one is odd, though, because "cold-blooded" is the one thing that our Myrtle is NOT!

Our Myrtle is keen as a hound on a scent. She's a brilliant, nosy kid who can't be persuaded, ever, to mind her own business. She is not put off by blood and poison and viscera, which sounds like she might be cold-blooded, except that she's not -- she's positively enthusiastic about murder, even ghoulish.

And we love it! Or at least, I do.

For Cold-Blooded Myrtle, we don't take any trips or go anywhere exotic. The action takes place entirely in Myrtle's home town of Swinburne and the neighboring Schofield College. Schofield College, it turns out, is where Myrtle's mother studied many years ago, before Myrtle herself was thought of.

When a former Schofield professor is murdered, the killer leaves behind a kind of signature pointing to Olive Blackwell, a student who disappeared from Schofield many years ago. And Myrtle discovers a link between Olive and her own mother. All our old friends are on hand to enliven the investigation.

Cold-Blooded Myrtle on Amazon

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ Mad sorcerers

Down on the Farm Charles Stross Sorcerers go mad. In Charles Stross 's LaundryVerse they suffer from K-syndrome (Krantzberg-Godel Spongiform Encephalopathy), a disease that results from running invocations on the neural hardware in your brain, in contrast with the safe practices of modern computational demonologists such as Bob Howard, who use electronic computers. ("Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of." -- Arthur Dent.) Mad sorcerers are a problem. You can't just give them a pension, even with generous health care. Compared to a mad sorcerer, a thermonuclear warhead is no more than a minor annoyance. Mad sorcerers need to be protected from themselves, and we need to be protected from them. Unknown to Bob, the Laundry has a facility, "St Hilda of Grantham’s Home For Disgruntled Waifs And Strays" (as Bob eventually remarks, "most of them aren’t so much disgruntled as demonically posse...

★★★☆☆ I'm still struggling with Easy Rawlins

A Red Death Walter Mosley I began reading Walter Mosley 's Easy Rawlins mysteries because one of them appeared in the Marvel Netflix series Luke Cage . (Sneer if you like, but I have read better books for much worse reasons.) I didn't much enjoy Devil in a Blue Dress -- in my review , I wrote, ...it is not a terrible well-constructed novel. There's just too much going on: too many characters, too many locations, too much event. It held my interest, but I was lost much of the time. But Blue Dress was Mosley 's debut novel, and I thought it could only get better. A Red Death is the second book, and it is not measurably better. It still felt like work to read it. The plot doesn't just meander -- it careens drunkenly from one scene to another. And there are so many minor characters. Every time a name appeared, I found myself asking, "Who is this person, now?" Also, there was one specific thing I disliked. Easy Rawlins is one ...

★★★★☆ Granny Weatherwax gets headologized

Witches Abroad Terry Pratchett Witches Abroad is the twelfth novel in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld series, and the third in the Witches subseries, after Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters , which introduced Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and the unfortunate Magrat Garlick. They are the central figures of Witches Abroad , but the first three witches we meet are not Magrat, Granny, and Nanny. One of these first three is Desiderata Hollow, who is about to die. but has unfinished business left. She needs to get Magrat, Granny, and Nanny to take care of it, so she uses headology. Got to be all three. And that ain’t easy, with people like them. Got to use headology. Got to make ’em send ’emselves. Tell Esme Weatherwax she’s got to go somewhere and she won’t go out of contrariness, so tell her she’s not to go and she’ll run there over broken glass. "There" is the distant city of Genua, where the third of the first three witches has cast hers...

★★☆☆☆ A story about a stupid liar who tells a stupid lie

The Lie T.C. Boyle ** spoiler alert ** Two days ago I started a local community college course called "Writing Short Stories". As an example the first week's material had a video of author T. Coraghessan Boyle reading his story The Lie aloud. The story in summary is that the protagonist (certainly not a hero), who is a lazy guy, doesn't want to go to work one morning, so he calls his boss and tells him a really stupid lie. The next day he skips work again and he doubles down on the lie. Eventually he gets caught by his wife. There are a lot of stories of stupid people acting stupid. There are so many that I have to assume some people like these stories. I am not one of them. The Lie on Amazon Goodreads review

★★★★☆ Fictions, not stories

Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges The title of Jorge Luis Borges 's Ficciones is both precise and accurate. It is indeed a book of fictions. What it is not, I was surprised to find, is a book of stories. Ficciones combines two short prose books by Borges : El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan ( The Garden of Forking Paths ) , consisting of a prolog followed by seven works, and Artificios ( Artifices ) , consisting of a prolog and nine works. Borges is a creative genius and the imagination he shows in these pages is dazzling. But, with a few exceptions, they are not actually stories. They are scholarly expositions of splendidly creative ideas. For instance, the first work, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," is a description of some very strange fictional places. When I say "story," I mean something like what literary scholars mean by the word, a work of fiction with a plot and characters. By a plot I mean, roughly, a tale ...

★★★☆☆ Good fairy stories, dreary ruin stories, and a John Hughes movie

Patreon Year 3 Seanan McGuire I will begin by clarifying what I am reviewing here. Seanan McGuire has a Patreon Creator page. Patreon is a website where artists can share their work with subscribers. Subscribers pay a certain amount (usually monthly, but that varies from artist to artist), and in return get access to things ("rewards" in Patreon-speak) that the artist posts on Patreon. "Things" can mean images, videos, or (most relevantly in this case) eBooks. Typically there are multiple reward tiers -- the more you pay, the more you get. McGuire set up her Patreon page in June 2016 and has posted a story every month since then, which makes 63 now (August 2021, when I am writing this), plus a few one-time extras. These "stories" can be pretty substantial literary works. For instance, the reward for July 2021 was a short novel. The way Patreon works, if you subscribe to a tier, you typically get access to everything that was posted for that tier at any...

★★★★★ Finding a home

The Blue Sword Robin McKinley When I was growing up my father's job kept my family moving. Mom and Dad eventually settled down, but just when they did I became an itinerant academic, moving to study and work at various research institutions. I was a 27 year old grad student at Stanford when I first read The Blue Sword and the longest I had ever lived in one place was six years. (Understand, I am not complaining -- I was and am a Happy Nomad.) There's a peculiar type of homesickness experienced by rootless people. One usually thinks of homesickness as being away from and missing a very specific place -- the place one calls home. But I had no place to call home. And yet I sometimes felt homesick -- I felt the lack of a home -- all the more because there was no home where I longed to be. In the first few chapters of The Blue Sword I immediately recognized this feeling of rootless homesickness in Angharad (Harry) Crewe, the hero of the book. As the book begins Harry ...

★★★★☆ Myrtle's Vacay

How to Get Away with Myrtle Elizabeth C. Bunce The title of How to Get Away with Myrtle , the second book in Elizabeth C. Bunce 's Myrtle Hardcastle Mystery series, is, like all the titles in the series, a pun. The double entendre in this case involves two meanings of "get away": to take a vacation, and to escape punishment for a crime. Neither of these things actually happens. Myrtle's father, Arthur Hardcastle and aunt, Helena Hardcastle, in their unending yet futile quest to change Myrtle into something that vaguely resembles a normal 12-year-old Young Lady of Quality, have arranged for Myrtle and her governess, the estimable Miss Judson, to take a seaside holiday. Aunt Helena, who is reminiscent of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha in her relentless disapproval of the younger sprout, alas, accompanies them. (Myrtle's father, in Paris for a criminology conference, does not appear.) The holiday is a package deal arranged with one Sir Quentin Ballingall, an ol...

★★★★☆ A Study in Scarlett

The Notorious Scarlett and Browne Jonathan Stroud A warning to begin -- this review will contain spoilers for book 1 of the series The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne . I will, however, try to avoid spoilers for this book itself, The Notorious Scarlett and Browne . In fact, this review is much easier to write than the one for Outlaws , because now I can be upfront about Albert's mental powers -- he reads minds, and he has poorly controlled telekinetic powers, which so far have mostly manifested in the form of huge explosions in his vicinity that somehow luckily spare Albert himself and his friends grievous bodily harm. In Outlaws we learned most of the story of Albert's life, at least to the extent he himself knows it, through flashback chapters. His earliest memories are of Stonemoor -- a prison/education facility for people like Albert who have mental powers -- and of Dr Calloway there, who tormented him, ostensibly to teach him to control his powers. I confe...

Search This Blog