Just a Little Bit OCD

It's back to the British Isles in my reading, and time for another list of books.  Remember I can't seem to let myself give away my books that I've read until I mention them in this blog, and my book shelves are crowded.  The trials of being slightly OCD--did I ever mention that I have to fight the urge to straighten up books in a book store when I'm browsing?  This neatness compulsion stops there unfortunately--no carryover to my home.




Berkley Prime Crime, 2013, 293 pages

If the last mystery I reviewed featured a setting for my Scots ancestors, I now give equal time to a book set in Ireland that a friend gave me.  However, this book is not as good as A. D. Scott's A Double Death on the Black Isle.  It's a bit more romantic in tone--young American, Maura Donovan, is bequeathed money by the grandmother who raised her so she will return to the Irish village where her grandmother was born.  Once Maura gets there, she takes a job in the local pub because there is really nothing waiting for her in the states.  Maura is befriended by some of the locals--the ones who aren't trying to kill her after a decades old body is discovered in a near-by bog.  It becomes a bit far-fetched as newcomer Maura has information that can help identify the body.  If she is right, it opens up a lot of speculation about property ownership and succession.  This is the first of a new County Cork mystery series by author Sheila Connolly who touts her own implacable Irish credentials.




New American Library, 2013, 355 pages

I bought this book using a gift card from Christmas because I loved the cover art.  Set in 1920's seaside England, this book is a Gothic mystery, complete with a couple of ghosts haunting the house where Oxford student Jillian Leigh is staying as she tries to settle the affairs of her eccentric Uncle Toby who has died under mysterious circumstances.  A Scotland Yard detective is also on the scene, there are local villagers with their own eccentricities and secrets, and so many twists and turns that it is difficult to say much more about the book without giving too much away.  The heroine goes from crisis to crisis so one arrives at the climax quite exhausted.

Minotaur Books: A Thomas Dunne Book,
2009, 356 pages

Another piece of cover art that drew me in, so I used my generous gift card from friends to purchase Dying in the Wool, a mystery set in a Yorkshire mill town and featuring young WWI widow, Kate Shackleton who has agreed to investigate the disappearance of the father of a woman with whom she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the war.  More deaths occur in the mill town as Kate traces the circumstances in the village when the man disappeared.  Suspicion falls first on one person, then another and Kate herself becomes the target of people who don't want this mystery solved.  Kate has been compared to Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs, and the book provides the same pleasurable reading experience with a bit less of the horrors lingering from the battlefield.

Author Tasha Alexander

Minotaur Books, 2010,
306 pages

I've read several of the Tasha Alexander's Victorian series featuring Lady Emily Ashton.  In this one, Lady Emily is recovering from a near death experience.  Lady Emily has become a less engaging character in this book and seems newly prone to the vapors.   The mystery is filled with people with familial mental illness. This book was only mildly interesting--I read it but I wouldn't recommend it.  I think Tasha Alexander is a talented author, so I fully expect subsequent works of hers to be of a higher calibre.

Berkley Prime Crime, 2012, 325 pages

I'm not a huge fan of Ann Purser's Lois Meade series, but I read them if they fall into my lap.  This one involves a rich Japanese woman and her missing violin.  Lois gets involves because the young woman is the musical partner of Lois' talented son.  Purser captures village life in working class England.  I read a lot for milieu, and so far Purser hasn't captured my imagination, but I like the cover art!