A Return to Provence and Venice in Books

While I love hard copies of books as demonstrated by my stash from the Centenary College Book Bazaar described here, I've enjoyed my Kindle far more than I thought I would, and BookBub has made it easy to view titles and download them free or inexpensively.  I try to focus on my personal challenge to read the books from my library shelves, but I often succumb to temptation and download e-books.  I've read two e-books this week.


The Promise of Provence

Patricia Sands
Kindle e-book



Katherine Price’s husband leaves her for another woman in the most cowardly way possible—he leaves her a note in the roses he traditionally gives her each year on their anniversary.  Katherine is devastated even as she admits their marriage hasn’t been satisfactory for her either.  Phillip was controlling and had monopolized her time.  Her best friend, her cousin and her widowed mother help her pick up the pieces and move forward. 

 

As other life changing transitions occur in her life, Katherine needs to make a dramatic change, so she participates in a “home exchange” program.  A couple wants to spend a couple of weeks in Toronto, Katherine’s place of residence, and Katherine can live in their house in Provence, France.

And it is the descriptions of her accommodations and the places she visits that were my reason for downloading this book from BookBub.  My husband and I traveled to many of the same places in Provence. Patricia Sands has photos on her website here that show places that inspired her book.  I included a few pictures of Provence below from our trip a years ago.

"Hipstamatic" view from the garden of our friend who lives in Cadenet

 

Ricky and I at Lourmarin Market

 

 Bread and tapenades at the Lourmarin Market

I don’t read a lot of women’s fiction, but this was an enjoyable evening’s visit to France.  I learned new facts about Provence while reading this novel and discovered places to add to my “To See List” for our next trip.  I also appreciate Sands’ recurring themes of women, aging and travel.  Patricia Sands has an attractive and comprehensive website, which is worth a visit.

In the epilogue to The Promise of Provence, Sands informs readers that Katherine’s journey isn’t over at the end of this novel.  There will be a sequel.  While I enjoyed this book for its setting, I’m not sure I need to know the rest of the story, but you never know.



Elusive
Sara Rosett
Kindle e-book

Zoe Hunter and Jack Andrews are divorced but the collapse of the housing market has forced them to continue to share a residence.  For convenience they have divided the house into his and her areas and see each other only if they meet on the stairs or in the front hall.  Zoe works from home editing travel guides.  Jack has a start-up eco-waste disposal business.  Their unorthodox living arrangement seems to work until the police come to Zoe with the news that Jack has disappeared and is presumed to have drowned.  When Zoe goes to Jack’s office to tell his business partner the distressing news, she finds the partner dead.

The police and FBI descend on the scene and seem to think Zoe is working with Jack to fake his death in order to cover up fraudulent business practices.  They suspect Jack killed his partner, then faked his own drowning.  Zoe doesn’t know what to think.  The more she learns about her ex-husband, the more he is a stranger to her.

Someone in a brown car starts tailing Zoe, which is both annoying and alarming.  Zoe wants to solve the mystery so she will no longer be a person of interest. She follows clues to Las Vegas where she finds she is in more danger than she realized.  The key to the puzzle seems to lie in Venice so Zoe soon finds herself overseas, but there is no safety there either.

Elusive was another BookBub e-book selection, and with part of the mystery set in Venice, I was interested in reading the book.  I enjoy books with overseas settings, especially places I’ve visited.  It’s a way to return briefly to that locale.  Because the action picks up in Venice, Zoe doesn’t do much sightseeing, but the backdrop of Venice and the canals are an essential component of the story's climax.

 

So I decided to include some photos of Venetian canals taken when my mother and I visited Venice.  (You may click on photos to enlarge them for better viewing.)

 

Gondolas ready to take people on tour of Venice waterways. 

Water taxis take guests to the islands.
 

A police boat patrols the canals.



 

Venetian canal with Bridge of Sighs

 

Back alley waterway in Venice

Weathered walls of buildings on canal side



Once you accept the premise of Rosett’s series, it’s enjoyable escapist fare, but don’t analyze it too closely. I liked the characters and kept reading to see what happens to them.  Elusive is the first in the “On the Run International Mystery” series written by Rosett.  Other books in the series are Secretive, Deceptive and Suspicious.  This isn’t the most nuanced mystery you will read, but Elusive held my attention.  If you grew up watching “The Fugitive” on TV, you will probably like this series.

Click here to visit Rosett's website.  She writes another popular cozy mystery series featuring Ellie Queen, but Elusive is the only book I've read by this author. 

BookBub Book Reviews

I’ve read several e-books recently, and I find that BookBub is a good way to preview a variety of affordably priced books.  BookBub, actually a Cambridge, Massachusetts, start-up company called Pubmark, Inc. is designed to help publishers and authors sell their e-books online.  Co-founders, Josh Schanker and Nick Ciarelli, have no publishing experience, but are marketing entrepreneurs in the fields of technology and blogging. The two-year-old company emails a daily newsletter, BookBub, to those who sign up.  It informs the recipient of the daily deals, handpicked by BookBub staff, that are available for Kindle download. 

When you sign up for BookBub, you select the literary genres you prefer, and then you receive daily recommendations in these categories.  Publishers and authors like the BookBub service because it draws readers’ attention to their books--out of the 3,500 books released daily in the United States!  I like BookBub because it tells me about books I may never hear of otherwise and offers the down-loads free or at discounted prices.  The discounted prices are only available for a short period of time. To read more about BookBub, click here.

 

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

Sara Gran

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2011 

Private Detective Claire DeWitt needs money so she agrees to return to Post-Katrina New Orleans to determine what has happened to her client’s uncle who disappeared during the storm.  While a lot of folks lost their lives and all bodies were not identified or found, this missing man was wealthy, lived in the French Quarter where it didn’t flood, and should not have been in harm’s way.   

Claire’s search soon takes her into the underbelly of New Orleans.  She befriends young drug dealers and street thugs, smokes marijuana laced with who knows what, and stays up all night passing a bottle back and forth with a homeless woman. It appears to me that Claire goes above and beyond the call of duty! 

Using her PI skills, plus “signs” from the Universe, she gets closer and closer to the truth.  There are those who want to stop her, her client fires her, she narrowly escapes with her life, but, in the end, she does unveil the truth.   

The characters are interesting, but not likable.  The book is gritty and surreal at the same time.  Many readers will either like the flawed, quirky DeWitt or be repulsed.  I fall somewhere in the middle.  I have a mild curiosity about the sequel and the development of the recurring characters, but I’m in no hurry to purchase it.

 

 

Author Julie Smith & some of her titles

Louisiana Lament: a Talba Wallis Mystery

Julie Smith

booksBnimble Publishing

(Originally published as a Forge Book:

Tom Doherty Associates, 2004)

 

You may sense a trend here in my interests as Louisiana Lament features another New Orleans Private Detective Talba Wallis and her partner Eddie Valentino.  New Orleans may be called the City that Care Forgot, or the Big Easy, but its residents have a lot of troubles in murder mysteries.  Talba’s half-sister, her father’s “outside” child, calls her in a panic and begs her to come to an address in the Garden District.  When Talba arrives, she finds the owner dead, and her half-sister is the most logical suspect in the eyes of the police.  Talba agrees to investigate the murder, initially on behalf of her sister and then Talba is employed by the victim’s son.

The motives and the plot didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  One component of the Talba Wallis mysteries’ is her other occupation, that of a slam poet called “The Baroness de Pontalba.”  Talba often refers to herself in the third person when she is responding to comments about her poetry, e.g.  “The Baroness thanks you.”  I cannot relate to this character.  I prefer Smith’s other mystery series featuring Skip Langdon who is a New Orleans police officer, or those with Rebecca Schwartz, a San Francisco lawyer. 

 

Adventures in Funeral Crashing

Milda Harris

Kindle download, 2010 

Kait Lenox, at age 16, marches to a different drummer.  Her hobby, indeed her obsession, is crashing funerals.  Not just the service, but the wake and the burial, if possible.  Why, any reader might ask, would a teen-ager do this?  Kait, an only child, lost her mother about a year ago.  Her father doesn’t know much about raising a teen-age daughter, but does his best.  In the meantime, Kait attends every funeral that she can.  She likes to hear the stories about the departed loved ones as mourners share stories of the persons when they were alive.  

Harris writes with a light touch, although Kait deals with high school bullying as her former best friend, Ariel Walker, apparently derives great pleasure in ridiculing her, preferably in front of others.  This is not a serious Young Adult novel.  It is escapist fare, with cliques of the most popular boy in school befriending the class' weird girl, Kait.  Every book doesn’t have to solve the world’s problems.  The characters are likable, the plot around the murder is weak, the motive for murder even weaker, but I can see where some young adolescents would find it entertaining.