It's a sunny, cold day at the farmette. Most of our snow has melted away with the warm temperatures and a bit of rain (!), although we still have a couple of inches of cover.
It's been a couple of months since I did a book review post, so thought I'd catch you up on my reading. I've continued my voracious appetite for it, partly because that's how I've always been and partly because the selection is pretty awesome these days.
Ann Cleeves is one of the authors Rob and I religiously read. Every time one of her books is published, we snatch it up quickly.
While she is known for her intrepid investigative character Vera Stanhope (highly recommend the books and the British television series starring Brenda Blethyn), she's written a couple of books with Matthew Venn as her hero. He's a complex person, having been shunned by his ultra-religious parents for being himself and marrying his love Jonathon Roberts.
The setting is almost as important as the mystery, on the coast of North Devon where the ocean gets wild and the Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) figures prominently. Amazing that well-trained volunteers are the ones who risk their lives to save others - or pick up a body floating in a boat, in this case.
There are many twists and turns, blind alleys and dark secrets held by the residents of the odd little village where Matthew has to sort out whodunit. Highly recommend this ripping story.
Anthony Horowitz is another favourite, prolific writer. Not only has he written some gobsmacking murder novels, he scripted Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders for years. This one really has a twist, because he inserts himself into the book's action. Daniel Hawthorne is the extremely quirky and tight-lipped detective and Horowitz is the guy who's supposed to follow him around recording his movements for a memoir.
Horowitz trails after Hawthorne on a bizarre case in which a well-heeled woman is found dead mere hours after she made her own funeral arrangements.
The line between fiction and reality is nearly erased as Horowitz weaves his own experiences among the threads of the story. What you get is a gripping tapestry of a tale. Again, highly recommend.
Finally, a book that's not about murder, but about death and a thoroughly modern take on the story of Scrooge. A young woman who thinks that her life has been wasted tries to kill herself.
She finds that, in the murky bit between breathing and not breathing, there's a library containing an endless supply of books that allow her to live a variety of different lives. Adventurous lives. Glamorous lives. Meaningful lives.
The trips she takes as she tries on all these different lives is eye-opening, helping her (and the reader) understand better what a fulfilling life might really look like. Great read.
So that's it. A little toddle through the latest offerings from the Harris-Wilson-Wilson-Harris library, where the lives being lived involve felines, family, friends and the farmette. Which is just grand. Until next week.
Gratuitous cat photo courtesy of Beatrix Potter, who has taken to her 'cave' to avoid being pestered by a certain young ginger named Calvin, who likes to pounce on her old bones. No worries. He's sound asleep in the 'apartment' above.
