Note before I start: I’m equal parts enraged and exhausted by the attempted coup last week. The images of white supremacists and alt-right extremists storming our Capitol, at the urging of our president, armed with Confederate flags and zip ties, made me sick to my stomach. Yet for anyone who has kept their eyes open about Trump and his followers, they are no surprise. I can only pray that now that he is deprived of some oxygen, days from his departure from a position of official political power, that his deplorable supporters sink back into the woodwork where they belong. PS – it wasn’t Antifa. It was Trump and his trolls. Own the violence, own the inflammatory rhetoric from the Trumps and Giuliani that exacerbated and urged it moments before it exploded, and punish it accordingly.

And now onto the books, eh?

As always I am joining our hosts Steph and Jana for this monthly linkup.

I didn’t read that much in December – too much else going on at work and at home. But I did get a few books under my belt and one “definite recommend”.

1. The Girl in Cabin 13 (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery #1) by A.J. Rivers was a Kindle Unlimited selection. (I’ve since unsubscribed from Kindle Unlimited since once my library reopened for at least curbside pickup, I can pretty much get anything I want that way, and the Kindle Unlimited selections weren’t consistently appealing for me.) Anyway, this was a quick read, introducing Emma as an FBI agent undercover in a small town to investigate several deaths / disappearances. I would read more of this series, but in general I’d say if you’re looking for books about strong female law enforcement, there are better selections out there (including the one I discuss below).
2. Where the Lost Wander, by Amy Harmon, was another Kindle Unlimited. The story of a family setting off on the Oregon Trail mixed with a love story. I love historical fiction but on occasion find it culturally problematic…This one seemed to acknowledge those pitfalls and avoid most of them. My biggest beef was that a major incident occurs within the first 1/4 of the story, and immediately afterwards, the author backtracks to fill in the narrative up to that point. The reader then has to wait until the last 1/4 of the book to find out the resolution of the aforementioned major incident. I know that the author probably thought that dropping the bombshell early and then withdrawing would draw readers on, wanting to find out the resolution, but for me it essentially rendered the entire midsection moot. I don’t care what they packed or what she drew or her relationships with her kid brothers after that, especially when some / all of the characters that the author is laboriously filling me in on may not survive Major Incident. So I ended up speed-reading and skipping large chunks just to get to the resolution. Which didn’t make it an especially enjoyable read.
3. Death in the Family (Shana Merchant #1) by Tessa Wegert is a much better example of the genre I reference in book 1 above. It’s an Agatha Christie-esque family whodunnit featuring a murder on a remote, storm-tossed island and a gallery of plausible related suspects in a sprawling manor house. Shana has her own demons and has to battle those throughout and the narratives mesh and play off each other nicely. Hugely atmospheric, fast-paced, and kept me hanging on until the last. Highly recommend.
4. A Rose for her Grave by Ann Rule – another Kindle Unlimited (can you tell that my library closed down in December because of a Covid surge?). True crime queen Ann Rule tells the story of a Blackbeard-type murderer who marries, takes out life insurance policies on his unwitting brides, and dispatches them one after another. If you like true crime, her books are classics.