Deadly Nightshade (Martha's Vineyard Mystery #1), by Cynthia Riggs (author), Davina Porter (narrator)

Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9780786153374, March 2006 (2001)

Victoria Trumbull and her niece Elizabeth live on peaceful Martha's Vineyard--peaceful, that is, until Victoria hears a scream, investigates, and finds a body on the outgoing tide.

Victoria starts, not investigating, of course, just wandering around her island home noticing things and asking questions. Which, unfortunately, the wrong people notice. Elizabeth, who drives her aunt around, and works for the harbor master (a retired NYC cop whom some people find to be very out of place on the island), starts to have some scary experiences--being followed, nearly driven off the road, unexpected and unfamiliar visitors when she's on the late shift at the harbormaster's shack.

We get a lively picture of island life, the mix of the old residents and the new, the social changes disrupting old ways, the tourists, and a presidential vacation. The characters are interesting, individual, and compelling. I'm looking forward to reading more of this series.

Recommended.

I borrowed this book from the library.

Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, by Newton S. Minow and Craig L. LaMay

University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226530390 , September 2008

Newton Minow, who helped bring the presidential debates into existence, and then helped guide their development, wrote this history of the debates for 2008. University of Chicago Press re-released it as an ebook for the 2012 elections.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this history is how hard it was to create televised debates between the presidential candidates, precisely because of rules intended to prevent the power of the new medium being exploited for partisan advantage. We get a wonderfully interesting tale of how the first presidential debate series, between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, was brought through the tangle of regulatory and competitive obstacles, and why it didn't happen again for well over a decade. Even with regulatory issues resolved, and both major party candidates in theory willing to do debates, there are still endless problems that need to be resolved anew every single time: number of debates, format(s) of debates, whether third party candidates will be included (and which ones.)

Days of Grace, by Catherine Hall

Portobello Books, ISBN 9781846271830, 2009

Nora is twelve years old when, because of World War II, she becomes one of the thousands of English children put on trains out of London into the safer English countryside. Her mother puts her on the evacuation train for her safety, but Nora feels it as an emotionally devastating rejection. When she reaches rural Kent and is taken in by the Rivers family, she bonds immediately with their daughter, Grace, is enchanted by Mrs. Rivers, and grateful for the new world Rev. Rivers opens up to her with education.

Nora and Grace grow as close as sisters, but as the girls reach adolescence, she discovers that even that is not quite close enough. She wants more, something that at that time and place she can't even ask for. And gradually she learns that this idyllic family is not quite so idyllic as it looked at first. There is a grief and a barrier between Rev. and Mrs. Rivers, and a fatal weakness in the Reverend.

Pets in a Pickle, by Malcom D. Welshman

John Blake, ISBN 9781843583615, June 2011 (December 2006)

Paul Mitchell is a young, newly-minted veterinarian, beginning his career at Prospect House Veterinary Hospital. Everyone, from the vet owners of the practice on down, is eccentric, to put it mildly. This includes the husband and wife who own the practice and who have their own very decided views, the receptionist with one working eye and one false eye, which comes out accidentally from time to time, and other support staff including Lucy, the young vet tech who becomes Paul's girl friend. She keeps rescuing animals, and she and Paul have a steadily growing menagerie, including the goose originally acquired for Christmas dinner, but who proved too good at home security to eat.

But the eccentricities of the staff are as nothing compared to the eccentricities of the clients and other assorted neighbors. There are the two older ladies still actively farming, and still living in a time about four decades ago, at least. There is the family with one dearly loved pet pig among the livestock on their farm, and the couple who dote on their pregnant mare, and are convinced that normal symptoms foretell the imminent loss of their pet.

It's clear the aim of this book was to tap into the ample market created by James Herriot's tales of his veterinary adventures. Pets in a Pickle is a fun book, but not in James Herriot territory, sadly. It suffers from the fact that fiction has to be plausible, while non-fiction only has to be true.

Fun but lightweight.

Book trailer

Second Hand (Tucker Springs #2, by Heidi Cullinan & Marie Sexton

Riptide Publishing, ISBN 9781937551575, September 2012

Paul is a young man who has been dumped by his girlfriend Stacey for a man with better prospects. Paul, sadly, is still hung up on her. El--Emmanuel Rozal--runs the pawn shop he inherited from his granddad and avoids all relationships because he sees all the failed relationships (but not the successful ones) all around him. El, by the way, is gay and out, and however mixed up his family is in other ways, it's just not an issue for them.

One day, spurred on by the need to do some outside maintenance on the rundown rented house Stacey picked and then left him with, Paul walks into El's shop.

The Secret Keeper, by Kate Morton

Simon & Schuster, ISBN 9781439152805, October 2012

Laurel Nicolson is an actress now in her mid-sixties, successful and happy in her career. She's come home with her brother and sisters for her mother Dorothy's birthday--her last birthday, as Dorothy Nicolson is fading both mentally and physically.

And Laurel finds herself obsessed with a long-buried mystery, the shocking day in her teens when, sitting in a treehouse, she saw her mother--her kind, generous, loving mother--kill a strange man who approached her in front of the Greenacres farmhouse and said something alarming. The man was Henry Jenkins, a writer who had been popular in the thirties and forties, but had since faded and declined, obsessed with the death of his wife Vivien and having acquire a reputation as the "picnic stalker." It doesn't fit the mother she knows, and Laurel decides she has to know the truth.

A Christmas Garland, by Anne Perry

Ballantine Books, ISBN 9780345530745, October 2012

Thomas Pitt's Special Branch boss, Victor Narraway, wasn't always the head of Special Branch. Long ago and far away, he was a twenty-year-old British Army lieutenant in India during the Mutiny. As the youngest officer, and new to the unit he's now in, Lt. Narraway gets assigned a fairly nasty task: defending an Army medic charged with a horrible murder.

The medic was well-liked, but so was the guard who was killed. And this killing took place as part of the escape of a prisoner, who after escaping also slaughtered an Army patrol. Also, there's no evidence against the medic except that everyone else's location is positively accounted for at the time of the murder. He's the only one who could have done it.

It's an altogether nasty situation, and Lt. Narraway knows he's expected to not make too much trouble as the defense, and let the situation be resolved with no more pain than is absolutely unavoidable.

But it bothers him that there is no actual evidence against his client, and that his client is very, very convincing when he says he didn't do it. With less than two days to work with, Narraway starts investigating.

It's a clever mystery with an unexpected but convincing resolution.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

What's a Dog For? The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man's Best Friend, by John Homans

Penguin Press, ISBN 9781594205156, November 2012

There's a lot of interesting material here, and yet in the end I am deeply frustrated with this book.

Homans gathers together in highly readable form much of the most recent research on dogs, their ancestors, and their relationship with us. Teasing out the history of dogs, just barely genetically different from wolves, has been a tricky business, not least because early dogs and proto-dog wolves would not have been physically different from their wolf relatives in any way that shows up in the fossil record. It's a fascinating story, and almost as fascinating is the story of how hard it has been to get any real research on dogs. Dogs, you see, were until the last couple of decades too mundane and familiar for research on them to be "respectable." Homans has studied the research, interviewed the researchers, and attended the academic conferences, and has a lot of good information to impart.

Fox Tracks, by Rita Mae Brown

Random House, ISBN 9780345532978, November 2012

Jane Arnold rides again, this time in pursuit of a killer riding with her own hunt.

The first signs of trouble are far from Virginia, in New York City, where "Sister" Jane Arnold, her lover Gray Lorillard, and two of the young ladies recently graduated from Custis Hall, and now attending Princeton, are attending the annual Masters of Foxhounds Association dinner. During this New York interlude, Jane and Tootie visit a tobacco shop to buy a gift for Gray, and meet a charming, Cuban-born tobacco merchant.

What Matters in Jane Austen, by John Mullen

Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN 9781408820117, November 2012

Mullen gives us a wonderful trip through Jane Austen's novels, including the unfinished Sanditon, looking at obvious, non-obvious, and "I never thought to ask that!" questions about Austen's world, daily life, the behavior and relations of the characters.

What people call each other seems a simple and obvious detail, but it reveals a wealth of information about status in a class-conscious society, relationships between characters, and the formality that governed relations even between husband and wife. When characters violate the rules, it's not a throwaway detail. It reveals important information about the characters and their relationships. In Persuasion, Anne Eliot's sister Mary and Mary's husband are a rare case of husband and wife addressing each other by their given names. This isn't the norm as it is for us, or the sign of marital intimacy it is later in the 19th century. Instead, it's a symptom of the disrespect and frustration the couple feel towards each other.

Another aspect of daily life in Austen's world that's mostly alien to us now, where we don't have the same assumptions that Austen and her original readers did is in both the formality and the ubiquity of mourning. Strict rules governed what people could do and what they could wear when recently bereaved of their near and not-so-near relations and connections. Death was all too frequent, could come as the result of what started off as apparently a minor cold, and failure to observe mourning for family, connections, friends, etc., could cause offense and long-lasting ruptures between different branches of a family or formerly close friends.

This is a clearly written, engaging exploration of Austen's world, her fiction, and of what a daring and even experimental writer she was, creating major innovations in story-telling that are with us today.

If you enjoy Austen and enjoy going "behind the scenes" to see what makes a novel work, this is a fascinating, rewarding read.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.