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Reading is what I’ve been up to, and these books were purchased locally at Murder By The Book.

New this year:

I can’t believe Requiem For A Mouse is my friend Dean’s sixteenth book in his Cat In The Stacks Mystery series. I feel like I just started reading them! Writing as Miranda James, his cozy series features a librarian/widower named Charlie Harris and his helpful Maine Coon cat, Diesel. The books are set in a fictitious college town, Athena, Mississippi, and every time I read one of the novels, his characters make me feel like I’m spending time with old friends. There are other cats, the occasional dog, and enough bad guys and murders to keep Charlie busy as an amateur sleuth. Plus: a library and plenty of good Southern cooking!

Martin Walker’s Bruno series includes 24 works, including novels, novellas, and a short story collection. There’s also a Bruno cookbook he wrote with his wife Julia. The series features Benoît Courrèges, aka Bruno, a former soldier turned policeman, enjoying the “pleasures and slow rhythms of country life” in the fictional village of St. Denis in the Périgord Region of France. The novels’ horses, dogs, townfolk, and meals are part of those “slow rhythms,” but Bruno’s romances, the crimes he solves, and the historical context Walker provides season the novels with delicious details, while the international intrigue adds a soupçon of suspense. I’ve learned so much from Walker’s books and his booksignings, and an offhand post-war diplomacy tidbit he once mentioned at a signing inspired me to research and develop an intricate part of my own Neverending Saga.

I got this one a couple of years ago and have finally raced through it in two days because I COULDN’T PUT IT DOWN.

I would hope anyone reading here knows who Hillary Rodham Clinton is, and Louise Penny is the author of the Inspector Gamache mystery series set in the fictitious Three Pines, Québec (the nineteenth novel in that series is due the end of this month, and I can’t wait). The real-life story of how the two woman became friends, and how publishing figures and life events brought them together to write a suspense thriller, is naturally fascinating to me–friendships having been not only a huge part of my adult life, but also because I co-authored novels with friends. Though I only occasionally read thrillers, political or otherwise, this one held me spellbound. It features a new administration in the White House, including a new president and his female secretary of state. She was the head of a publishing empire, and the president may have chosen her only to settle an old grudge and ultimately disgrace her. We get to travel the world with this one, and meet plenty of heroes and villains, though sometimes we’re not exactly sure who’s who. Though published in 2021, the themes and ideas explored remain topical, and I appreciated reading about strong, smart women, complicated and often painful family dynamics, and fascinating settings (the political leaders and figures throughout are fictionalized, though there are effective references to real-life international figures, as well). I also was delighted to find Easter eggs in mentions of Penny’s Three Pines village and characters (Clinton was a reader of the series before she and Louise Penny were introduced). I hope one day these two will write another together.