The Liquor Vicar by Vince R. Ditrich

It's every eccentric dreamer & small-town store owner & jaded RCMP officer you've ever met, all crushed into one zany story by an ex-rocker who lives on Vancouver Island himself. He knows whereof he writes.

The first thing that hits you about this book is that it’s not a cozy. As if it could be with a title like this. But it goes in hard and fast and definitely off the twist. And that’s just the prologue. 

 

Chapter 1 is just as weird in a different way, introducing our protagonist, our antihero, Tony Vicar who is at that very moment gyrating his way right out of a job as an Elvis-impersonating wedding DJ. Then we meet Tony‘s new boss, and have a really enjoyable few pages inside Tony‘s head while he mentally corrects all the malapropisms his new boss utters. But at the end of it, he has a new job in a back-bush hamlet on Vancouver Island. 

 

Even if we still don’t find much sympathetic about Tony or any of the other characters, there is a hint that he cares not to make life worse for himself or anybody else, no matter how much he despises them. And he despises pretty much everybody. There is no softness, very little political correctness, just jaded dystopian review of his neighbours and society and the whole universe. 

 

The only thing that makes Tony truly outraged is unwitting massacre of the English language; The only thing he loves is music, preferably from 40 years ago. But he has these Robin Hood moments where he just goes off to help out someone vulnerable. 

 

I was definitely intrigued enough to keep turning the pages as Tony settles in to his new life, and the front seat of his new boss's massive, ancient muscle car.

I admit to being a bit generous with the stars on this one, in that I really enjoy the voice of Jacky O. That’s not her real name but she says herself that nobody can spell it and very few can extract what it's supposed to sound like from the Irish Gaelic spelling. And her descriptions of other characters tell as much about her as about them, for example, “This guy. Kind, generous, and surprisingly sensitive, but with the social graces of a bag of mud hitting the sidewalk from a great height.“

There are some funny minor truths here too. 

 

“Those passengers were surveilling him, stalking him. Driving around his house to get a look-e-loo. He’d never heard of such a thing in this country, where most celebrities still mowed their own lawns.”

One annoying little tic is the author intrusions. We’re going along happily falling for all the rhetorical flourishes, seeing exactly what we're intended to see and thinking what we are supposed to think about all the characters, and then the author intrudes to underline it for us. Whether the author himself or an editor somewhere along the way decided that it had to be underlined for the slow readers, I don’t know. But it is obvious and off-putting when it happens.

Despite that last comment, I am definitely up for another dip into the world of this author, just as soon as I can get my hands on their next book.

#Dundurn #VancouverIsland #ComedyOfErrors #music #love #friendship #smalltownlife

DARE NOT TELL by Elain Aucoin Schroller

The novel is named for the poem by Henry Lawson, “The things we dare not tell,“ and includes verses from that poem at each section.

Although the story is billed as concerning events in World War I, it opens in 1939 London. Immediately we learned that Joe's  brother Robbie had been missing, presumed killed,  for the past 22 years. Then we follow Joe and his wife Sophie, a war nurse, back to their World War I meet, and onward again to 1939.  Joe and Sophie spend part of the summer in France, and slowly realize that the shadow of war is looming over the border from Germany again.

Sophie and Joe are overall good, responsible, ethical people. Their wartime and later relationships develop in a way that feels recognizably real. This is solid women's fiction from a historical perspective. The details of Parisian wartime life are seamlessly woven in (although there's a lot of roast chicken eaten). Their travels through France and meeting with other WW1 veterans at the War Memorial are engaging, although the secondary characters aren't developed. Joe's troubles with nightmares and other symptoms of Post-Combat Stress Disorder are convincing.

The second half of the book is almost a different story than the first. If the first half is good women's fiction, the second is mediocre spy story. Journal entries from an unnamed point of view character are introduced out of nowhere. These were 'as you know, Bob' descriptions of the narrator's actions instead of credible journal entries that reveal the character and motivations of their writer. I found them an unnecessary distraction from, rather than an augmentation to, the unfolding intrigue plot. The tension would have been greater if Joe and Sophie, along with the readers, had been left guessing for longer about the source of the suspicious events..

Don't judge this author's whole future body of work on this one review. The writing is sound and there's deft handling of the main characters. The structural issues of the second half are not uncommon with debut authors, and should have been pointed out by editors, as should the relative flatness of the secondary characters. I would look at this author's next book before crossing them off my reading list


**********SPOILER ALERT***********

Last Dance on the Starlight Pier

Last Dance on the Starlight Pier

By Sarah Bird

One of those rare books where the prologue shapes the reader's entire experience through to the final page.
 
Set largely in gaudy, glammed-up Galveston in the years following the great crash of 1929, the tale bounces between the shocking 1932 prologue and the summer of ‘29 when Evie Grace’s life first takes a turn away from vaudeville and deep poverty toward nursing school and respectability.
 
From there we follow her winding path forward and backward in time, up and down the social scale, from luxury hotel suites to dusty homeless camps. Flashbacks from her early life flesh out her current situation and preoccupations, and her brushes with the mobsters who run America's lucrative Prohibition-era liquor trade compete for sheer nail-biting tension with repeat encounters with her mother, Mamie, whose high-drama selfishness makes Joan Crawford look more like Mary Poppins than Mommy Dearest.
 
This book is a much bigger, more absorbing story than I was expecting, with ever-deepening knowledge of the Depression's economy, society, and politics as well as a blistering condemnation of the treatment of women in general and of anyone suspected of 'sexual deviancy' which had an elastic definition that could be stretched to fit almost any situation and used to bludgeon anyone with less power. 

The writing is sound, the Depression backdrop is laid in with sure and convincing strokes, and tough-as-nails Evie is easy to root for. So easy, in fact, I stayed up well past bedtime to follow her unfolding journey, rooting for her to find acceptance and happiness and the family life she yearns for.
 
 
Highly Recommended for anyone with an interest in American history, women's history, and love that doesn't fit the mainstream mold.

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 #womensfiction #StarlightPier #Depression #Galveston #DanceMarathon #Prohibition #politics #corruption #LastDance #LGBTQ #mobsters #nursing #Netgalley

Mrs. Claus and the Evil Elves

  

Mrs Claus and the Evil Elves 

By Liz Ireland 

3rd in the Mrs. Claus mystery series, this book is a delightful escape into a world of candy canes, reindeer, elves, and Christmassy crime. Tired of living a lie, April Claus invites her best pal up to Santaland for a holiday. Innocent Claire is at first unbelieving, then baffled, then enjoying the opportunities to shop and bake with the elder Mrs. Meanwhile, Santa’s preoccupied with a looming reindeer strike and some elves are embracing modern electronic toys at an alarming rate. 

When Santaland is hit by sabotage and other chicanery, terrorizing everyone from the mayor to the usually slow-moving snowmen, April dives into investigating with her customary zeal to protect the place—and the man—she’s come to love even more than her old life in Oregon. 

I enjoyed the previous book, Mrs. Claus and the Halloween Homicide. This one’s even better. The author has a way with visual imagery that elicits giggles and sometimes guffaws. The Christmas-theme trappings are delightful. The elves are characters familiar from any small-town (!) mystery: shop owners and bakers, manufacturers and officious public servants. The plot glides along like a well-steered sleigh from first crime to final confrontation, making it easy to relax into the charm and zaniness while trying to spot the clues and smell the red herrings amid the candy canes. 

Highly recommended. 

 #Netgalley #MrsClausMystery #Elves #Christmas #Mystery #cosy #CrimeFiction #reindeer #NorthPole #Santa 

 

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Last Call at the Nightingale

Good Jazz Age atmosphere, a lively and believable heroine, and a dead body outside the Nightingale club make this book easy to fall into. The writing is competent, the characters well sketched from the start, and trouble unfolds around dance-loving Vivian faster than her cranky neighbour can think up her next complaint.

Questions pile up about people Vivian likes as well as those she can’t stand. The dead man lurks, tainting Vivian’s desire to return to the Nightingale even though she’s sure of her welcome by the friendly bartender, Danny, and fascinated by the enigmatic owner, Hux. Then there's the debonair mystery man who showed up right around the time of the murder and seems willing to buy Viv's between-dance drinks forever. And a flapper socialite's frustrated boyfriend. And Viv's equally frustrated sister, who stays home, works hard, and can't understand how Viv can risk police raids and poisoning by bootleg booze just to go dancing night after night.

The narrator doesn’t give a lot of inflection early on, and you have to listen carefully to the words to know which character is talking. But after a few chapters she settles into the voices, especially Vivian’s, and lets the story unfold through emotion as well as the words.

There are a few jarring switches in Vivian’s audacity/bravery that threw me off a bit, but overall this is a competent, well-crafted, and absorbing Jazz Age mystery.

 

#Netgalley #mystery #JazzAge #BlindPig #Speakeasy

The Shadow of Memory

RELEASE DAY!!!!

The Shadow of Memory

by Connie Berry

4th in series

The title is foreboding, and the setting in part reflects that, with a Victorian sanatorium for the insane as a backdrop. The rest, however, is English cosy crime of a high order. There's the female amateur detective, Kate, an American with the obligatory professional police love interest. Many of the sprawling cast know almost everyone else, and the long ago crime stretches its tangled roots through not only the immediate village but out to several surrounding towns. All it needs is a bit more emphasis on police procedure to be a fitting entry in a Midsomer Murder episode.

The author has some sneaky humour in there, as the sanatorium's former name was Netherfield Hall. Yes, like that famous Jane Austen line, “Netherfield Hall is let at last.” Another nod is to cosy mystery royalty via the name of Brightwell, as in the famous author of the Mrs. Jeffries mysteries.

Although the (first) body is found early, there is a bit of meandering around and chatting to people before essential questions get asked and the detecting begins to gather momentum. Since the person who holds most of the early clues is actually Kate's roommate, the delay in getting down to brass tacks is quite noticeable although neatly papered over with mild British drama around the engagement of Kate to widowed policeman Tom over the objections of his mother.

That said, our amateur sleuth, an antiquarian dealer, is competent, intelligent, and apparently lacking any deep psychological traumas which is a nice change from many modern sleuths. Moreover, she is almost always thinking about the investigation and analyzing what she has learned about her unfolding collection of mysteries.

I use the word "collection" advisedly. Not only is there mystery around what happened to a family 50 years ago, in a strangely modernist house we will all find familiar from various Poirot TV episodes, but there’s also mystery around a possibly forged antiquity, and over who in the current generation could possibly have enough at stake in these decades-old crimes to go after a bunch of seniors who were teenagers at the time and didn’t think they knew anything of import about any of it. Thrown in are some sidelights on the incestuous nature of modern corporate and developer finances, and on how some family money and connections persist across generations.

The only real drawback I found is the sprawling cast: so many minor characters are coming and going in this mystery that they start to pile up and blur by the midpoint. There are Netherfield's board members and their forebears and current families, the original teen sleuths from the 1960s, their descendants/inlaws and survivors, other police and art experts, waitresses, care home attendants, and an old man whose only purpose is to offer a single pointer. Added to the series characters (this is the 4th) the sheer quantity of names gets a bit much to recall. It could have been streamlined by having fewer named characters offer more information each, or some info coming from sources other than fleeting conversations with characters who never appear again.

Overall, the book is an absorbing read, as winding as any hike through the history and hills of an English countryside, where each twist of the trail promises new revelations, rain may fall, and there's a cosy pub with a crackling fire at the end of it all.

#Netgalley #RandomHouse #cosymystery #TraditionalMystery #art #ArtHistory #ArtForgery #InsaneAsylum #TeenSleuths #1960s #castofthousands #EnglishVillage #ConnieBerry #EmilyBrightwell #NetherfieldHall #Poirot

Three Reasons for a DNF

 As regular visitors know, I mainly review from traditional publishers. But today I'm turning over the page to a reviewer who only handles independent authors. Pamela Willson of The Picky Bookworm has some thoughts to share on what makes her not want to finish a book.

 

 3 Reasons for a DNF

Not finishing a book, for me, is like getting to the tootsie inside a tootsie pop, then throwing it away. Doesn’t seem the point. I also feel guilty when I don’t finish a book. Until a while back, when a librarian told me something that has stuck with me:.

Life is too short to read a book you’re not completely interested in.

Once she told me that, I felt so much better about letting go of the guilt, and only sticking with those books I absolutely love.  Here are 3 reasons why I’ll quit.

Reason to DNF #1: Obvious lack of research

When it’s obvious the author has done little to no research about the topic in the book, I get bored and frustrated REALLY quickly. One book I started a couple years ago was supposedly set during the time after Jesus’ ascension, but it felt like either the author wasn’t a Christian and was just making stuff up, or just didn’t care. Either way, I made it through about 25 pages before I gave up.

When it’s obvious, however, that an author has researched well, and is approaching the subject matter in a sensitive and thought-provoking way, I am all about that. Two examples of this would be:

HIDDEN MAGIC by Elana McDougall: I absolutely adore Elena. Her books created some really diverse characters in a fantasy setting, and her story telling is amazing. I In this book, there’s an abusive situation. She had obviously done her research, because not only did the character give examples, but it was handled sensitively enough that a reader could see their own life, and maybe find the strength to leave a dangerous situation. I really applaud Elana for her handling of this subject.

THE GOOD SISTER by Sally Hepworth: I don’t know Sally personally, like I do Elana, but I absolutely loved this book! One of the characters is autistic, and while it’s never stated outright that this is the case, Sally provides enough examples of behaviors or mannerisms, that it would be easy for someone who isn’t autistic to understand what’s going on. What I really like is that through her fiction, I learned more about what being autistic means, and if I’m ever in a situation where an autistic person gets overwhelmed, I can recognize it and use tools from Sally’s story to help.

Reason to DNF #2: Lack of Emotional response

I want to care about the characters. I want them to feel real, and I want to either root for them to win, or root for them to die. I don’t like feeling mediocre about a book. A good example where I really cared was Meg in Fear and Fury. I loved her. She was snarky and rude, but despite her negative quirks, I rooted for her during the whole book. I will typically give myself about 30% of a book, to allow for evolution of a character, or for me to start caring, before I will give up. If I don’t care by then, chances are I won’t ever.

THE 13^th ZODIAC by Lacey Krauch: Lacey has worked really hard to make sure her readers are carried on a wave of emotion throughout her entire series. Whether we are rooting for the good guys, or wishing the bad down an elevator shaft, her books are a roller coaster of emotion. I love that.

DESTINY & OTHER DILEMMAS by Caroline Fleur: Caroline created Brooke, a mom whose son has food allergies. Brooke is such an amazingly relatable character that I rooted for her happiness, no matter what she was going through.

BETWEEN THE BIRCHES by Katie Roberson: I proofread Katie’s book, and DM’d her at one point to tell her that I had to back up 5 pages, because I forgot what I was doing. She created such an immersive story. I laughed, I cried, and I cheered. 

 I could probably list about 100 books here that gave me all the feels, but I’ll stick with these.

Reason to DNF #3: Really, REALLY bad editing

I’m a book editor and proofreader, and most times I can overlook small issues. I’ve read books in the past that had good premises, but whoever edited them just did a godawful job. One book, true story, used “bought” instead of “brought” throughout the whole book. Props for consistency, but minus a million points for not realizing it was the wrong word.  While I finished the first book, I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the others in the series.

It’s not all bad news

Before you get upset about not having the money for a professional editor, let me tell you something. Editors who also review books can TELL when you’ve done your best. We KNOW that not many people have the budget for expensive services. That’s why we can overlook many issues.

We can also tell when someone has thrown together and published their first draft.

Authors work hard on their stories. I get that. I’m friends with many authors on Twitter and love reading about their journeys. I want indie authors to keep writing. The world needs your stories. I hope you can take these words and use them as encouragement to make your story the best it can be. I promise, that people like me will always be around to shout about them from the rooftops.

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