Peachy Reads

I’m always fond of a good alternative history, so when The Afrika Reich came across my radar screen, I snatched it up.  In this novel Germany comes out triumphant in World War II.  Great Britain negotiates a non-aggression pact with the Nazis that allows them to retain their empire.  Africa is now primarily divided between the British and the Germans, the Nazis pursuing their racial policy, a diabolical plan of shipping Europe’s Jews to Madagascar and eradicating native peoples and transporting remaining black Africans to the region of Muspel in the Sahara. Burton Cole is an Englishman with a mercenary past.  He thinks those days are long gone when he is made an offer he finds impossible to refuse—a contract to assassinate his nemesis, a despicable Nazi in the new German African territories, whose efforts at the aryanization of the continent are stomach-turning.  Plus he has a history with Cole. So starts a nonstop thrill ride that rivals anything tha...

About two-thirds through this book I had just about decided that this might be my last Flavia de Luce novel. I do love Flavia, how could you not? She’s smart beyond her years, infinitely resourceful, indomitable, charming.   But this latest novel is just such a complex wedding cake of a mystery novel that I found it to be a just a bit overplotted.   When the church organist is found murdered, stuffed in the crypt of the church’s patron saint, Saint Tancred, Flavia jumps into action to figure out whodunnit.   Before she’s done she will have negotiated secret tunnels through the church yard (giving the vicar’s wife a fright in the process), swallowed a priceless diamond, forced her way into a manor house where she makes friends with a man-boy with webbed hands (whose father suffers from leprosy), survived an attempt on her life by a church lady and sustained burns in an ether explosion… Well, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.   There is such an extensive ...