Peachy Reads

Sue Grafton is another author I've read since the 1980s, and since her stories take place in that decade and time never advances much, it's always a bit nostalgic traveling back to the time before cellphones, internet, and many of the things that define the intervening decades.  This unfortunately is the last visit with detective Kinsey Millhone, since the author of the alphabet series "only" made it to Y before her recent passing. In Y is for Yesterday Kinsey is hired to find out the identity of a blackmailer who is trying to get a surprisingly paltry sum from a young man recently released from confinement after a tragic murder in high school.  The story ping pongs back and forth from 1979 to 1989 and includes as a sidestory a stalker (from a previous episode in the series) who is after Kinsey.  The whole book is a bit dark, and the usual lighter vignettes of Rosie's "offal" cooking in the neighborhood Hungarian restaurant and her octogenarian b...

Having recently read a couple books by Alexander McCall-Smith, his wonderful knack for character development reminded me of another skilled author who is adept at drawing well-rounded 3-dimensional characters, Anne Tyler.  I began reading Anne Tyler back in the 1980s with  The Accidental Tourist , but it had been many years since I had picked up one of her novels.  Clock Dance was available through the library's eBook service, so I reentered her world of quirky individuals, plotting their course through life. We first meet Willa as a young girl, trying to navigate a tricky childhood with a mother whose mood swings introduce a difficult dynamic into the home.  Willa holds things together, far too young to be doing so, trying to walk a tightrope and searching for that all important balance, which seems to be a recurring theme throughout her life.  We next meet Willa in college, with a promising career in linguistics ahead. ...

  Paul from My Italian Bulldozer is back.  He has a remit to write a book on the philosophy of food, but can’t find his groove in Edinburgh.  A distant cousin offers him a quiet place to write in a villa she’s rented in France, but it doesn’t quite go to plan.  The writing is soon derailed by a cast of village characters that consume all of Paul’s attention.  And the “second worst restaurant in France” turns into a project, not unlike Restaurant Impossible, that Paul can’t resist.  This almost has the feel of a comedic television series.  It’s light and entertaining.  It reminded me of Peter Mayle’s fiction, and characters like Anne Tyler writes.

A collection of David Sedaris’s essays might be the perfect antidote to these anxiety-filled times.   As to be expected there are many laugh-out-loud moments, but some serious content as well.   Sedaris always mixes darkness with light, so his revelations about his sister Tiffany and his mother’s alcoholism counterbalance the oftentimes wacky encounters he has with people on his seemingly unending book tours. Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve read some of these before, maybe I have, but it also could be partly due to being a lifelong fan.  

This is the ideal foil to the last couple of books I've read.  The anodyne tangential back-and-forth dialogue, and the unceasing non sequiturs are the perfect replacement for real conversation so absent during these self-isolating times.  But that's what McCall-Smith has always excelled at, after all.  Whether it be Precious Ramotswe, Isabel Dalhousie, Bertie Pollock, or Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfel, it's all about human nature, and never particularly about moving a complex plot forward! This new series is set in a police department in Malmö.  The sensitive crimes that Varg investigates are not the blood-soaked cases of nearby fictional colleague Kurt Wallander!  Instead, we follow a case that involves a minor knifing at a market stall involving a little person, a made-up boyfriend who disappears to the North Pole, and a supposed werewolf who is depressing a hotel's overnight traffic.  Characters are key here.  It's a great escape...

Medical examiner Sara Linton and her partner GBI agent Will Trent stumble across a band of domestic terrorists who have just perpetrated an explosive attack on the Emory medical center. Sara is abducted and Will goes undercover to save her and foil a larger terrorist plot targeted on Atlanta and its airport.  Sara’s journey takes her to a doomsday community somewhere in the Georgia mountains.   There she is confronted with a mysterious health emergency among the children in the camp, which first appears to be measles, but eventually reveals itself as something much more sinister.  This is a well-crafted story, but violence and bio-terrorism were perhaps not the escape I was looking for during a pandemic!  Maybe it was because the setting was Atlanta and Georgia, which normally would be fun, but given recent news headlines, just wasn’t.

Alfred Hitchcock's psycho shower killer has nothing on the frenzied bent murderer in Stalker .  Videos of women in private moments in their homes are posted on the internet, and then within the hour their corpses, with horribly mangled faces, are discovered by police.  A pattern begins to emerge, and of course a surprise ending and a deft escape round out the novel.  The non-stop action and blood-saoked violence unspool breathlessly.  Sure, it's a page-turner, but I found it to be all a bit one-note after awhile. Joona Linna is back from the dead, though the spotlight doesn't fall quite so much on his fascinating personality as it has in previous novels in this series.