O Jerusalem

Author Laurie R. King sends Holmes and Russell to British controlled Palestine to work on a case for Mycroft.  During their sojurn they masquerade as an Arab man and boy traveling with two others through the countryside.  Their costumes bring them into some unusual situations as Russell proves to their two guides her ability with a knife and her willingness to kill if necessary.  The four of them uncover a plot to destroy British rule and of course triumph.  An exciting story.

The Klondike!

Having once visited Dawson City in the Yukon, I decided this book Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike would be an interesting read.  Author Charlotte Gray takes a look at the gold rush and its relationship to the development and decline of Dawson City through the stories of six different individuals.  We witness the tale through the eyes of writer Jack London, miner Bill Haskell, businesswoman Belinda Mulrooney, journalist Flora Shaw, mountie Sam Steele, and priest Fr. William Judge.  This was a fascinating account of the free-wheeling and often amazing story of the gold rush from the travels on the Chilcoot Pass tthrough the earliest gold strikes, the tent cities, and freezing conditions and starvation, to the eventual commercialization of the gold industry.  Gray writes a worthwhile tale.  It makes me want to go back to the Yukon to see the area through better informed eyes.

You've heard about it, now read it!

I have heard endlessly about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, and I bought it a year ago.  But it took me until last week to get around to reading it.  I hated putting it down!  It is worth reading. 

Disgraced financial investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired to research the decades old disappearance of 16 year old Harriet Vanger.  In turn, he hires the unorthodox Lisbeth Salander as his assistant.  Along the way, they discover the shady dealings of Hans-Erik Wennerström the financier who sent Blomkvist into his exile. 

Now that we have the facts of the story out of the way, I want to say that there is much suspense, horrific crime, computer hacking, and romance.  I cannot do the book justice.  Just read it.

Body Work

This latest work by Sara Paretsky featuring her detective, V. I. Warshawski, begins in the trendy Club Gouge.  Performance artist Karen Buckley, The Body Artist, allows bar patrons to paint on her naked body, at the club.  Warshawski attends a performance and witnesses the venom of one of the young club goers (Chad) toward Nadia, a woman who paints on the Artist.  At a later performance, Nadia is shot and Warshawski gets involved; hired to prove that Chad is not guilty of killing this woman he has had differences with.  The Body Artist, the bar owner, and all involved in the club are extremely uncooperative with the investigation, which leads to the disappearance of the Artist and the involvement of Ukranian thugs.  This latest offering in the V. I. Warshawski series is worth reading.

Face-blind!

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers is the story of one woman's quest to understand a little known disability.  Sellers has prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, something that she only recently realized she suffered.  All her life she has had trouble recognizing people, but did not know that this was abnormal.  In her quest for knowledge about face-blindness, she explores her childhood to determine if her mentally-ill mother or her alcoholic father could be the source of her own problems. 

I found myself racing through the book to learn more about her childhood as well as her present day mistakes in introducing herself to long-known acquaintances.  Once she ran up and kissed the wrong man in the airport thinking it was her boyfriend. 

The book can seem disjointed at times, but is still an enjoyable and quick read worth considering for your own reading lists.

Books books books

Now that school is in session again, it is harder to get around to blogging about my reading. 

Here is what I read - as far as I can remember

The Lies of Fair Ladies - Jonathan Gash - Lovejoy book - loved it.
The Moor - Laurie R. King - a Sherlock Holmes, Mary Russell book - I listened to it and loved it.
Deep Shadow - Randy Wayne White - A Doc Ford mystery - probably his best yet.

If I think of anything else, I will write again.

A Real Slog through a Lovejoy Mystery

The Great California Game by Jonathan Gash was quite a slog.  This one takes place in the US, but the slang was so weird that you would never recognize it as anything American.  Lovejoy gets himself involved in some sort of country-wide gambling scheme aimed at control of the major markets of America.  You can tell from that last sentence that I never quite figured out what was going on.  Give this one a miss.