I Love a Mystery Oart One

So this post will be about mysteries. Right now I'm reading Nightlife by Thomas Perry. He has written a lot of books, and The Butcher's Boy was outstanding. Nightlife has an unforgettable villain: a small, beautiful woman. Warning! This is not a cozy. The protagonist is a Portland police officer who finds herself turning in to prey. Perry writes tight, well written books. Nothing improbable happens. (It always bothers me when plots aren't believable.)
Other writers I follow: Dana Stabenow, Kate Wilhelm, Charles Todd, Ian Rankin, Sharyn
MacCrumb, Earl Emerson, Cara Black. I like mysteries with a sense of place. All of the above fit that. Stabenow's Alaska, Emerson's Seattle, Rankin's Edinburgh, Black's Paris are places that are very real. Sharyn McCrumb's east Tennessee gives a great feeling about the beauty of Appalachia, and lays over that an otherworldliness that haunts me.
Lindsay Davis gives us a funny look at early Rome in the character of Marcus Didius Falco. Charles Todd's post WWI mysteries have protagonist Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge haunted by his dead sergeant.

Heavy Books

I mean this in both ways. Ones that are slooow reads, and the kind that can do harm to you if they fall on you.
Right now I'm reading The Vikings by Robert Ferguson. It has 451 pages, including notes and index. While I've been reading this I've taken breaks and read a few light books.
First the heavy one. I'm now about halfway through it, and it's definitely a worthwhile read, though I must admit I've had to look up some words in my big dictionary. Ferguson writes with humor and precision, and though I've read other books on the subject, this is the best. The chapters, in a way, are stand alone. Some totally captured me. Others, such as Across the Baltic, were a struggle. Though there are maps in the book, I had to get out my atlas to figure things out. For a largely illiterate people, they left some fascinating traces. I remember standing in Maes Howe on Mainland, Orkney, staring at the runes left behind by Vikings. Our guide said most of them were pretty much what you'd find on the walls of a men's room. One tells us "Ingegerth is most beautiful..." This is a great, exciting read...though heavy.
On the lighter side....
I just finished Michael Crichton's last book, Pirate Latitudes. We're told the finished manuscript was found after his death. I doubt he had really finished it, unless he was really under the influence of Pirates of the Caribbean. I was with him until he introduced the giant squid.

Beach Reads

A funny time, perhaps, to write about them. But I just returned from Belize and the unusually cool, windy weather wiped out plans for snorkeling, so I read a lot,walked the beach, read, checked the clouds, read some more. I read Bob Mayer & Jennifer Cruisie's Agnes and the Hit Man which was a couple of steps off the chicklit beaten path. It was hilarious, laugh and read out loud funny. The place we stayed, Maya Dream in Placencia, is right on the beach north of the village, with a bookcase stocked with light reads, so next I read two of Karl Hiaasen's-more laughter. I've read all of his, but I have no problem rereading them. Then I found an early Sara Peretsky which got into grimmer stuff, and Elizabeth Peters' Seeing a Large Cat. (Her Amelia Peabody mysteries are favorites of mine, especially the early ones.)
Anyway, home again, where the sun sets early & rises late, I just finished reading an exceptional first novel, miss harper can do it by Jane Berentson. A third grade teacher in Tacoma Washington deals with a new class and a lover who is in the army in Iraq, as well as a best friend named Gus, a 93 year old woman and a pet chicken named Helen. Funny and poignant, though I do hate to use that word.
I have eight requests in at the library, including the new books by Ian Rankin and Dana Stabenow, one on crows and one on vikings. I am also number 201 on the waiting list for Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. Jeez-I'll probably be able to get the paperback sooner.

The Book Hound Oona in memorium 12/25/2009

Shadows
Long after they follow Death
they stand beside us, or walk
at our heels.
We see them
from the corners of our eyes.
A lost toy, a wisp of fur, caught
in some dark corner, after we think
all trace is gone, haunting
the empty place reserved for them.
Their warm weight shapes itself
to memory, brushing agsint us
leaving an echo.

Their names are with us.
We speak to them
and know somehow
they answer us
From the shadows
in our hearts.

On the Road

The Road To Culloden is my first book, soon (I hope) to be ready for an agent. It's been a long process, with many rewrites, practically a different book from the one I began some years ago. It's less of a romance than it once was, though it's a love story. An avid researcher, I got so caught up in the whole 18th Century, that my one book is now being stretched to a trilogy. The first takes place in a very short period: 1744-1746. It begins with a marriage and ends shortly after the tragedy of the Battle of Culloden. I discovered The Lyon in Mourning, a collection of accounts, in three volumes, about the battle, the aftermath and the devastation that followed. It was published in the late 18th Century. Then I got interested in the spy systems on both sides.The Jacobite Spy Wars, Moles, Rogues and Treachery by Hugh Douglas is excellent. After reading Damn' Rebel Bitches by Maggie Craig I got new insight on women's role in the rebellion. In the past few years I've visited Scotland twice, absorbing the atmosphere, studying the landscape. On a rainy, blowing day on the road along Loch Laggan, I saw a small peninsula that exactly fitted the place where my imaginary castle, Castle Caorann would stand. In my book, just before the battle, the hero Niall rides his horse to a place that captured me, Clava Cairns, near Culloden Battlefield. Friends and I wandered on a foggy morning among standing stones and burial chambers, and I felt a sense of the past so strong that I knew it would have to be in my book.
Touching one of the engraved stones feels as if I am touching my past.

First 2 Pages

CHAPTER ONE


THE ROAD TO CULLODEN
CHAPTER ONE
AUGUST 1744

Two deerhounds, tall as ponies, burst through the open doors of Castle Caorann. Like gray shadows, they circled the nervous horses. As Niall MacGregor dismounted and slapped the dust from his clothes, he noticed an old man standing in the doorway.
“Ye’ve come at last. I thought mayhap the British warships had captured you. I am Alasdair Drummond.”
MacGregor bowed. “Niall MacGregor. Your servant, sir. The winds were not in our favor. I bring you greetings from Lord John Drummond in France.”
He followed Alasdair Drummond through past the open ironbound door into the great hall of Caorann Castle.
“Fiona, send the trollop down!” Drummond bellowed.
A red haired girl, dust cloth in hand, fled up the staircase followed by one of the deerhounds that had come in with the men; the other hound stayed at Drummond’s side.
MacGregor, walking behind his host, looked around the great hall that would be his after his marriage to Drummond’s granddaughter.In spite of the August heat outside, the ancient gray stones held the chill of winters past. Dust motes drifted in the sunlight from high windows, and his eye caught the movement of a tattered battle flag, so old the colors were shades of gray, hanging on the wall next to a crossed pair of claymores.
Drummond led the way into a room lined with bookshelves, casement windows opened to an enclosed garden. Sunlight fell softly on late roses, their scent coming to MacGregor on a breeze from Loch Laggan. The hound followed them in and went to lie in front of the fireplace.
From a table near the door Alasdair Drummond took a decanter of whisky, pouring each of them a sizable drink. MacGregor examined the grandfather of his betrothed as he took his glass.
The old man grinned slyly. “Our secret. The tax man has yet to find where we make our whisky. Fine, is it not?”
MacGregor nodded, inhaling the scent of peat smoke in the whisky.
Drummond was just short of six feet, his belly hanging over the belt of his trews, his yellowed, old fashioned wig askew. The old man’s red nose and cheeks showed years of raw Highland weather, and, MacGregor suspected, a great deal of whisky. Drummond peered at him through a thicket of gray eyebrows.
The two men raised their glasses, toasting exiled King James Stuart, away in Rome.
“Shall we discuss our contract?” MacGregor asked.

The Books That I Read Over and Over, and why

I first read The Game of Kings a lot of years ago. After I read it, I stormed through the others in the Lymond Chronicles:Queen's Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle and, finally, Checkmate. Since then I periodically reread them. Dorothy Dunnett's skill with language and character development can't be equalled. As a writer I am full of wonder at the way she controlled dozens of characters and backgrounds. When she went on to write The House of Niccolo series, I found another set of characters to love and hate (sometimes the same character!)
Dunnett had the skills to turn an imperfect, unsympathetic character, such as Lymond and Niccolo, into heroes. The villains who lurk in both books are memorable. In The Disorderly Knights, one of the most interesting characters is the golden, beautiful Graham Reid Mallett, known as Gabriel. All the Lymond books are filled wth the dangerous quarrelsome Borderers, the Scotts, Maxwells and Douglases. Niccolo and Lymond both travel through various countries, so in Niccolo's books, we see the Lowlands, Scotland, the Black Sea, Africa, Iceland.
Dorothy Dunnett
She was called, by Washington Post Book World, "The finest living writer of historical fiction."
I have friends who have never been able to get into these books. Some comments: "They're so complicated." "I find it hard to have main characters who are so bad!"
See what you think