The Grave Gourmet Falls Flat

Oh dear. The Grave Gourmet fell as flat as a failed soufflé. I lasted 36 pages. In those first few chapters Capucine, the policewoman who has been dealing with computer fraud and is itching to get out on the streets with the real criminals, flashes her breasts at her superior when she leans over his desk to demand a transfer. And lo and behold, at that very moment a murder is reported and the supervisor sends her off to solve the crime in place of his favorite detective who is out of town. She spends 30 minutes looking for the office of said detective in order to find his team. She wants to cry. The team consists of...wait for it...the tall North African, the butchy woman with the mangled hair cut, and the gay guy with the beautiful hair.

Really? Of all the citizens in Paris, the author picks those three stereotypes?

They head to the scene. Capucine sees the body - her first. She wants to throw up. She meets the forensic guy who calls her 'missy'. That makes her mad. Again, she wants to cry. (By now, so did I.)  The first policeman on the scene is Duchamps. The forensic guy is named Dechery. But Duchamps is named as the one to close the large door leading to the refrigerater that just recently held the corpse. A page before Duchamps had left the scene of the crime.

Huh? Can you say lousy editing?

Mistakes like that infuriate me. So does this sentence, blessedly the shortest one I had to read:

She boggled.

Now does the author mean:
1. she hesitated?
2. she was overcome with fright?
or
3. she acted ineptly?

I didn't stick around long enough to find out.

Case closed.

Character Backgrounds Run Aground

Finished The Black Widow Agency. I appreciate the author's idea - four women who bring their talents together to help other women who have been mistreated by men. Somehow I think it would make a great television series...sort of like Leverage (which I love)... just with women only.

In this book there is a lot of time spent explaining the backgrounds of each of the women including all their little quirks. I have already mentioned the tarantula. One woman has a drinking problem. One has a flagrantly homosexual brother. Another is always fanning herself and putting cold cloths on her head due to hot flashes. These idiosyncracies would play out better on screen.

I have noticed in some books that the author seems to have read or heard in a fiction writing course that each character 'needs' a background. I can picture the author writing furiously creating odd personalities and histories. All of that may be fun for the writer, but for the reader too much of a good thing gets tiresome. The backgrounds become filler and don't necessarily carry the action forward. I do want to know what the characters were like before they showed up on the page, but not every single detail of what makes them tick, thank you very much.

So I am moving on to Paris: The Grave Gourmet by Alexander Campion with Parisian policewoman Capucine Le Tellier and her food critic husband Alexandre. I hope I won't be overwhelmed with TMI.

The Black Widow Agency

Since I seem to be on a spider theme with The Story of Charlotte's Web, I chose The Black Widow Agency by Felicia Donovan from my stack of mysteries brought home from the library yesterday.

The agency is run by Katie, an ex-cop; Alexandria, the resident computer geek with her pet tarantula, Divinity; Margo, the African American gourmet cook who whips up chocolate black widow spiders for snacking; and, Jane, a somewhat dowdy woman of a certain age that handles the account books.

All of them have somehow been scorned by a man. Katie's husband was having an affair and when she found out she got drunk and went to an undercover drug bust totally hungover and ended up getting shot and fired from the police force. Her ex-husband has recently been promoted to captain.

Alexandria got set up in some sort of cyber-fraud by an ex-lover. I can't remember what happened to the other two, but it wasn't pretty.

So they band together to take on female clients who are being cheated on or have been in some way harmed or abused or mistreated by a man. In this case, a woman whose husband sets her up and she gets arrested for using drugs. Of course she is innocent, but she loses her job and her daughter.

There are an awful lot of tasteless jokes, the writing is a bit choppy (OK, this is her first book), and way too many descriptions of that tarantula crawling up legs and across tables. Eeeww.

But I am gonna hang in there. It is a quick read; I finished half of it last night. There is a sequel as well, so the Black Widows must be doing a good job.


.

Sunday in the Stacks

Sunday afternoon used to be the day I would head off to the library to see what treasures there awaited. Then horror of horrors, due to budgets (of course), it cancelled Sunday hours. I was appalled, but got used to going on another day.

Then, hurrah of hurrahs, the library restored Sunday hours about a year ago. I was thrilled and returned to my habit of visiting then. There are 17 branches in the public library system including the Main which is where I like to go. On Sundays now, seven of those branches are open.

Which is a long way to getting to the books I scored today. All mysteries. All new authors to me. One can only hope that one of the four will be a gem. I am very picky about my mysteries.

If anyone has any remarks or recommendations as to my choices, chime in.

The Grave Gourmet by Alexander Campion
Main characters: Parisian policewoman Capucine Le Tellier and her food critic husband Alexandre.

Murder on the Riviera by Mary-Jane Deeb
Main characters: Marie-Chrisine "Chrissy" de Medici, heiress and new owner of a small newspaper in Grasse and her Grandmere.

The Black Widow Agency by Felicia Donovan
Main characters: Ex-cop and agency owner Kate Mahoney; cybergoddess Alexandria ; number cruncher Jane; and, office manager and gourmet cook, Margot.

Wicked Autumn by G.M. Malliet
Main character: Max Tudor, vicar of St. Edwold's in the village of Nether Monkslip and former MI5 agent. (Now there is a combination for you.)

They all four look promising and my first dilemma is which book to start with.

E.B. White

E.B. White and friend
(1899-1985)

I do adore E.B. White. His classic The Elements of Style written with professor William Strunk Jr. is a writer's bible. I read it yearly just for the sheer entertainment of the writing. I think maybe I have three different editions of the little book. And as for White's collected essays, I must have five or six on my shelves. For a writer, he is the ultimate mentor. His essays are concise, humorous, and clearly written. He is the master.

But, I have a confession: I was an adult before I had the courage to read Charlotte's Web. As a child I knew it was going to be sad, so I wouldn't read it. I knew that it would still be sad when I decided to read it as an adult but I thought by then I could handle it. I couldn't. I wept. And wept some more. And then a little bit more.

I can't bear to read stories in which an animal dies, is hurt, shot, or mistreated. I can read a gruesome murder mystery (well not too gruesome) about a stabbing, shooting, or poisoning, but don't you dare harm a dog, horse, cat, tiger, lion, dormouse, deer, or...well, spider.

For this reason I never read Black Beauty or watched the movie Old Yeller. I was afraid to read Watership Down, White Fang, or Shiloh. I did read Wind in the Willows and found it delightful but then none of the characters die. They just have adventures.

In his book The Story of Charlotte's Web author Michael Sims does a fine job of recounting White's early years as a boy growing up fascinated with the natural world. He spent hours poking around ponds and creeks and observing the goings on of the inhabitants of his family's own stable and barn. He was introspective and shy and felt more at home with his dog than with other children. And forget about even thinking about getting to know a girl in high school.

So his fiction, Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, and Stuart Little, all populated with animals, springs from his early observations and interactions with the natural world. Not a bad place to start.

March is still blowing in big time

The sky is darkening and the winds are acomin' according to weather reports. I don't pay much attention to reports because they are always: 'if' this happens, then that 'could' happen and then nothing does happen. But today, the weather gurus must be serious. Schools have let out early. There have been tornados west of here. So I thought I had better post here in case the 'ifs and the coulds' do occur.

I am going to curl up with The Story of Charlotte's Web and let myself be carried away from threatening skies to the world of E.B. White.

What are some books that feature dangerous weather? The first one I think of is The Wizard of Oz with its tornado that transports Dorothy and Toto to the Yellow Brick Road.

Then there is The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger about the crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail and that one last fishing trip.

For such a rainy day as this, how about Rain by Somerset Maugham or The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield.

Can you think of any others?

March Blows in with a pig and a spider

I actually finished Living Alone at quarter to midnight last night so technically it is a book I read in February but I will start out March with it as Book One finished.

The book is strange and brief. I almost got the feeling that Benson had started a notebook and just jotted down scenes...in the woods, committee members' meetings, characterizations, war...and then created a story to string all them together. There is a witch and her broomstick (I have already forgotten its name), a wizard, magic packets of Happiness, an almost invisible person whose life is changed from meeting the witch, her dog named David, fairies, a dragon, dead people, a ferryman, and a too-too upper class woman.

I got carried away trying to make sense of the plot (of which there was not much) and forgot to let myself be enchanted by Benson's writing. It may be that I need to re-read it slowly now that I know that really nothing and everything is going to happen.

My favorite witch book is Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman.

I also started a mystery by a new (to me) writer Katherine Hall Page titled The Body in the Belfry. Has anyone else read her Faith Fairchild mysteries? Chapter One grabbed my attention with its humor and solid writing. We will have to see where it takes me.

And as promised, I started reading my autographed copy of The Story of Charlotte's Web by Michael Sims.

"Where's Papa going with that axe?"