Monthly Archives: September 2021

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Review: A Dark and Secret Place

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A Dark and Secret Place tries to do a whole passel of things in the course of its tale. Most of it is terrific. Prodigal daughter returns home to small town after her mother commits suicide only to find her mother had quite a number of secrets.

The prodigal daughter is Heather Evans, who heads home to deal with her mother’s suicide and to clean up the things a long life leaves behind. In the course of her cleanup, she discovers a large number of letters from a rather gruesome serial killer who is currently in prison. What did her mother know? Heather’s investigation leads her into some dark and creepy and cultish angles. In fact, the sheer number of things this investigation winds up including is a bit much.

Otherwise, the book is creepy and thought-provoking (on the nature of relationships, evil, and other things). The stakes are upped when ore young women are killed, something the police initially chalk up to a copycat. When it becomes clear they are not Heather works with DCI Ben Parker to solve the mystery. We also get what I saw as a bit of a gratuitous romantic arc.

That brings me to my only other minus: the ending. It’s a bit over the edge of what I was willing to suspend my disbelief for.

For the things I saw as a negative, though, the rest of the book was quite good. I’ll give it a solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Nonfiction - History, Reading and reviews

Review: American Agriculture: From Farm Families to Agribusiness (Mark Wetherington)

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American Agriculture traces the very beginning of agriculture in America from the earliest days of settlement well into the current giant agribusiness outfits that control the vast majority of American farmland.

This is not, however, just a dry recitation of facts and figures and graphs about farming. Wetherington also goes into social, economic, and political considerations that trailed along ag (and later, Big Ag), through periods off boom – wars, foreign markets -and busts – Dust Bowl, collapsing markets, and movement of rural people to cities, looking for work off the farm.

We also get to see how the addition of heavy machinery, subsidies, and chemical pesticides helped boost production per acre to astronomical levels, to better feed the US and the world. On the downside of that, if the market for a particular commodity collapses, the government can and does step in to help offset the losses farmers experience and to make it worth their while to simply not plant the next round of crops.

If you’re curious about the evolution of agriculture in the country, or how it affects people and policy, it’s a good read.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Rowman & Littlefield and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Nonfiction - History, Reading and reviews

Review: Iron Women: The Ladies Who Helped Build the Railroad (Chris Enss)

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Having enjoyed Chris Enss’ Wicked Women: Notorious, Mischievous, and Wayward Ladies from the Old West some years ago, I had high hopes for Iron Women. However, the title is a bit misleading, and I didn’t much care for the writing, what there was of it. It seems more like notes made in the course of research, or verbatim transcribing of quotes, and women didn’t actually work on laying the the physical rails.

Their contributions were in rail-adjacent items: engineering better bearings on axle wheels, designing the interior of the cars, creating refrigerated boxcars, and so on. All these things, of course, are incredibly important to rail travel overall, for both people and goods. There were other women, from the bad side of the tracks, as it were, as well: prostitutes and train robbers also plied their trades. I don’t see, however, how these women contributed anything to “building the railroad”, and the text didn’t enlighten me to see how they were.

I was disappointed in this outing. Two out of five stars. Sorry, this was a miss (ha!) for me.

Thanks to Rowan & Littlefield and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Mysteries, Reading and reviews, Thrillers

Review: A Fire in the Night (Christopher Swann)

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Nick Anthony has retreated to his cabin in the middle of nowhere after the death of his wife. Retired now, he whiles away his time at the cabin in peace.

That peace is shattered when a local deputy appears at his door to tell him that his estranged brother and his sister-in-law have been killed in a house fire. He’s shocked, of course, but not as shocked as he is when he finds out he has a niece, Annalise – now on the run and the primary suspect.

Annalise, for her part, is running toward her uncle, as her father told her to, in possession of a flash drive she was told to take. She has no idea what’s on that drive, but bad guy Cole does: he and his mercenary teams are on her trail.

There’s a flashback that doesn’t make a lot of immediate sense, but be patient, the significance of it will be revealed.

Nick, though, is not just a mild-mannered professor. He’s an ex spy, with skills that Cole and his gang of baddies don’t know about. When Annalise arrives, Nick sets about trying to build a relationship with her, and she eventually thaws. To read the drive, they have to go to a public library. Cole sends a crew to snatch them up, because there’s some kind of whizbang thing that alerts when the drive is accessed. Highly improbable, but it’s a staple these days of thrillers than some hacker can break into just about anything, so just roll with it.

There’s a big showdown at the cabin, of course, and the final fight scene is quite enjoyable – that fight alone gets five stars from me.

The ending is what you might think and expect.

A solid four out of five stars, and good for a day (or weekend if you’re not a straight-through reader) of escapism.

Thanks to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Mysteries, Reading and reviews, Thrillers

Review: Count to Three (TR Ragan)

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A parent’s worst nightmare: their child is missing from her school, picked up by someone who looks just like them.

That’s how Count to Three begins: Tinsley Callahan is collected from kindergarten by a woman who looks just like Dani Callahan, her mother. Dani is devastated, as one might expect. While her husband insists they give up and move on, Dani refuses. Five years later, the husband is an ex, Dani is a private investigator, and she still keeps the case file on Tinsley open, even while she works on other cases.

She doesn’t do this alone: the original detective on the case is now a friend, and they chat every so often, about Tinsley, or when Dani’s trying to find out something for a client. She also has an assistant named Quinn, who wants to be a PI because he mother vanished some years ago, and she carries that around with her.

In the current timeframe, Ali Cross is kidnapped in broad daylight, dosed with some kind of drug, and tossed into a van. The only witness is 12 year old Ethan, a local “bad kid” who lives with his mom in a rundown trailer. Ethan has an unfortunate habit of lying, getting in trouble, and generally being someone who others ignore.

Ethan hires them to look into Ali’s disappearance, something the local cops have written off as a runaway, since she has run off before (not not really).

Dani and Quinn go to work, finding out everything they can about Ali – social media! – and eventually team up with Ali’s mom to work out strategy, make flyers, and figure out if someone had access to the house (contractors, and so on).

Eventually, they track down Ali’s boyfriend, getting a few minutes to talk to him before something really unfortunate happens.

To keep the place afloat, Dani is also working a case for a woman who insists that someone is coming into her house and rearranging her furniture. This is the comedy relief in what is a very dark book. If you have issues reading about molestation, child sexual abuse, or physical torture, you might want to skip this one.

As Dani and Quinn get closer to finding the perp, the perp is busy throwing obstacles in their way, and threatening Ali’s family if she doesn’t behave herself in her captivity.

Dani’s ex shows up, telling her again to move on, and she tells him off in a way that really gave me a smile. That smile got bigger when she just kicked him out.

The end rushes at us, as it often does in thrillers, and everything’s tied up with a bow on top.

My only real issue with this book is this: Dani and Quinn are running around, poking into this, and they KNOW that the perp is both out in the wild and dangerous, given that he’s killing more people. But they take NO precautions with 12 year old Ethan, even to the point of Quinn leaving him alone on a corner after they’ve been hanging flyers. There’s no sense in this except to make it another plot point, which it does. It just made me angry.

Other than that, it’s a good read. I’d have given it five stars except for the Ethan thing. Four stars instead.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for the reading copy.

LesRom, Reading and reviews, Romance

Review: Her Countess to Cherish (Jane Walsh)

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I learned, after reading this, that there’s a book before this one that introduces us to at least Beatrice. Or, shall I say, Lady Beatrice Sinclair now, after dragging her family out of poverty by marrying Lord Sinclair and having him pay off her father’s debts. He’s cold and sneering toward her, since she threw herself at him and she and her family apparently ran off the woman he was supposed to marry. Bea isn’t really excited about Sinclair, and the day after their wedding and her first night providing wifely duties, she flees to the country to stay with a friend for awhile.

Said friend is living with a friend of her own – who just happens to be the woman Bea shoved aside in order to marry Sinclair. While she and Bea are a little frosty to start, it turns out Bea did her a favor, because now she gets to live with the woman she loves instead of the man she doesn’t.

We then meet Georgina Smith, who is also staying, and Bea takes an immediate dislike to her. To me, it seemed that Bea was projecting, because I found Bea to bea not a terribly nice person: she was snobbish, selfish, sour, and unthinking. What Georgina saw in her was a mystery to me, but I know, instalove.

Speaking of instalove, Bea was charmed by George Smith, Georgina’s cousin and someone she met at her wedding. Such Bea’s luck that George is also staying at this house in the country, too! She hopes to run into him there (spoiler: she does, mainly in the library).

I think what amazed me most about this book is just how many LGBTQI+ people are in this tiny town. It seemed like you couldn’t swing a dead cat around without hitting someone that fit somewhere in that group.

One thing I can give this book is that the principals don’t immediately fall into bed with one another. It’s more of a slow burn of a romance, although I still wasn’t a fan of Bea along the way.

Bea finds out she’s pregnant, and decides she will divorce Sinclair and marry George instead, without bothering to talk to George about it, which leads to some rockiness. Eventually, she disposes of that idea, and admits to Sinclair she is pregnant but shock of all shocks, he’s suddenly turned into an ultra caring, forgiving, and entirely other person in the three months she’s been gone. They come up with a solution, and everyone’s story wraps up like a nice little gift.

It’s always nice to see books with gay+ main characters, but this really struck me as something written as a message book, with long discussions that would be more suitable to 2021 than 1800 England. I’m not opposed to message books per se; my problem comes when virtually every piece of the book is a message the reader is hit over the head with time and again. The ending was rather forced and tidy, but at least there were no loose ends.

I’m going with three stars out of five.

Thanks to Bold Strokes Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Nonfiction - History, Reading and reviews

Review: The Great Thorpe Railway Disaster 1874: Heroes, Victims, Survivors (Phyllida Scrivens)

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In 1874, a momentary lapse – in protocol and in communication – at a railway station in Norwich led to the head on collision between two trains on a single trail rail line at Thorpe St Andrew, in Norfolk, England. Almost two dozen people died; scores more were injured.

The book begins by introducing us to some of the people aboard the train. for some, we get two or three paragraphs. For some, we get two or three pages (especially if they are part of the aristocracy or are involved in the actual running of the train). I do usually enjoy this, but after awhile I found myself skimming them – it became a little tedious, and very difficult to remember all of them, especially given the sheer number of Johns and Roberts and Marys and Anns, and all the other quite common names primarily given in that place at that time.

The most interesting art of the book is the breakdown of the accident and just how a series of errors, boiled down to one single lapse, can have disastrous results. In this case, the trains were running late. At the time, the station agent had to give he telegraph clerk a written slip – signed – so the clerk could transmit the authorization to proceed down the line. In Norwich, the clerk had a group of friends in the office, against protocol, and the station agent, aggravated by this and by the lateness of the train, failed to sign off on the authorization. The telegraph clerk transmitted it anyway, which set the trains on the collision course toward one another. Although the engineers on both trains saw each others’ trains coming and attempted to brake, it was too late for the crash to be avoided.

After the crash, people from towns on both sides of the crash flocked to the area to pull people from the wreckage. The engineers and firemen (coal stokers) in both trains were killed instantly, as were a number of people in first class at the front of the trains. Other people suffered rather gruesome injuries, ranging from severed limbs to burns from the boilers spewing uncontrolled steam.

For the time, the response was remarkable, in my opinion. Constables went door to door in each town looking for doctors and nurses to help the wounded, and a response train, loaded with supplies and more medical professionals, ferried wounded from the crash site to yet another town, moving back and forth through the evening.

We get the details for many of the people we met a the opening of the book, dead or alive/wounded, but again, without flipping back to the beginning, I couldn’t place about half of them. Quite a number of the doctors get their chance to shine here as well. working doggedly to save who they could.

The inevitable lawsuits begin, and most of the blame is found to lie with the station agent (and the railway, of course).

The book ends with a sort of “where are they now” look at what happened post-Thorpe to many of the wounded and the doctors who treated them.

If you can get past the first part, it’s a four star read. The beginning, though, just gets a two. I’m spitting the difference and giving it three stars.

Thanks to Pen & Sword and NetGalley for the reading copy.