Reviews and Comments

While attending a tea party in Great Diddling, author Berit Gardner witnesses the murder of Reginald Trent in the manor of his aunt, Daphne Trent. Reginald Trent is pretty universally disliked in the village of Great Diddling. Everyone there dislikes him. Berit Gardner, wanting to avoid writing her next book, investigates instead. Meanwhile the townsfolk, lead by tourist board chair, decide to take advantage of their sudden notoriety by holding a books & murders literary festival on short notice. At the center of the crime is who controls the books of Tawny Hall, Daphne Trent's massive collection.

It's a cozy mystery. It's a bit of a police procedural. It's an homage to readers, though there precious little of the point of view of readers. All the town's characters have backstories. My main nitpick is the ultimate solution to the mystery of the murder follows a pretty standard pattern, so whodunnit won't be a surprise after a while. But the journey there is pretty entertaining.

The audiobook narrator, Helen Lloyd, does a great job in the audio version.

Relentless Melt starts off with young Artie Quick attending their first investigation class at a night school for young men run by the Y.M.C.A. The teacher, an older policeman, observes that Artie appears to be a young woman wearing a young man's suit, making them ineligible for the class. Nevertheless, he seems inclined to keep Artie's secret.

Artie is taking the class to, as they later figure out, make sense of why their brother Zeb has abandoned the family for a life of crime. But at the outset Artie thinks they're intrigued by solving crimes. And so Artie and their best friend Theodore, a young adult with family money but living on his own, decide to practice solving crimes by investigating a scream heard in a local park late at night.

The book is a little bit coming of age, a little bit amateur sleuths solving a mystery, and a little bit of magical fantasy. When Artie's investigations instructor suddenly cancels class, Theodore convinces Artie to join him at his school where he's learning a bit of being a magician. Theodore's one spell he's working on allows him to quietly sneak quietly by casting a sphere spell around his feet.

You'll notice I use the they pronoun here. A lot of what makes this good is Artie feeling how their sense of self changes when they're wearing a men's suit. Neither Artie nor Theodore quite knows what to do with themselves, Theodore's attraction to Artie, and Artie's feelings of ambiguity to Theodore.

The character study is intertwined with a lovely mystery. The scream they heard leads them to a criminal enterprise that is abducting young women, including the daughter of Artie's teacher. The sleuthing led to something I was not expecting in the least, and yet it made for a great story.

Set in early 2020, two of the three main characters are inmates at an Arizona women's prison. They get an early parole because the prison needs to reduce its population because of the pandemic. Plonked in a cheap motel and told that a charity will feed them and also that they are restricted to their rooms until conditions have been met. But of course they aren't fed, so Florida sets out for Los Angeles to get her car because a car is freedom.

Dios follows, but the two are not friends. Dios' purposes is to instigate Flordia. They disembark early, spend a night breaking & entering, drinking the booze left in a boarded up bar, and cause mayhem in a rural homeless camp.

Lobos is the L.A. cop assigned to investigate a murder when the bus arrives in L.A. carrying the body of a man whose throat has been slit. She zeroes in on the absconding inmates, and investigates all the places where Florida haunted prior to incarceration. At the same time, she's also dealing with the trauma of a soon-to-be ex-husband who is spiraling into mental illness.

Florida has fallen into a life of getting others to be the drivers of what she wants to do. This is the heart of her conflict with Dios, who wants Florida to own up to being an instigator. Dios herself is an instigator. I never really could wrap my head around why Dios cared that much about Florida, but I suspect it would make a lot more sense to me on a re-read. Lobos is constantly looking for her husband among all the homeless camps surrounding the places where Florida might be, frustrating her well-meaning but also casually low-grade sexist new partner. How she interacts with him is a gem of a component to the book. He just can't believe women can be the instigators of violence. To him, womens' violence is the result of mens' behavior.

I think I was expecting a bit more punch for this than it delivered, hence why I didn't rate it higher. That said, that has a lot to do with my expectations and another reader may feel this more intently than I did.

The premise that one day in the 1970s, Jane Larkin disappears. She is married with three children, late teens Alex, early teens Jeff, and middle-schooler Miranda. But the first point of view character is that of a writer about to publish a novel based on the disappearance of his childhood friends' mother decades later. Because it's so long after the disappearance, this section can reveal a bit of how each of the members of the family handles, and has handled, the disappearance over the years.

Jeff & Miranda come to think that their father murdered their mother, but the police never find anything to connect him to the disappearance. Alex believes his father is innocent. The family can't be tight-knit with such disparate views. Much of the story focuses on Miranda & Jeff, but I think one of the things that Landay really did well is introduce the idea that Alex would stick with his father even if he were to be proven guilty. After all, what's done is done and it's not like their father is going to murder someone else. I kinda wish Alex's attitude was explored a bit more than it was.

A solid book.