Lamorna Wink by Martha Grimes (1999)

I remember that I lost my initial infatuation with Martha Grimes and her Richard Jury mysteries at some point years ago and then picked one up later and once again was pleased. Recently the library was getting rid of The Lamorna Wink so I thought it was time to see what was going on with Jury and his friends.

Surprisingly it is aristocratic Melrose Plant who has traveled to the Cornwell coast while Superintendent Jury is away. His delight in meeting the people in the area draws the reader in. Magic enters the plot through the remarkable young man, Johnny Wells, who's Aunt Chris suddenly disappears. Melrose is intrigued and decides to rent the magnificent cliff home where two young children drowned in the recent past. How all these unconnected strands of story finally converge is satisfying. AND you want to find the next

This is a series that benefits by being read more or less in order. There are 21 titles and The Lamorna Wink is number 16. The characters reoccur and it helps to explain some of the nonsense and humor that Grimes injects into her stories. It has been stated that she has a way of combining humor with shock and the playfulness of this story gives way to an awful unpleasantness at the end.

If you haven't discovered Martha Grimes, you have a wonderful reading experience waiting. If you have read some of these titles, then you know they are all pub names!

1. The Man With A Load Of Mischief
2. The Old Fox Deceiv'd
3. The Anodyne Necklace
4. The Dirty Duck
5. Jerusalem Inn
6. Deer Leap
7. Help The Poor Struggler
8. I Am The Only Running Footman
9. The Five Bells and Bladebone
10. The Old Silent
11. The Old Contemptibles
12. The Horse You Came In On
13. Rainbow's End
14. The Case Has Altered
15. The Stargazey
16. The Lamorna Wink
17. The Blue Last
18. The Grave Maurice
19. The Winds of Change
20. The Old Wine Shades
21. Dust

What value do 'I' get from my library?

Have you ever wondered about the benefit you get from your local public library? Here is a great little calculator that will tell you the dollar amount you receive monthly in relation to your use of the library! Check out the information at Stephen's Lighthouse blog or visit the Denver Public Library calculator page directly.

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Joe Bageant describes the America that the educated, city liberal doesn't even know exists and he does it in such a way that you can't help laughing and then being disturbed at the same time. Whether you agree with the author or not, there is a lot to consider in the arguments he puts forth concerning gun control, American health care, the mortgage racket, and our political system in general.


View all my reviews.

100 Great Books - What Have You Read?

BBC believes the majority of people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Copy this list and put an X next to the ones you have read, or you can be like some other people and make up elaborately complicated instructions of your own. (I X'd 36, which isn't all that great either. I can't explain why I have never read Jane Austen.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Whither the Bookstore?

Shaman Drum Bookstore has been around since 1980 but it may no longer be able to sustain its business model. Read what owner Karl Pohrt has (1) gone through because he could see what was coming and (2) what he has tried to do to find an alternate way to keep the Ann Arbor institution alive. It's more sad news for those of us who love bookstores.

The comments are as interesting as the article. I live near Ann Arbor and I have never been inside Shaman Drum. The name alone sounded like everything would be 'new agey' and not what I would be interested in. Apparently they carried everything including text books for University of Michigan students. Guess they fooled me there.

Click here for the article.

A Certain Justice (1997)

P.D. James is a favorite mystery writer so when I saw this title at a recent library book sale, I picked it up. As soon as I started reading, there was something naggingly familiar about the story. I even went through my journals in an attempt to find a record of it. I couldn't find anything. However, I know I read the book before. Luckily, I had forgotten enough to enjoy reading it again. (Apparently I am not the only person known to do this. Right, Kathy?)

A Certain Justice, according to Wikipedia, is 10 out of a list of 14 mysteries featuring Adam Dalgliesh. Venetia Aldridge, a distinguished criminal lawyer is defending Garry Ashe on charges of having brutally killed his aunt. Set in the closed world of the British legal world, the story takes a number of twists and turns and has a very satisfactory ending. This is an accessible and literate read.