I love church mysteries. Been a while since I read one.

Olivia Matthews is the cozy mystery pseudonym of award-winning author Patricia Sargeant.

Suspense Magazine says, "..readers of this first-in-the-new-series will soon find out Mayhem & Mass is a promising addition to the cozy mystery genre, and its protagonist is delightful!” Nice

About stolen art work during WWII, the family innocently inheriting massive art collection not knowing of the secrets behind those acquisitions. Interesting complicated plot, story line and characters interesting.

I've always enjoyed mysteries about art. This comes up listed under Contemporary Romance but sure sounds more like a mystery to me. "one woman’s journey to discovering the truth behind an abandoned apartment and a family whose mysteries may be better left undiscovered."

Half a Crown by Jo Walton. It's the third of an alternate history series (the first two are Farthing and Ha'Penny) in which England avoided WWII by coming to an early accommodating with Hitler. The first two take place in the late 1940's, and the first one is very much a straight forward murder mystery set in the alternate time line. The second and third are more closely alternate history.

The third novel takes place in 1960, and that world's version of WWII (although it's not called that) has been dragging on for some twenty years. Jews have been systematically rounded up and sent to the death camps in Europe, although apparently Britain is getting ready to open its own death camp quite soon.

I don't want to say any more, because anything additional will be a plot spoiler. But I do strongly recommend all the books.

Jo Walton has written several other books, the only one of which I've read so far is My Real Children, in which an elderly woman can remember two entirely different versions of her life. I loved that one.

I also got to meet Walton at CoSine, a science fiction con that's in Colorado Springs in January. She is funny, sharp, and very friendly.

I will have to look for her books. Thanks.

and why sometimes I don't even look at it for weeks at a time, is that I see so many good books here that I know I need to read. One of my problems is that I'm interested in almost everything. Non fiction is anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of what I read. Right now of the 11 books I have checked out of the library, 7 are non fiction. Having four fiction books checked out at once is unusual for me.

And in fiction I read quite widely. I tend mostly to identify as a science fiction reader, and I actually have relatively narrow interests in that field. Fantasy does nothing for me, to which I say fortunately because there's so very much fantasy out there. Zombies, werewolves, urban fantasy all do nothing for me. I like a lot of hard science fiction and I especially love time travel and alternate history. There's plenty to read in those two alone.

What I do like is finding an author whose work I like. Jo Walton is a mixed bag for me, because some of her stuff is straight up fantasy, and I have zero interest in those. But a writer who writes widely herself is nice.

Zombies and werewolves don't interest me, nor do vampires. But I absolutely adored Anne Rice's stories. An author who 'speaks to' you can write any genre and be enjoyable. Meanwhile, the book piles get deeper and deeper....
Oh well, as obsessions go, I guess books is a pretty harmless one.

"In The Garden of Beasts" by Erik Larson

But, as one review said, "Larson has a knack for writing history as riveting as almost any novel, and this is an example of him at his best."

It seems like an important book to read, showing how people have a tendency to believe what they want to believe, never mind evidence to the contrary. The German people wanted to believe in their country's greatness and that Nazi excesses against political opponents, Jews and others were just temporary or weren’t nearly as bad as some were reporting. Now, here we are, in that same boat.

You can't help but draw comparisons to what's happening today from that time. Scary.

It's the fourth in the Liebermann series, and these books are irresistible! I've already requested the two remaining books in the series from my library, and hopefully they'll be tucked in my suitcase when I fly to NYC week after next.

appears to be a writer I should look into. Good stuff.

NYC, eh? Going for a little vacay?

Ever since moving to Florida, I go back for a visit with family in May. I missed the last two years, due to a misadventure with cancer...but now I'm ready to go! I'll be staying with my sister on the UWS, seeing my younger daughter's new apartment in Brooklyn, and spending time with Mom on Long Island. Pastrami! Bagels!
If you liked The Alienist you will like Tallis...the character is similar to his hero. More Viennese pastry, though.

Congrats to you. I am a 30-year survivor. You will be one, too.

"Noir" was an entertaining , clever, fast moving read once I realized that Americans in the 1940's spoke in different patterns, clichés, which require the reader to do some back-ups early in the book. Once the rhythms were established it was a lot of fun. The characters were terrific.

"The Cabinet Of Curiosities" is another Inspector Pendagast novel. Action packed with the usual scary surprises.

Thanks!

The Cabinet ... is high on my list. Wildly popular.

East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood's high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can't or won't touch.

They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford, which might be a set of tires or a homemade casserole. To get by, he's forced to take on clients that can pay.

This time, it's a rap mogul whose life is in danger. As Isaiah investigates, he encounters a vengeful ex-wife, a crew of notorious cutthroats, a monstrous attack dog, and a hit man who even other hit men say is a lunatic. The deeper Isaiah digs, the more far reaching and dangerous the case becomes.

This was a First Novel Nominee for the 2016 Anthony Award and the 2017 Edgar Allan Poe Award.

I already grabbed book 2 from the library.

Haven't started it yet but it does sound good!

highly recommend it for those who like offbeat, original stories. The ending was a bit of a surprise, but I loved it.

I can't remember if someone here recommended this book, but I wanted a change of literary scenery, and since I loved The Man Who Fell to Earth (both the book and the film), am now reading Mockingbird by Walter Tevis.

The author's life history is nearly as interesting as his fictional work. (copied from amazon.com)

Walter Tevis was born in San Francisco in 1928 and lived in the Sunset District, close to Golden Gate Park and the sea, for the first ten years of his life. At the age of ten his parents placed him in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Home for a year, during which time they returned to Kentucky, where the Tevis family had been given an early grant of land in Madison County. Walter traveled across country alone by train at the age of eleven to rejoin his family and felt the shock of entering Appalachian culture when he enrolled in the local school. He made friends with Toby Kavanaugh, a fellow student at the Lexington high school, and learned to shoot pool on the table of the recreation room in the Kavanaugh mansion, and to read science fiction books for the first time in Toby’s small library. They remained lifelong friends, and Toby grew up to become the owner of a pool room in Lexington.

At the age of seventeen, Walter became a carpenter’s mate in the Navy, serving on board the USS Hamil in Okinawa. After his discharge, he studied at the University of Kentucky where he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English Literature and studied with Abe Guthrie, author of The Big Sky. Upon graduation he taught everything from the sciences and English to physical education in small-town Kentucky high schools. At that time he began writing short stories, which were published in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy. He wrote his first novel, The Hustler, which was published in 1959, and followed that with The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was published in 1963. He taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for fourteen years, where he was a distinguished professor, and left that post in 1978 to come to New York and resume writing. He wrote four more novels—Mockingbird, The Steps of the Sun, The Queen’s Gambit and The Color of Money—and a collection of short stories, Far From Home. He died of lung cancer in 1984. His books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greek, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Israeli, Turkish, Japanese, and Thai.

Thanks for the weekly thread, hermetic. A belated happy Mother's Day to all the mothers, cat mothers, dog mothers, and nurturers of all creatures.

“I promise you have never read a story like this.”—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter

Inception meets True Detective in this science fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind...

Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family—and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.

Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.

https://m.

From the collaboration album from Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile ‘ Lotta Sea Lice ‘ which came out last year.

We haven't done one of these in a long while.

I like it. But my, they are just babies! Kurt Vile.

In AA at least and I imagine the others as well, you need to concentrate on your own needs during your recovery, you need to be very very selfish in that respect and getting "involved" with others and their problems can be detrimental to your own program...

Also it is a very very vulnerable time for all concerned...

That was my understanding. But in this book the members go out for coffee after each meeting. Some are dating or at least sleeping together. They just don't share their last names. Pretty odd, I thought. But maybe that's just NOLA.

A lot really but is really not recommended at all. taking a chance on problems in a relationship during that time at least the first year.. Almost all AA groups,at least the ones I have attended go for coffee after meetings and quite often get together on weekend BBQs but usually as a group

Just finished Sandfords "Twisted Prey" and am into Baldacci's "The Fallen"....