What a month. I did everything I could to avoid the news and spent much of the month watching TV. When I read, I found it hard to concentrate, so I gave up on all my reading goals for the year and decided to just stick with light fare (with one brilliant exception).
In all, I read 9 books, all fiction (although I am working my way slowly through a non-fiction book and a book of poetry, neither of which I finished this month). No surprise 6 of them were mysteries, my go-to comfort read. But I did read a wonderful work of literary fiction that may end up being my favorite book of the year.
These are the books I finished in February:
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
This book was chosen by my in-person book group that was supposed to meet in February. Actually, we were supposed to meet in January and I was still on the library waiting list a few days before the meeting date. I didn't think this would be the kind of book I wanted to spend money on so I took myself off the wait list and was prepared to go the book group without reading it. Then a snow storm intervened and we rescheduled for February. So I put myself back on the wait list (there were now 400 people ahead of me) but figured my number still wouldn't come up by the end of February. The library has, however, this "jump the line" feature where they (randomly I guess) just ask people on the list if they want to borrow (seems unfair to me, but I'm not in charge). I was offered to "jump the line" so I took the opportunity. How glad I am that I didn't buy this book. It started out with a good premise - 72 year old widowed Grace Winters is living a small life still grieving the death of her only child in a bicycle accident years before and still feeing guilty that she wasn't the wife she thought she should have been after that. Then a former work colleague (Grace was a highschool math teacher) suddenly out of the blue leaves Grace a house in Ibiza in her will. So Grace goes to Ibiza and her life changes. All of that is fine, but her life changes through magic (alien magic). Maybe because I read 100 Years of Solitude last month I was not in the mood for magical realism, especially not heavy-handed magical realism. I lost interest as soon as the magic appeared (about 150 pages into the 500 page book - on e-reader) and had to force myself to finish (I really should have just DNF'd it and gone to the book group anyway). In the end my book group meeting was cancelled again so we still haven't discussed it.
The Rivals by Jane Pek
A sequel to The Verifiers, which I read in 2022, this is the further adventures of Claudia Lin, a Chinese American English major who ended up working for Veracity, a company that people go to in order to verify that the people they meet on a match site are telling the truth about themselves. Basically an on-line dating detective agency. In the first novel, they also discovered an AI conspiracy and that is continued in this novel. Claudia Lin is a fan of mystery novels (specifically mystery novels with a Chinese detective) and also spy thrillers and so she uses the techniques she reads about in them to investigate, much to the chagrin of her partners at Veracity. I enjoyed the first novel and I enjoyed this follow up, although I was sorry that there were not as many off-the-cuff literary references as in the first novel. I assumed that Pek was going to go on to write sequels that were a detective novel series but it looks like she is going for one long story about the AI conspiracy. This one ends on a bit of a cliff hanger leading me to wonder if it is only going to be a trilogy. In some way the real world of AI is catching up to the conspiracy in the novel. This novel was longer than I expected (over 500 pages on my e-reader) but the pacing is good (except for a segment in the middle) and it kept my interest along the way. I recommend it. You don't HAVE to have read the first novel, but I think you would enjoy it more if you did.
Bad Day at the Vulture Club by Vaseem Khan
This is the fifth in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series set in modern day Mumbai. Inspector Chopra is a retired policeman, now acting as a private detective, who inherited (he doesn't know why) a baby elephant that he calls Ganesha. He takes the baby elephant around with him in his investigations (it is India so apparently not completely strange to see a man with an elephant). In this installment he is investigating a murder of a prominent Parsee man at the Towers of Silence. Coincidentally I was at the same time re-watching The Jewel in the Crown, the 1980s TV production of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, which is where I first encountered the concept of Towers of Silence. The Parsees did not believe in burying or cremating their dead. Instead they leave them exposed on special "towers" for vultures to destroy. I am also enjoying another mystery series set in Bombay in the 1920's with a woman detective who is Parsee. So this must be my year to read about Parsees. This is a light hearted series. At first I was thinking that Ganesha, who has good instincts, didn't have enough to do in this story but eventually he acted heroically. I did not guess the solution to the mystery. If you are looking for escape, like to read mysteries that are set in foreign locations and like elephants, this series might be for you. You could probably read them out of order but they would be more enjoyable in order.
Midnight at the Malabar House by Vaseem Khan
After I finished Bad Day at the Vulture Club, I learned that Vaseem Khan had another series and I thought, why not? This series is set in 1940's India, after the end of WW2 and after Partition, where the subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan, and the withdrawal of Great Britain. The main character, Persis Wadia is the first woman police officer in Bombay (now Mumbai) and she has been relegated to Malabar House solely because she is a woman. Think Slow Horses, but set in India. On New Year's Eve she is the sole person at the desk when a call comes in about a murder. Persis is determined to solve it, but why did they call Malabar House? I liked this novel as an introduction to the series and will be reading more of this series.
Murder Under Her Skin by Stephen Spotswood
In March last year I read the first book in this series, Fortune Favors the Dead. Because this was a month in which I needed a lot of light diversion I decided to continue the series. Set in the 1940s, the twist is that the two detectives are women: Willowjean (Will) Parker and Lilian Pentecost. Will is a former member of a circus and has many diverse talents. Lilian is known as the best PI in New York City. She suffers from Multiple Sclerosis so her energy levels go up and down. In this installment there is a murder at the circus - the tattooed lady, who was a friend of Will's. Will and Lilian travel down to Virginia, where the Circus is currently playing, to solve the crime. I liked this book although I think it was a little overlong due to a lot of exposition that could have been eliminated.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Nominated for a Booker Prize last year, it took forever for this novel to be published in the United States. But it was worth the wait. Set on a convent property in a rural part of Australia this is a beautifully written novel. It is not at all plot driven, but is a meditation on death, grief, guilt, forgiveness and despair taking place during the pandemic and during a mice infestation due to climate change. It is unexpectedly uplifting. This was the first book in years that I immediately re-read after finishing it. I wrote a separate blog post about it here. It is my favorite book so far this year and I'm positive it will end up in my "best of 2025" list, possibly even at the top of the list.
Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood
Yes, I read the third book in the series this month too (and am on the wait list for the next two). In this case, Will and Lilian have a client who writes murder mysteries. Someone is killing people using the methods she puts in her stories. For complicated reasons she doesn't want the police involved. I liked this one the best of the three, it seemed tighter in terms of pacing than the last one.
Murder on the Red River by Marcie R. Rendon
This was the 2021 One Book, One Minnesota selection. Set during the Vietnam War era (late sixties, early seventies?) in the Red River Valley between North Dakota and Minnesota, the main character is Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman who grew up in many white foster home situations and is now making it in the world as a farm laborer who shoots pool for money in her spare time. (She also smokes incessantly, which I found distracting.) Her only real friend in the world is a local sheriff named Wheaton who believes she could do more with her life. Cash helps Wheaton solve a brutal murder but that isn't the main point of the book. As a mystery story it is pretty poor. As a picture of the results of white policy towards native people it is much better. There are sequels but I'm not sure I will read them. Cash solves the crime using "visions". I get tired of the magical Indian trope. William Kent Krueger uses it too but at least this author is an enrolled member of a tribe.
Back After This by Linda Holmes
This is Holmes' third book and it is more, it seemed to me, of a romance than her first 2 books (which featured romances but seemed to be more). This one features a podcaster (which Linda is) and a youtube influencer who team up to make a series of podcasts in which the narrator goes on 20 dates. In the meantime, on her own, she meets a personable guy with a dog who lives in her neighborhood. I don't read a lot of romances mostly because you always know how a romance will end, it's simply a matter of how they get there. In this case there were few of the interesting interpersonal obstacles that make for the romances I do enjoy. The biggest issue was the fact that the narrator couldn't stand up for herself in the face of people telling her she couldn't date the person she wanted to date. I got tired of that. Also, while I'm sure Homes knows everything there is to know about podcasting, I have no real interest in the ins and outs or in the typical work day. And there are a lot of ins and outs in this book. This is all to say that it just didn't hit the spot for me although there is nothing wrong with it and I'm sure many people will enjoy it.
