December Reading

 December was a fairly light month for reading because I was busy with holiday activities.

• Viviana Valentine Goes up the River by Emily J. Edwards.   This is the second in the Viviana Valentine series and I thought I should catch up since the third book was recently released.  These novels are set in the early 1950s and are light hearted mysteries with main characters that sound as if they should be in hard boiled mysteries.  This time the scene is reminiscent of an English country house mystery (although it is outside NYC) with Viviana spending time at a rich guy's mansion to figure out where the "noise" he is hearing is coming from.   These are not deep mysteries and I guessed the culprit pretty early.   But they are lighthearted fun that work as good pallet cleansers between deeper books.

• Home at Night by Paula Munier.  This is the next in the Mercy Carr mystery series.  Mercy solves crimes with her dog Elvis.  She is helped by her partner Troy and his dog, Susie Bear. This one involved an eerie old house that Mercy wants to buy and fix up.  But strange things are going on there.  I love this series because I love the two dogs and usually the mystery is pretty good too.  I was told that the author said this one was inspired by the novel Possession by AS Byatt and I can see that.

• Woof by Spencer Quinn.   I was in the mood for another dog-led mystery and someone on the internet was talking about this series so I thought I would give it a try.  Birdie Gaux is a little girl who lives in a town near the Louisiana swamps.  At the beginning, for her birthday, she is allowed to adopt a dog and she picks Bowser (her name for him).   The mystery is told completely from Bowser's point of view and is delightful.  It's not a complex mystery.  This series is published by Scholastic so I suppose this is a YA novel but that didn't really matter.  It was the point of view of Bowser that made it enjoyable.  I think kids would like this. 

• The Hero of this Book by Elizabeth McCracken.  This is not a memoir, the author makes very clear.   It is a "novel".  She says "If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else.  Let other people argue about it.  Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere."  So this is a "novel" in which the unnamed narrator takes a short trip to London in August 2019.  You know, before the world changed.  "Things", she writes, "felt dire, which now seems laughable."  It is 10 months after the death of the unnamed narrator's mother.  The last time she visited London was in 2016 with her mother.  I read this the day before the 3 year anniversary of the death of my own mother.  I wasn't sure that was wise but it turned out to be perfect.  The mother of the unnamed narrator was nothing like my mother but I still related to the feelings in the book.  And London is one of my favorite cities. In addition to a book about a larger than life mother, this is also a book about writing.  "Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably.  Invent a single man and call your book a novel  The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable."   I enjoyed this very short book very much. 

• Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead.  Whitehead is one of my favorite authors but this novel is not one of my favorites.  It is more like a series of three linked short novellas and that's not a form I particularly enjoy.  The writing is, as usual, brilliant but I did not find the story as interesting as I found the story of Harlem Shuffle (this is a sequel).  The initial premise is that, in order to score tickets to a Jackson 5 concert for his daughter (it's the 1970's) Ray Carney is drawn back into the life of petty crime he previously abandoned.  But it is much more violent and dangerous than previously, just as New York became much more violent and dangerous in the 1970's.  While I didn't enjoy this novel as much as his others that I've read, I did regularly think that it would make a good TV series.     

November Reading

 The following are the books I finished in November. 

• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.   It seems that everyone is reading this novel and I worried that it might not live up to the hype.   The New Yorker called this Ann Patchett's "Pandemic Novel"  but there really isn't much about the pandemic in it.  The pandemic is the reason the whole family is together for the summer on the family cherry farm but they don't talk about it much and nobody dies of COVID.  The novel is a memory novel in which Lara tells her three grown daughters the story of how she once dated a man who later became a famous movie star.  Lara has long been content with her life on the cherry farm with her husband (who is secure enough to not care about the daughters' interest in the famous movie star) and doesn't regret anything in her life.  Her daughters, like most children, find it hard to imagine their parents as young.  This is a NICE novel.  A PLEASANT novel.  I never really cared much about the plot line (such as it is) although there were a few pleasing twists that caused me to smile.  I never felt deeply invested in the characters, although I liked most of them.  I enjoyed this book mostly for Patchett's use of words and the structure that kept things moving along. 

•  A Mercy by Toni Morrison.  Not my favorite Toni Morrison book but still a wonderfully well written novel.  Set in the 1600's, the main character is Florens who is sold as a slave to a man from New England (?) and separated from her mother who is a slave in Maryland.  The sale is actually the mercy because this saves the daughter from the worst of plantation life.   But the separation scars Florens.  The novel contains multitudes - native american slavery, fear of witches, greed, mail-order brides.   It is a little difficult to follow sometimes because Morrison switches points of view often.  It is a good picture of 17th century America told from the points of view of persons from whom we don't normally get points of view. 

• Chenneville by Paulette Giles.  The latest book by Paulette Giles is about a Journey for Revenge.  I don't much like revenge tales and this one ended up being something of a disappointment at the end.  But Giles is VERY good at writing about the journey (as she was in Enemy Women).  Her creation of a sense of place is excellent as the main character moves from the eastern battlefield hospitals of the civil war, back to St. Louis, down to Ste. Genevieve county Missouri and then a long trek through Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.   Giles also is good at creating characters with interesting back-stories - in this case the main character begins the story waking up from a coma with only partial memories.  But after creating interesting characters, it's as if she doesn't really know what to do with them. It's not that they don't grow, they do.  But they grow in predictable ways without, in my opinion, having to actually do the work for the growth.  I'm always left wanting more. In  this case I was disappointed that at the end she took away from the main character the decision to act or not act that was, in my opinion, essential to having him actually grow.  On the whole, not a bad read but frustrating in places. 

• Fatal Legacy by Lindsey Davis.  The latest Flavia Albia mystery.  I always enjoy Davis' mysteries which are set in ancient Rome but have a modern feel to them.   This one involved an investigation Flavia Albia does for a very complicated family.  It involves slavery and emancipation in ancient Rome.  This can be read alone but it is part of a series and the earlier books give more background on the main, continuing characters. 

RIP A.S. Byatt

Today we learned of the death of A.S. Byatt, one of my favorite authors.   Thinking about her I remembered that long ago (15 years!) I did a re-read of her Frederica quartet and blogged about it.  

The Virgin in the Garden

Still Life

Babel Tower

A Whistling Woman

I didn't like everything she wrote but I loved many of her novels, including Possession.  RIP

September/October Reading

I combined September and October because ... well, I only finished one book in September.  There were a few reasons for that but the main reason was that I was working on a book I started in August and I found it very hard going.  But, instead of just DNF'ing it, I wanted to finish it because I like the time period it was set in.  The problem was that when I would put it down I never wanted to pick it up again. And I guess I felt guilty starting something else.  And there was a lot of good television I wanted to watch. And ... well, enough excuses.  By October I stopped feeling guilty leaving it and started reading other things.   

• Jamie MacGillivray:  The Renegade's Journey by John Sayles.  I think the word "Journey" is an appropriate word for the title.  This is the book I had a hard time finishing.  This is the last of my "Scotland" books that I started in August.  You may remember that the main character of the first Scotland book I read, The Bookseller of Inverness, was also named MacGillivray and he had survived the Battle of Culloden and transportation to the colonies, only to return to his home town of Inverness.   The MacGillivray in this novel has a similar journey without returning to Scotland. But this novel goes into much greater detail about the horror of the Battle of Culloden and its aftermath, the horror of being imprisoned in London for treason, the horror of being transported across the ocean, the horror of being attacked by privateers, the horror of being enslaved on a plantation in Georgia, the horror of being captured by native Americans - and that's only the first half of the novel.  With so much horror I kept putting it down and reading other things.  In the end it took me almost 2 months to finish it.  It was good enough that I wanted to finish it but at the same time I kept wanting to leave it.   When Jamie is finally captured by Indians and becomes involved in the beginning of the French and Indian War (and another main character ends up in Quebec)  it began to move faster for me because French North America is a particular interest of mine (and there was less horror).  But in the end, I can't really recommend this book.   I truthfully think it would make a good mini-series.  Detail can be captured on film with a shot that lasts a few seconds.  In a novel, the detail takes pages (and pages and pages and pages).  

• The Fraud:  A Novel by Zadie Smith.  This is the only book I finished in September.  I love Zadie Smith's writing and although this is the first historical novel she has written I ended up loving it as much as the other works of hers that I have read.  The novel opens with a home catastrophe brought on by the weight of too many books in the library/study which causes many books to crash through the floor to the room below.  I was a little nervous when it turned out that it was a history of the Battle of Culloden that turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back (Culloden again!).  And the main character, the widow Eliza Touchet, is also Scottish.  But this is not a Scottish novel.  Eliza is the housekeeper for her deceased husband's cousin, a one-time best selling author who is in his declining years. Both of them are people who really lived but are not much remembered  today (in fact, not much at all is known about Eliza).  Set in the 19th century in the times of Dickens, the main "fraud" in this novel involves a real life incident where a man claimed to be the long lost heir to a great fortune.  The main witness for the fraudster was an elderly, formerly enslaved Jamaican man who is also a character in this novel.  The legal proceedings around this are always in the background as the main characters, and all of London, follow the trial avidly.  Those of the lower classes see this as a populist cause and echoes of our own times are all over this part of the plot.  But there are other "frauds" that are ongoing in the novel.  I enjoyed the many layers of this novel and recommend it as well as Zadie Smith's other novels (all of which are set in modern times).

• The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman (A Thursday Murder Club Novel).   The next installment of the Thursday Murder Club, this episode features our elderly main characters investigating the death of a local antiques dealer whom they knew.  As usual it is delightful and I think he captures these elderly detectives beautifully.  But a warning - if you had or have a loved one with Alzheimers you may find parts of this book very difficult.  VERY difficult. I did not expect to find myself crying my eyes out in the middle of a cozy murder mystery.

• The Accidental Detectorist: Uncovering an Underground Obsession by Nigel Richardson.  When the pandemic stopped all travel, a travel writer decided to learn about metal detecting.  He could travel through British history.  Richardson takes you through his journey, buying equipment, learning the how's and where's of the hobby and the joys of finding things.  As someone who was always interested in archaeology, this seems like the perfect hobby and while reading I briefly considered taking it up.  But, then I realized that while America has been inhabited many thousands of years, the only metal objects I would find would be a few hundred years old at most. 

• The Umbrella by A. M. Stuart.  This novella is a prequel to the Harriet Gordon mystery series which is set in southeast Asia in the early 1900's.  In the series we know that Harriet, a widow, had been arrested in London as part of the demonstrations for Women's Suffrage and that she had been force fed.   This novella is that story. I liked it because it filled in some of Harriet's background, although as with many novellas there wasn't much to it. 

• Terror in Topaz by A. M. Stuart.  This is the fourth book in the Harriet Gordon mystery series.  In this novel, Harriet and her brother travel to Kuala Lumpur (in present day Malaysia) because her brother has a job offer.  While there, a murder (of course) takes place and Harriet is in the midst of it.  I mainly read these mysteries because they have a good sense of place - I find myself googling pictures of places a lot when reading.  As mysteries they are fine but are not my favorites. 

Ahsoka Series Finale Season 1

 The series finale of Ahsoka is tonight and I thought I'd go on record with my predictions (not that anyone cares or will even read this). 

Here they are:

• Baylon Skoll will discover the thing/person who has been calling to him and he will die or be irrevocably changed/defeated in the process.  Throughout the series he has been set up as a very powerful force wielder.  Ahsoka has come up against him twice.  Once she lost and the other time he didn't win.   If the final "big bad" is going to convine those of us who don't participate in the Expanded Universe that it really is big, really is bad and is horribly frightening the writers have to show us - they can't just tell us.  The best way to show us is to kill the most powerful person in the series and that's Baylon.  They can't kill Ahsoka, it's her show.  That's why she hasn't defeated Baylon - they need him to be defeated by the Big Bad to show us how frightening the Big Bad is. 

• Thrawn will make it back to the original galaxy.  He will take the witches (sigh) with him. I'm pretty sure the others except Baylon will make it back too but I suppose it is possible Ahsoka, Ezra and Sabine could be stranded until next year.   Maybe fighting the Big Bad.  (I'm hoping whatever the Big Bad is, they will just leave it in the other Galaxy.)  None of them will die - the death of Baylon will be enough.

• At some point Ezra will use a light saber and make some quip about how it's all coming back to him.  (But I think he will eventually construct a new light saber of his own when he gets back to the main galaxy - although I like the idea of him finding Kanin's light saber which many people have thrown out as an idea.)

• Although Shin wants to throw in her lot with Thrawn, the witches PLUS zombies will be too much for her.  (I don't really care for Shin but in some ways she is a stand in for the audience every time she says "witches?"  Zombies haven't shown up yet but I predict that if they do, that will be too much even for her).  Thrawn will have to show some of his hand or we fans are going to wonder why we should really be worried about him getting back to the main galaxy. 

• Shin will not be "redeemed" - if she ends up with Ahsoka and company it will be because she is stranded like them and has no other choice.  But wherever she is I predict she will magically continue to have time to apply all that eye makeup even though she hasn't had time even for a bath. Same for Sabine.

• I predict they will NOT return via the World Between Worlds.  Ahsoka already made it clear in Rebels that everyone has to go out the way they come in or chaos will ensue.  And Dave Filoni has said it is a place meant for knowledge not travelling between times.  This is not to say that the WBW will not come into it in the final episode, I just predict they won't use it to return. 

• They will NOT fully resolve the looming issue between Ezra and Sabine over her not telling him how she got there.  I think they will let that character issue arise in the episode and then be resolved next season.  

• There will be a post-credits scene.

• Not a prediction, but speculation.   Whatever the Big Bad is, it will not be resolved without Anakin who may be set up to be the most powerful being in the Galaxy (the Father?) and finally bring meaning to the phrase "bring balance to the Force" (which I've never thought had much meaning at the end of the original trilogy).   Part of me thinks that would be cool but part of me thinks that would be a problem in a series entitled Ahsoka.   Seems like Ahsoka should be the hero in her own series. 

Ahsoka

 We are six episodes into the eight episode season of Ahsoka on DisneyPlus and I have thoughts.  Minor spoilers ahead. 

I've seen a lot of commentators on YouTube wondering if the casual fan who never watched the animated series Star Wars:  Rebels can really understand what is going on in Ahsoka.   There has been a lot of discussion about the necessity of making the series accessible to the casual Star Wars fans while still exciting the uber-fans.  Since I did watch Rebels, I can't speak for those casual fans but I don't think it's hard to figure out what is going on - Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren are trying to find their friend Ezra Bridger who disappeared, along with Grand Admiral Thrawn, at the end of Rebels and has been missing ever since. They want to find and bring Ezra back but they don't want Thrawn to return because he is dangerous.  It's a pretty simple premise and, while seeing Rebels adds dimension to the story, I don't think it is difficult to understand.  At some point in each episode this premise is more or less said out loud by one character or another. 

But at the same time that these uber-fan commenters are so worried about the Ezra Bridger story line, they are all excited by another part of the story that I think is far more problematic for casual fans. 

I've been wondering all season why Dave Filoni decided to send Ahsoka and friends (and enemies) to an entirely new galaxy instead of keeping the action in the usual "far, far away" galaxy.   In episode six some of the characters arrive in this new galaxy and I was underwhelmed.   I saw some online  fans  saying "this new galaxy is awesome!" and I wondered how they could possibly know. We've seen nothing yet of the new galaxy except for one planet.   And while this planet is different from other planets we've seen in Star Wars, it's not that different.  It's still just a planet.  Why, I wondered, did Filoni feel it was necessary to put it in a brand new galaxy instead of just sticking it in an under-explored part of the existing galaxy? 

I can't read Dave Filoni's mind but I have a theory that it relates to the part of the storyline that in my opinion could be a problem for the casual fans. 

First, you have to know that while I am a Star Wars fan I am not by any stretch of the imagination an uber-fan.  Yes, I've seen all the films (the original trilogy began when I was in high school so that's still my favorite).  During 2020 quarantine I got access to DisneyPlus and re-watched the first trilogy (which I'd seen multiple times before) and the prequels which I had only seen (maybe) twice.   Then I binged for the first time the two animated series:  Star Wars:  The Clone Wars and Star Wars:  Rebels.  I went into them thinking they would be cheesy children's cartoons but they turned out to be really well done and I recommend them.   I've also seen all the live action TV that has since come out on DisneyPlus and I watched the recent animated Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi.  I did not watch Star Wars:  Resistance but I don't think that affects my enjoyment of Ahsoka since I think it takes place in a different time period.

So my basic Star Wars knowledge is pretty good.  But in terms of the expanded Star Wars universe, I've never read a single book or played any of the games.   And I don't intend to ever read the books or play the games.  My experience is limited to film/tv.   If it wasn't in a film or on a tv show - I don't know about it.  I think that makes me similar to the casual fan who may have just seen the movies and maybe the live action TV shows but hasn't watched any of the animated shows. 

I really enjoyed Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated series that introduced the character of Ahsoka Tano.  It was well done, filled in a lot of detail that made the prequel series make more sense and gave us a great character in Ahsoka.  My least favorite part of that series, however, was a storyline that involved the Witches of Dathomir.  Witches?  In Star Wars?  I found it eye-rolling.   Especially when they re-animated the dead into, basically, a zombie army.  Zombies?  In Star Wars?  This was not what I expected to happen in the Star Wars Universe.  Apparently all of this was justified because they appear in the expanded universe in books and/or games.  But I don't read the books or watch the games so I just found that storyline at worst irritating and at best boring. Fortunately they were defeated and I could forget about them.  

And now Ahsoka has her own live action series.  Which I am very much enjoying.  But I was not particularly thrilled when one of the villains identified herself as a surviving Dathomir witch.  Unlike the cartoon versions she didn't dress "witchy" and her magik (yes, they do magic with a "k" at the end) seemed mostly to be somewhat Force related.   So, I thought, as long as they don't introduce a bunch of "witchy" witches I could handle it. 

Of course, now the characters have started to arrive in the new galaxy and on the new planet are three "witches" who dress very "witchy" and act very "witchy" and there is big possibility that before the end of the season we are going to confront zombies. 

The uber-fans love this and constantly talk about how great this is and how it relates to the expanded universe.  But I don't partake of the expanded universe.  I am more like a casual fan who has only seen the movies and maybe the live action TV shows and this is NOT what that casual fan would expect to find in the Star Wars universe.  Or at least in the Star Wars galaxy that we are all familiar with.  

And maybe that's why Dave Filoni made us all travel to ANOTHER galaxy "far, far away" to encounter them.   Because to the casual fan they shouldn't be found in "our" galaxy and if they find a way into "our" galaxy it would be bad.  (And for people like me who rolled eyes through that part of The Clone Wars, it explains that the witches I endured in The Clone Wars originally came from another galaxy.)   I really hope it doesn't come to zombies again, but I fear it will.  

Other than that I've really enjoyed the rest of the series. 

My August Reading

In June/July I visited Scotland, including Inverness, the Highlands and Edinburgh.  When I traveled up to the lake at the end of July I brought along a number of books that had been on my (virtual) shelf for a long time, all set in Scotland, because it seemed the right time to read them.  So this month is heavy on Scotland.  And  I must admit that, at the end of the month, I was working on the last "Scottish" book on my virtual shelf but didn't finish it , so it will be in next month's summary.

• Murder in Piccadilly by Charles Kingston.  This 1936 mystery was re-published in 2015 as part of the British Library Crime Classics series.  A few years ago I bought my mom a set of 12 British Library Crime Classics, but I don't think she had read any of them when she passed away.  This is the second one I've tried and I was unimpressed.  This is a murder mystery where the murder doesn't appear until halfway through the book.  The first part of the book sets up all the reasons why the wealthy but unlikeable victim would be murdered by any number of people (all of whom are stereotypes and almost all of whom are awful). The second part of the book is the detective trying to solve the murder and he's not very likeable either.  On the whole - not recommended. 

• The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. MacLean. Iain MacGillivray survived the Battle of Culloden and transportation to the colonies and now, six years later, he is back in his hometown of Inverness running a bookshop and keeping his head down.  But then his father Hector, an agent of the exiled King and a wanted man, turns up in town and Iain finds a murdered man in his bookshop with the Jacobite symbol of the white cockade on the hilt of the dagger that killed him.  This novel had a very good sense of place (I enjoyed recognizing many of the places I visited) and interesting characters.  The mystery was a little far-fetched for my taste but it did move along. My attitude to the Jacobites and their cause in the aftermath of Culloden was, perhaps, influenced by the attitude of one of my tour guides in Scotland who spent a great deal of time trying to convince us that the Battle of Culloden/Bonnie Prince Charlie and the King over the Water was little more than a fight among rich people for power and that the "little people" were used in their fight.  Which may be true, but this novel did show what the "little people" were up against as Redcoats patrolled the streets of Inverness in the aftermath and a way of life was disappearing.  On the other hand, the characterizations in this novel are very shaded and even some of the Redcoats turned out to be ok. On the whole I enjoyed this. 

• Rose Nicolson by Andrew Greig.  Another Scottish book but in a later time period - the fifteenth century.   Mary Queen of Scots has fled to England and King James VI is but a boy.  The main character, William Fowler, the son of money-lenders (although they aren't called that) has grown up in Edinburgh amongst the conflicts and now he is off to St. Andrews for University.  There he makes friends with another student, a local boy named Tom Nicolson, and Tom's sister Rose.   Many of the characters in this novel were real people and I didn't realize until the end that William Fowler himself was a real person - a poet very much a part of the court of James VI/I.  The novel is written as a memoir by the much older Fowler looking back on his young self.  I feel certain there will be a sequel because this memoir ends when Fowler is only a few years out of University.  I enjoyed this novel and do recommend it to anyone who likes historical fiction. 

• Queen Hereafter by Susan Fraser King.   Another Scottish book.  This is the story of Queen Margaret of Scotland, she of sainted name.  I knew little about her before this novel except that she was Anglo-Saxon, married Malcom (who killed MacBeth) and was a saint.  Even after reading this novel I didn't find her a very interesting character - all that fasting and religiousness didn't appeal to me.  The real main character is Eva, who is the daughter of the deceased King Lulach (MacBeth's stepson also killed by Malcom ), living as a hostage at the court of Malcom and Margaret.  She makes friends with Margaret but is torn between her loyalty to Margaret and loyalty to her grandmother Gruoch (the widow of MacBeth and still a power in the north).  Despite all this history this is a very light read and it mostly left me unsatisfied.  I like my historical fiction to be dense and leave me wanting more.    

• Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.   This was a complete change of pace.  A novel set in the distant past, the recent past and the future, it revolves around an ancient manuscript describing a silly young man's desire to go to "Cloud Cuckoo Land".  One part of the story contains the fall of Constantinople and the saving of the manuscript (although greatly damaged).  Another part of the novel is about a man in 20th century Idaho who translates the manuscript and works with a group of children to dramatize it.  The other part takes place at some point in the future where a girl who appears to be on a spaceship bound for another planet becomes somewhat obsessed with the manuscript. I found this novel hard going. Doerr not only shifts between stories, he goes backwards and forwards in time within each story.  The chapters are short, which for me meant that I never really was invested in any of the stories until the book was half over.  Given that the hardback version I was reading was 622 pages, it took 300 pages for me to even begin to care about the characters. Full disclosure, I was not someone who loved Doerr's well loved novel "All the Light we Cannot See".  I thought he relied too much on tropes and was bent on telling a "feel good" story no matter how dark the time was.   I felt much the same in this novel.  When I began, I was hoping it would compare well to one of my favorite novels - "Dream of Scipio" by Iain Pears.  That novel is also about a manuscript that ties together three stories taking place in three different time periods.  But they don't really compare.  Pears' novel really made me think long and hard about what "civilization" meant and how people respond when they see their civilization threatened.  I understood the "why" of the novel.  Doerr sets his stories amongs war, domestic terrorism and climate change, and almost as importantly the threat of losing culture's stories.  And yet ... he resolves all of his stories on a positive note.  I couldn't find the "why" of the novel.  At best he seems to be saying that bad times happen in every generation and what is necessary is to have a positive attitude ... and take reading seriously. On the whole, I didn't care for this novel. It was a lot of work and not enough payoff. 

• Wild Fire by Ann Cleves.  The last novel in the Shetland Series. Apparently Ann Cleves' husband died just as she was finishing this novel.  They had originally met in Shetland on Fair Isle.  She feels it would be too painful to continue the series.  She doesn't really wrap up Jimmy Alvarez' story completely but also doesn't end it on a complete cliff hanger. The mystery was fine.  Mostly I liked these novels for their sense of place, which is always good.