murder.booklocker.com

Chris Rogers did a great job on this book, even if it got a bit sappy at the end. We had gotten all three books, this one, Rage Factor and Chill Factor, at the library. Have to tell you, folks, I forced my way through to page 92 of Rage and gave it up. I managed to read the first rape, but the subsequent vigilante rape of the rapist was way too graphic for me. My partner had already read the book and, when I complained about the violence, she warned me that it only got worse. That was all I needed to hear. Didn’t finish the book and have no interest in the third.

As a sort of “by the way, that reminds me,” that’s the reason we both stopped reading Dick Francis. We devoured everything he wrote in the beginning. When the violence and just plain gruesomeness seemed to dominate, we bailed.

Okay, I confess. I was slow in getting to this one. But you have to understand that we cycle through the alphabet at the library. We start at A, work through to Z, then begin again. Alexander McCall Smith just had to wait until we got to the Ss.

There’s a bit where Mma Ramotswe is thinking about medical matters:

“Now constipation was quite a different matter. It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party — with a chance of government perhaps — but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail.”

I love language and what can be done with it. Which is why I want to tell you about an extraordinary book that I pulled off the shelf at the local library: Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily Carter. Here’s a sample:

“There was this one summer that began in June and ended quite some time later, when I could hear the voices of men in traffic, while I was walking east on Houston. They honked and squealed, barked, drawled, groaned, purred, hissed, whispered, and raggedly begged at me as I twitched down the street in a borrowed dress that was as red as the stoplights, the stoplights gleaming in the black air like costume jewelry from a sunken Spanish galleon, gleaming from the bottom of the sea: the night on Houston like a black tropical shipwreck ocean, fathoms deep and full of trinkets for a young girl like yours-ever-true.”

I recommend you pick it.

I’m reading Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter by Blaize Clement. We were headed out of the library and there it was — propped on the end of one of the shelves. On impulse, my partner picked it up and I’m not a bit sorry.

However, it strikes me strange that the book is large print (I’m not in need of that yet!) but is printed on really thin paper. I’m assuming, maybe incorrectly, that the larger print targets older readers. The curious thing is that I have a touch of neuropathy in my fingers (not unusual in older folks either) and I’m having trouble turning the pages easily. So while the large print solves one problem, the thin pages create another.

Another thing which struck me was the way the book handled emphasis. I scanned a bit so you can see what I’m talking about:

In the line “He can’t do that many bypasses” the word THAT is in a larger, italic, sans-serif face. Notice that in typing that line, I put the word that I wanted to emphasize in all caps. I’m thinking that what I felt I should do had some influence on what the publishers/author thought they had to do. Normally, one might expect boldface for emphasis. But speaking as someone who used boldface to set off the “Murder” and the “Videotape” sections, boldface doesn’t always turn out like you think it will. Within a sentence, boldface in a book, jumps right off the page at you.

Given that in these days of text messaging, email, etc. folks put words in all caps, or italic or even bold italic with abandon, it’s hard to remember the days when sentence construction and word choice alone controlled the emphasis that the author felt should be there.

Still, the choice to interrupt the text with a different font — sans-serif, larger and italic — is intriguing.

The large print edition is published by Thorndike Press, Waterville, Maine.

Just finished two more book by Nadia Gordon: Death by the Glass and Murder Alfresco. We weren’t very impressed by her first book, Sharpshooter. A bit too contrived. But the others were much better.

My real gripe is that Gordon rushed through to the end in a blur. As an author I understand that the action needs to pick up, but even after I finished, I wasn’t sure that I had the sequence and the actual facts down.

This book also had more humor to lighten what it surely her darkest book so far. It made for a good balance.

Maddy Hunter (Passport to Peril mysteries) was another author I looked at when considering “competition.” She, like Peter Abresch, also writes about senior citizens, although her Iowans go on trips to Europe and Peter’s take classes across the U.S.

Hunter’s sleuth is the granddaughter of one of the seniors. Grandma reminds me a lot of Stephanie Plum’s grandmother in Janet Evanovich’s books.

Hunter is probably best known for her delightful sense of humor - a chuckle on every page. So far, I’ve read Alpine for You, Top O’ the Mournin’, Pasta Imperfect, and Hula Done it.

In the memoir class I took with Professor Michele Morano, one of our assignments was to research the competition to our “slice of life.” That particular exercise came back to me when PARK RIDGE was published. “Who,” I asked myself, “was my competition?”

Foremost on my list were Peter Abresch’s books, the Elderhostel series. I have since read all of them, but find that they are not competitive. True, they deal with groups of senior citizens and murder, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Abresch’s books are fairly light (not a bad thing) while PARK RIDGE is pretty dark (not a bad thing).