Instead of blogging about books I read this week, I wanted to let everyone know about the Albany Book Festival this Saturday. I have attended many times and will be attending again this year.
I feel warm to this event since last year it was the first in-person event I attended.
Besides the local author section, where I will be, the event has talks and a children’s section with games and more. It is FREE.
This will be held at Albany University’s upper campus: 1400 Washington Avenue.
There are many many authors covering all the genres, non-fiction and more.
As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am an avid hiker and one of my favorite places is Acadia Park. We visit the park as often as we can, at least several times a year.
We visited Acadia over Labor Day Weekend. I have never seen the park so busy – but I digress. This was our first time taking the new puppy on a real hike. On our past visits, we took her for several of the easier walks: Wonderland and Ship’s Harbor.
This time we hiked up Flying Mountain. Although short, and one of the easier hikes, it includes many of the things we love about this park: the rock climbing and the stunning views.
After twenty minutes going almost straight up, Cayenne was already tired. But we pressed on to the summit.
Then we began the downward climb. One’s knees really take a beating from climbing over the granite boulders on both the up and the down. Many of the trails are also treacherous with exposed roots.
We were almost to the end here, with maybe a little more than half a mile to go. Cayenne was very tired and didn’t want to walk anymore. We did not carry her and she made it to the end of the trail. When we got home, she collapsed on the floor and didn’t move for about twenty minutes.
August 29. This week I read the latest Kathy Reichs Cold Cold Bones.
A human eyeball is delivered to Temperance Brennan’s front porch. Shortly after, a head missing said eyeball is discovered. Shortly after, other victims turn up, each one mimicking a past case that Brennan worked on.
At the same time, she is worried about her daughter, Katie, who has returned from military service. Suffering from PTSD, she wants to set up a charity for veterans. She begins volunteering at a local shelter, only to disappear shortly after.
What is going on?
Enjoyable. My only criticism is that I knew who the villain was fairly early on.
The second book I read was In Death’s Shadow by Marcia Talley.
I enjoy these which are a cozy as I like to read. In this one, an insurance scam results in several murders. Insurance scams sound as though they would be very dry but I found the insurance in this book interesting. Hannah’s breast cancer, now in remission, is the theme that ties all the books together. Fun.
Inadvertently, I read this one out of order; this is number four so I will have to go back and fill in with the third.
Rum was the lubricant and the fuel for the engine of commerce leading up to the American Revolution and a bit beyond. It was a favorite drink of the slavers, the slaves, and pretty much everyone else. Called Nelson’s blood (as well as a number of less flattering names), rum made up part of the British sailors’ pay.
In fact, one source I read said that the outrage over the Boston Tea Party had more to do with the dumping of rum than tea.
What is rum? Rum is distilled from the molasses left over from sugarcane. The cane has particular requirement and cannot be grown in the temperate lands. It must be grown with lots of sun and water. It also needs intensive labor to cut, cart and process the cane under the tropical sun. A clear and distinct link between the growing demand for sugar and slavery can be drawn because, as plantations were turned over to cane, the needs of a large work force demanded more workers – Slaves. The Good Hope Plantation, at its height, owned approximately 3000 slaves to do with work.
The slaves needed to be fed. New England ships brought dried cod, picked up the molasses for transport to the distilleries in New England. The resulting drink (called among other things, screech, kill-devil, demon water) was put in casks and sent to Africa to purchase more slaves and also to Great Britain. This was the previously discussed Triangle Trade.
Once slavery was abolished and the plantations no longer had this labor pool, the importance of sugar and sugar cane fell, first in Jamaica and then in the United States. (Now machinery performs most of the duties required in farming and harvesting sugarcane.)
Ironically, the long trips over the ocean, stored in casks, made the rum more drinkable.
Although rum was still consumed after the War for Independence, as mentioned in Murder, Sweet Murder, it was falling out of favor as the new country’s beverage. Whiskey, from rye grown in Western Pennsylvania, and distilled in the country, was considered more patriotic and as such became the drink of choice.
I have been a long time fan of the Jane Whitefield mysteries by Thomas Perry. This week I read the latest, The Left Handed Twin.
Jane disappears people. Abused wives, people on the run from the mob, witnesses who fear Witness Protection won’t keep them safe: they all find their way to Jane.
In this one, Jane takes on a young woman who testified against her boyfriend for murder. Jane takes her on and begins training Sara (who becomes Anne) how to survive as someone different from herself. But the story takes a sudden turn when the Russian mob become involved. They are not interested in Jane’s client; they are interested in Jane. They pursue her across the country and then across the 100 mile hike in Maine.
Perry’s style is not the smoothest but the action keeps one captivated.
The second title I read was Undercover Amish by Ashley Emma.
Like the excellent Linda Castillo Kate Burkholder mysteries, Olive leaves the community after a trauma but returns to solve a mystery. Other murders, two fires and a kidnapping all figure in the plot as Olivia deals with her feelings for her long ago flame, Isaac. Olivia, like Kate, has become a cop.
I felt the representation of the Amish was not as compelling or as believable as Castillo’s mysteries and Olivia herself is not as interesting a character as Kate. This series is billed as romantic suspense, which the Castillo mysteries are not, so I may not have liked this as well because of the genre.
I did not like this as well as the Kate Burkholder series.
The cruise I was on for vacation stopped at Falmouth Jamaica. An excursion out went to the Good Hope Plantation. I was particularly interested in visiting this estate since my most recent book, Murder, Sweet Murder, centers around a sugar plantation in Jamaica.
Sugarcane is a finicky crop that demands a particular temperature and regular water. Since it exhausts the soil, new fields must always be planted. It is also very labor intensive.
The Good Hope estate was set up in 1774 and, at its height, used about 3000 slaves.
Several buildings from that time are still there, although they are being used now as a shop, reception area and a restaurant. A small museum was attached.
One of the tools used to create sugar from the cane is a pot that resembles a wok. Five of these, the heat increasing as the syrup was moved from one pan to another, boiled the cane juice down. The resulting syrup was allowed to cool and the sugar crystallized out of it. The crystals are allowed to continue drying and then packed in barrels.
This must have been some process. Anyone who has ever made fudge knows how quickly sugar burns. (At the Whitney Plantation near New Orleans, a site now dedicated to the enslaved people who worked it, we were told that children were usually given the job of stirring the syrup, I can hardly imagine assigning a child to such a dangerous task.)
The byproduct of sugar making is molasses which was fermented into rum. The lowest quality was called killdevil, screech and a number of other names. Nonetheless,, everyone drank rum – until the Whiskey Rebellion in the new United States made whiskey the patriotic drink.
At its height, Jamaica produced about 20% of the world’s sugar. The amount dropped off when slavery was abolished and the plantations lost their enslaved workforce.
I did not see the house but pictures show an elegant home and hint at the gracious lifestyle the enslaved population offered the white planters.
I went on a much needed vacation last week; a Disney cruise to the Caribbean. I don’t think traveling to the Caribbean in August is the best plan but it was fun.
Anyway, waiting for planes in airports and then the flights gave me a lot of time to read. I’d read about The Devil’s Own in a previous book so I decided to read it.
It tells the story of a teacher hired to teach in a small English town that, unfortunately, follows devil worship and other unsavory practices. This was written many years ago and I found it extremely slow moving until about half way through.
I followed it with a cozy, Kibbles and Death by S. A. Kazlo.
Samantha Davies discovers the body of the local kennel owner, bashed in the head and lying amongst scattered kibble. Her dachshund Porkchop begins nibbling on a bone, the murder weapon used to bash the victim in the head. Samantha begins investigating and soon discovers Calvin has been blackmailing a number of town residents.
The arrival of a new detective suggests the possibility for romance for the divorced Samantha.
Charming.
I went darker again with Fake, by John Dedakis.
The third in the Lark Chadwick series, we find Lark involved with the occupants of the White House. Lark has begun interviewing the First Lady for a biography and thus witnesses her sudden collapse and death. At first Lark believes Rose has died from the pancreatic cancer that is slowly killing her but the truth is much more serious, involving politics on the world scale. This is a murder mystery and a political thriller with romantic overtones.
The Ninja Betrayed was next.
This is the third and final (Unfortunately) Lily Wong. Lily travels with her mother to Hong Kong for an important meeting with her grandfather’s company. Not so much of a murder mystery but more of a story of financial malfeasance, it describes riots and unrest in Hong Kong. Lily’s romance with Daniel Kwok continues – but has several startling turns. I really enjoy Lily and wish the series had continued.
Finally, I read a Talent for Murder by Andrew Wilson.
Agatha Christie’s marriage is breaking down; her husband Archie is involved in an affair with Nancy Neele. Agatha disappears, registering at a hotel as Teresa Neele. This much is true. In the novel, Wilson suggests a much darker explanation for her disappearance than her upset over the impending divorce. A Dr. Kurs approaches Agatha and, by threatening her daughter Rosalind, involves her in a plot to murder his wife.
At the same time, a young girl, Uma Crowe, investigates Agatha’s disappearance.
I found this book interesting with its mix of true and fictional. Not exactly a murder mystery but captivating for its depiction of Agatha Christie and the world she came from.
This past week I read two great books, both very different.
The first one is The Hidden one by Linda Castillo, the newest in this series.
Kate receives an appeal from three men from a far away Amish community asking her to come and help. Jason Bowman, her first flame, has been accused of murdering the Bishop of this village eighteen years ago. Kate hesitates. She will be out of her jurisdiction and with none of her support network. But she agrees to look into it.
Once she is attacked in her motel room, she knows her investigation is upsetting someone. Instead of being intimidated, she is more determined than ever to resolve this case.
Her research takes her to Minnesota, and to a failing bar outside the Amish are. She soon begins to see that the Bishop was not the man everyone thought.
I did not guess the ending. Another wonderful mystery.
The second book I read was A Killing in Costumes.
Cindy and Jay, once married soap stars, came out as gay. They remained good friends and have set up a store of movie memorabilia Hooray for Hollywood. Facing financial ruin, they are offered a way out in the offer of a valuable movie collection from an old star. But a larger company is also trying to handle the sale. After meeting with the salesman from Cypress, he is found dead and Cindy and Jay are the prime suspects.
And what’s up with the old star’s creepy son? Lots of fun.
I finished reading Queens of the Wild. As I understand it, Hutton’s thesis challenges the belief that the Faerie Queen, Queen of the Night, the Green Man and all the witches and goddesses are descended from the ancient world. He believes they are more recent constructs and offers both scholarly and literary examples to prove it.
My problem with this theses, and he may be right that there is no direct line from the Goddesses of the ancient world to the current (after all, it is hard to interpret what was happening in prerecorded history), is that he seems to dismiss the existence or at least the importance of these Goddesses. Here is a quote: To a great extent, the vision of a prehistory in which human society had been violently altered from being led by and centered on women to being dominated by men, and in which religion had changed its focus from an earth goddess to a sky god was an obvious response to modern anxieties about gender roles in changing Western social orders.”
Am I the only one to see his belief that patriarch has always been dominant underlying his statement?
He draws Maria Gimbutas, a well respected archaeologist, into the discussion but dismisses her later work after she’d moved to California. “Gimbutas’ own work now gradually mutated to serve the beliefs and ideals of this movement (which stressed the importance of a female deity. . .”
I want to add that statuary, art work, Minoan seals and other artifacts do attest to the presence and importance of Goddesses in the ancient world. In the modern world matrilineal societies are not unknown. (see the Pueblo tribes in the southwest U.S.)
The book jacket says this book is thought provoking and it is. In my opinion, though, he wrote out of his belief in the primacy of male dominance.
I also read Holy Chow by David Rosenfelt.
This was a wonderful relief from the previous work. In this offering, Andy Carpenter reluctantly takes on the murder of a wealthy woman who had adopted a dog from his rescue operation: the chow of the title. Her stepson is arrested but Carpenter does not belief he is guilty. As usual, he professes his unwillingness to become involved but does and also, as usual, the mystery is more complicated than it at first appears.
One of the things I have found so interesting is the way politics infuses everything; even the simplest article.
For example, cloth. We take it for granted. But cloth is important and has a very involved history.
But back to politics and calico.
Cottons, especially the calicoes, imported from India became very popular in the late 1700s. In Salem, calicoes were one of the primary imports into the new United States.
In England, however, which had always had a thriving wool trade, various protectionist laws were established to protect the woolen industry from this threat. First the printed calicoes were banned. This created trade in the gray unfinished cloth (fustian) which was sent to London to be finished.
A flourishing industry in India was almost destroyed to protect the English wool trade.
Then the wool trade objected when the imports of cotton recovered. Parliament passed a law fining anyone caught wearing dyed or ‘stained’ calico, but they exempted neckcloths and fustian.
In 1783 Thomas Bell invented a process to print cotton using copper rollers. At first only a few pieces were printed but by 1850 over 20,000 pieces were completed.
Now the Calico printers in their turn took steps to protect their product. In 1916, they and the other printers joined and formed a trade association. This then set minimum prices for each ‘price section’ of the industry. This held until 1954 when it was challenged by the government Monopolies Commission.
