Currently Reading – week of August 21

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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.

Making sugar from sugarcane

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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.

Currently Reading

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August 7 – 20

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.

Currently Reading

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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.

Currently Reading

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Queens of the Wild (continued).

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.

Amusing and fun with a good mystery to boot.

Politics and cloth

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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.

Even printed cloth has a political history.

Currently Reading – and the whiff of patriarchy?

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The first book I read this week was A Simple Murder by Linda Castillo.

I chose it because it shares a title with my first Will Rees mystery series.

I also enjoy Linda’s books and have read them all. This work consists of five interlinked short stories, all starring Kate Burkholder and the Amish.U admit I prefer her novels but these were fun and were a little lighter than her novels. (It seems funny to consider murder mysteries ‘lighter’,)

The second book is Queens of the Wild; Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe. This is nonfiction; a study of Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, Mistress of the Night and the Old Woman of Gaelic Tradition. Hutton challenges most of the current scholarship in claiming these are NOT pre-Christian Goddesses.

I am reading it as part of my research for the new series I am working on. It will take place in Bronze Age Crete. Women figured prominently in this society and the mosaics, seals and other artifacts discovered seemed to indicate, not only a Goddess as the supreme being, but the importance of women.

Why do I find the Hutton work so disturbing?

When I began my research into what is popularly known as the Minoan Civilization, I began with a work by Nilsson, one of the first archaeologists to dig in Knossos. He was convinced that the many depictions of women in the mosaics, including a very famous one showing them participating in bull leaping, had to be showing Goddesses. Why? Because women simply couldn’t be that important. His prejudices were clear and informed his interpretation of this ancient civilization.

Granted, understanding a society that is separated from us by over 3000 years is very difficult, especially when one is working with mosaics, jewelry, seals and other artifacts, (no newpapers or written records to help) as the clues to interpret the inner workings of a culture. With that said, however, the lesson I took away is that we all judge based on the cultural mores we’ve internalized. It is important not to assume that because gender roles in the early twentieth century followed one pattern that they were set and unchangeable, and fit every human society. Most scholars now posit that women were indeed that important in that society.

So, back to Hutton. I admit I haven’t quite finished this work and maybe I will agree with him more when I’m done than I do now. His focus does appear to be more about the Christian world of the early Middle Ages and a discussion of how these pagan goddesses came to be in a Christian society. We shall see.

Communes – and Shakers

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The communal style of living which is now so much a part of our picture of the Shakers was actually not a part of their beliefs. When they moved to the Colonies, however, relocating around Albany, financial stresses compelled them to live in a communal setting

If you have begun thinking of tie-dye, put it out of your mind.

The equality between the sexes was a direct outgrowth of the Shakers’ belief in the dual nature of God; a masculine half and a feminine half. It did not hurt that the spiritual leader of the order was a woman, Mother Ann Lee. Her experiences during childbirth, and the death of her young children, persuaded her that all sin came from sex and that only by overcoming fleshly desires could true salvation be attained. Unlike many of the new faiths that sprang up at that time, the Shakers were celibate.

The sexes lived together in the Dwelling Houses, but were separated and lived on separate sides of the Dwelling House. Personal property was abolished as well, all the property being held communally. New converts brought with them and gave to the order all of their worldly possessions, including land. Even though the order accepted anybody, including those who were penniless, the order became quite wealthy from the property deeded to them.

By living communally, the Shakers also had a work force, necessary on the large farms they owned.

Their agrarian methods ceased to be competitive with the United States economy when it shifted from farming and handcrafts to factories. The Shakers couldn’t compete and their numbers began to dwindle. Celibacy was part of the problem. Since they had no children of their own, they relied on converts, both adults and children. Once there were governmental agencies that cared for the poor and for the abandoned children, formerly a conduit of people to ‘make’ a Shaker, and the number of converts declined, the number of Shakers diminished rapidly.,

Tthey remain once of the most successful ‘communes’ ever established. Currently, there are still two surviving members.

Currently Reading

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Week of July 11

So glad to return to my usual routine. This week I read two books: Sleep Well My Lady by Kwei Quarter and Unbreathed Memories by Marcia Talley.

Sleep Well My Lady takes place in Ghana.

A famous fashion designer, Lady Araba, is found murdered in her bed. Her chauffeur is arrested but Araba;s aunt is convinced he is not guilty so she applies to the Sowah Detective Agency. They quickly discover there are plenty of suspects, from the alcoholic Augustus Seeza to Ismael, the gardener. Although DNA evidence has been collected, it has been set aside, untested. The members of the agency go undercover to lay bare what really happened.

Although the setting is exotic, the motivations -and the people – are like people everywhere. Outside of some clunkiness in the style, probably from the translation, a very enjoyable mystery.

The second book I read this week is Marcia Talley’s Unbreathed Memories.

It is number two in the Hannah Ives series; my plan is to read them all throughout the summer.

Hannah’s sister Georgina is seeing a therapist and suffering a rather severe mental breakdown. During therapy, she claims her father sexually abused her. Worse, Georgina’s therapist has taken a header off the balcony and now Georgina is the prime suspect in her murder. It is up to Hannah to figure out what really happened.

I really enjoy these mysteries!

Maine and Ellery Queen

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Had a fun but very busy week in Maine. We stayed on Mount Desert Island, an absolutely magical place. The place we stayed had limited Internet; I could only access my email from 5 am to about 8. After that my phone worked only intermittently.

Above are a few shots of Maine locales. The middle photo is Thunder Hole in Acadia Park. The Island is one of the best place for hiking I know.

While there, I did not have time to read a book. Instead, I read an Ellery Queen magazine. Probably the April issue (I am behind.) Some good stories in there.