Since last Thursday, I have read only one book: Blood Cross, the second Jane Yellowrock.
Jane is still in New Orleans, searching for the vampire who is creating new young rogues. (In this world, the newly risen have be controlled i.e. chained in a basement, for ten years until they regain their sanity. The young and newly created are attacking humans and vamps indiscriminately.
After Jane’s friend Molly is attacked and her children kidnapped, Jane realizes she is dealing with something new: witch vampires.
Because I blogged about the Albany Book Fair (tremendous fun) on my usual day, I will do my review of my most recent books now.
The first book I read was John Dedakis’ Bullet in your Chamber.
I unfortunately read this series out of order so I already knew something terrible had happened. I had to go back and fill in. Really excellent, but pretty dark.
Lark Chadwick, finally happy in a relationship, comes across a plot to blackmail one of the president’s advisors into pressing the president into approving a drone law. There were so many possible murderers, it was hard to identify the guilty party. Several deaths later, and problems in Lark’s relationship, make for a captivating read.
Lighter but still fascinating was This Enemy Town by Marcia Talley.
I am gradually reading my way through all the Hannah Ives mysteries. In book 5, another cancer survivor asks Hannah to help with the naval academy’s production of Sweeny Todd. Feeling she cannot refuse, Hannah agrees. While there, she sees Jennifer Goodall, the woman who’d accused Hannah’s husband of sexual harassment and almost destroyed both his career and their marriage. Hannah confronts her and when Jennifer’s body is discovered, Hannah is arrested as the prime suspect.
I did not see the final twist coming and I am now on to number six.
I took a break from mysteries and read Skinwalker by Faith Hunter.
It came up on my Amazon feed as something I might enjoy. And I really did. Jane Yellowrock is a vampire hunter in a world when the ‘vamps’ have been outed and are now part of the human world. A rogue vampire is terrorizing New Orleans, draining humans and vampires alike.
Well-written and full of action. It reminded me of the Thomas Perry Jane Whitehead mysteries with a badass woman, except with an added paranormal aspect. Another series I will continue reading.
Finally, I began reading a nonfiction book by Matthew Green: Shadowlands; Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages.
Although I haven’t finished this, I read the first chapter and was immediately hooked. Skara Brae is an old old village, estimated as about 5000 years old, so older than the Egyptian pyramids and older than Stonehenge, in northern Scotland. A severe storm in 1850 washed away the sand from a beach and revealed this neolithic village on the shore.
I have seen this village on a pre-pandemic trip to Iceland. On the way home, we stopped in Kirkwald, a very northern town. From there, we took a bus to Skara Brae.
It is a village of little stone huts. Repeated storms have continued to wash away the sand and also, unfortunately, one of the houses.
Although it was the beginning of July, it was COLD.
I had a great time at the Albany Book Festival this past Saturday. It was so wonderful seeing all the other writers (especially my table mate Jode Millman) and the crowds of attendees.
This is a free event and plenty of people took advantage of it. All ages, both men and women, and a wonderful diversity. I will definitely sign up again next year.
All of the authors around me sold books too so we did well with publicity aspect of it. As usual, I picked up a few books to read but at least this time I didn’t spend more than I took in. LOL
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
