Total Books: 8   Total Pages: 2544   Longest: 416   Shortest: 157

Genres: 2 (Mystery – 4, Thriller – 4)

I missed my goal of finishing a non-fiction book this month, but I do have one in progress. I got distracted by a couple of series. Oh well, I’ll probably make up for it later in the year – maybe!

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

Gamache is now the head of the Sûreté Academy, where he hopes to imbue new life into the police force that he has recently exposed as corrupt nearly to its core. He has choices to make in terms of who now teaches at the academy and who is accepted to be trained there as well. The adage, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”, comes to mind as he decides on the professors. And his decision to admit one new recruit, Amelia Choquet, has both friends and enemies questioning Gamache’s competence.

But, if you’ve read any of the prior books, you know that Gamache tends to give people second chances that most don’t think deserve it. He sees the potential in people that others do not see and he nurtures and mentors them towards possibilities even they can’t imagine. Most of the time, his decisions work out well for everyone, but will his decisions this time become his great reckoning?  

The Boomerang by Robert Bailey

What if there was a cure for cancer? How would that impact the pharmaceutical, medical, and insurance industries? Who would get access to it? All I can say is this was an epic page-turner that was hard to put down.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

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Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once.
 
I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth, and when I was faced with writing this down, difficult as it is with one hand, I realized that telling the truth was the only way to do it.

Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started.

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But don’t start at there at the Prologue (which is where my Kindle app wanted to start) – you must start at very beginning title page and read the Epigraph and 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction which appear prior to the Prologue. Why? Because our trusty narrator, Ernest Cunningham, promises to uphold these rules of the Golden Age of detective fiction!  

This was a fun read and I’m looking forward to Stevenson’s next Ernest Cunningham book, Everyone On This Train is a Suspect.

Glass Houses by Louise Penny

This series really has become one of my all-time favorites with the eclectic, flawed, eccentric, yet dependable and likable collection of characters residing in the hidden village of Three Pines. The title of each book appears to be carefully considered and reflected in multiple ways and meanings in each book almost becoming a character itself.

Glass Houses has so many layers and the narrative is expertly woven back and forth between the events leading up to and the trial at which we find Gamache testifying as the novel opens. Once again, Gamache and his trusted protegees, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle LaCoste, find their integrity, careers, and perhaps their very lives endangered as they seek to solve a current murder cloaked in centuries-old folklore and history, and uncover something that goes even deeper.

Kingdom of The Blind by Louise Penny

Let’s just say that I’m really glad I’m so far behind in reading these and know there are several more already written. Since I mentioned the interplay of the titles previously – I wish I’d kept track of how many times “blind” in some form appears in this book!

Although the timeline is a few months away from Glass Houses, the fallout from it continues. Along with that storyline, Penny weaves yet another fascinating plot involving an old cleaning woman’s ludicrous bequest in her will, which requests Gamache, Myrna (the Three Pines bookstore owner and psychologist), and a carpenter from Montreal as the liquidators (executors) instead of her three children. But none of the three liquidators knows the woman – so why them?

I really must take a break and read something else now, but you can be sure that I’ll be pulling up #15 in the not-so-distant future to see what happens next with Penny’s riveting characters.

Adriana Villa Trilogy by Ernest Dempsey

The Mexican Connection, War of Thieves, and The Syndicate comprise a single “story” divided into 3 quick reads. Adriana Villa is a character from Dempsey’s Sean Wyatt Adventure Thriller series. At the time of the release of the trilogy in 2015, Adriana was Sean’s girlfriend (spoiler alert: she later becomes his wife).

Independently wealthy, Adriana is a master art thief who specializes in recovering lost works and returning them to their rightful owner. Of course, she has to be a thief because the people possessing these works haven’t obtained them legally in the first place! In the trilogy, someone has kidnapped her father, and the ransom is that she must find 3 works of art that have been missing since the end of WWII. Adding to her stress is that the search is also a competition between two billionaires, so she has a rival thief to beat in order to save her father. As usual in a Dempsey thriller, there is a mix of swash-buckling adventures and real history intermingled into the story.

Until next time, read what pleases you!