Corgies and also Death - The Bookpost
As a pre-emptive defence, I would like to point out that Amazon offered three months Kindle Unlimited membership for cheap and I obviously took it and then immediately made some very questionable decisions.
Mildred Abbott: Cruel Candy - A Cozy Corgi Mystery
A Cozy Mystery with a depressingly un-punny title about a 39-year-old ex-English literature professor and ex co-owner of a multimillion-dollar publishing house who returns home to her quirky hometown together with her corgi Watson. Of course, she then falls over a dead body because quirky small towns have an incredibly high murder rate.
I did not expect much and was still disappointed. I mean, I could have come up with a better mystery if you had given me 20 minutes and the premise ‘murdered sweet shop owner’. I also would have come up with an idea that did not involve a second murdered shop owner (obviously also found by Fred, our ex-professor because is somebody really dead if their body wasn’t found by a cozy mystery protagonist?) whose murder had nothing to do with the main murder and ended up not really being solved. (At the end, the detective murmurs something about “somebody was arrested for that already” but nobody that had appeared previously in the book.
ALSO WHAT IS IT WITH ADULT WOMEN ACTING LIKE BAD CARICATURES OF TEENAGE GIRLS IN THOSE KINDS OF BOOKS? Fred is as established almost forty. She’s had two careers and was married. She meets two hot guys in this book. With guy 1 his hotness leads to her losing any brain-to-mouth filter and just blabbering nonsense. Guy 2 is so hot that she completely forgets how to talk and just stares at him, presumably just going O O O and this whole thing takes an excruciating amount of time till she also starts blabbering nonsense.
WHY?
THIS IS NOT CUTE. THIS JUST MAKES ME WONDER HOW ON EARTH THESE PEOPLE SURVIVED FOR SO LONG! I MEAN WHAT HAPPENS IF THE BAKERY GUY IS KIND OF HOT? DO THEY ALSO STARE AT HIM FOR FIVE MINUTES BEFORE ASKING HIM A COMPLETELY RANDOM QUESTION TO WHICH HE REPLIES ‘MAM. THIS IS A BAKERY AND I HAVE ACTUAL CUSTOMERS WHO ARE WILLING TO BUY BREAD’ AND THEN THEY HAVE TO STARVE BECAUSE THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF BUYING FOOD ON THEIR OWN????
Niamh Murphy: Escape to Pirate Island - A Lesbian Adventure Romance
Once upon a time I came across a list of ‘The Best Lesbian Historical Romances’ which contained a staggering 5 books. They were
1. The Covert Captain. Aka the book that was written in style that reminded me of baby’s first fanfiction and which I dnf-ed before I got to all the fun antisemitism other reviewers complained about
2. The deadly boring Alpenninia books
3. A mystery series I downloaded a sample of and got as far as the phrase ‘And his smile snaked evilly’ and then I broke down crying and wondering if humanity was really such a good idea
4. An Alyssa Cole novella that distinguished itself from romances that featuring alpha male assholes who force the heroine to do things she isn’t keen on because they know better than her what she wants by having a female alpha asshole
5. This book
So when I saw it was on KU I went ‘Since that list was so trustworthy I will give this one a try’
You have three guesses as to how well that turned out. You may call a friend.
First of all: emotions? What are those? Both characters had their life pretty much turned around at the beginning of the book (pirate lady walks into a trap and half her crew and her husband get killed, posh lady’s dad has died and left her a ridiculous amount of debt) but nobody really seemed very upset by it. I mean we were frequently told that they were Really Very Sad about all this but it never really felt like it.
Secondly: You? Ye? Thou? Thee? Those are all completely interchangeable and in no way connected to singular and plural or subject and object, right? When A talks to B he can use all of these forms during the conversation. It’s not like there’s grammar rules or some shit.
Max Allan Collins: The Titanic Murders
Here there be spoilers but it's not like I recommend this book
murder mystery set on the Titanic? And that is also basically RPF since the amateur sleuth is Jaques Futrelle, the author of the Van Dusen stories (imagine an American Sherlock Holmes but with a far more condescending attitude and who is also a charisma vacuum) who really was on the Titanic (and died there). I couldn’t help but be intrigued. But somehow, I wasn’t willing to throw my complete sense of decency and morals out of the window and that would have been necessary to really enjoy this book. Because it’s not only Futrelle who was an actual real person. The murder victim - a blackmailer - is someone whose name Collins picked up of a list of Titanic victims. Of course, there’s no proof that he was really murdered. Or a blackmailer. He just didn’t have much info available about him so hey! Who does it hurt when we use that name for a despicable character?
The murderer was a nanny he blackmailed because he had found out that she had previously been imprisoned for murdering her own child. The nanny also shares a name with an actual nanny who survived the Titanic and was shortly afterwards accused of being a child-murderer but it then turned out that she just had a similar name to a woman who was convicted for murder and from what I can tell they figured that out pretty quickly so either Collins worked from really questionable sources or he went ‘Yeah but it would be a much better story if she really had been guilty?’
Besides: I do love dramatic irony as much as the next person but …
- When the first class passengers learn that Captain Smith intents to retire after the crossing, they tell him that the White Star line should still let him on the ships as passenger so he can be a good luck charm (you see, it’s funny because Smith will have incredibly bad luck, the ship will sink and over a thousand people will die)
- When Futrelle is asked to investigate the murder on the ship they ask him to keep it quiet and he says that he understands that they don’t want the Titanic to be associated with death forever (you see, it’s funny because the ship will sink and over a thousand people will die and it will be associated with death forever)
- A passenger tells a story that is supposed to doom everybody who hears it. He explains that he doesn’t believe in such nonsense and laughs that if he did, he would have just doomed the whole ship (you see it’s funny because the ship is doomed. It will sink and over a thousand people will die)
- Futrelle is reading The Wreck of Titan or Futility while on board. This is also an actual existing book, written ten or twenty years pre-Titanic about an Ocean liner called Titan who hits an iceberg and then many passengers die because there aren't enough lifeboats. (When interviewed after the Titanic disaster he seems to have said something along the lines of 'Icebergs are a thing in the Atlantic and so is Ship-owners sacrificing health and safety for money). So of course, he jokes that the Titanic will be fine as long as there’s no iceberg (you see, it’s funny because there will be an iceberg, the ship will sink and over a thousand people will die)
Isn’t it *~*hilarious*~*?
H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon’s Mines
Look. I am not averse to some old-timey pulp adventure (or mystery). I have several Karl May Stories as audio plays. I have watched pretty much every Edgar Wallace movie. I’ve read the original Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel. I am fully aware that you will have to expect certain amounts of period-typical racism/sexism/other isms in these kinds of books but I have my limits.
Highlights include
- Our heroes who are looking for the mines come across a remote African tribe and tell them that they are magical beings who come from the sky
- This backwards tribe has a tradition that the narrator keeps referring to as Witch-hunt but really isn’t. During it, the resident evil witch of the tribe points out random men whom she considers ‘tainted’ in some way and who then get killed immediately
- When our heroes need a way to convince the people that they have actual magical powers they happen to look at a calendar and discover that a solar eclipse is coming up the next day. GUESS WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (I guess this book is the originator of that trope?)
- Now in all fairness, this does lead to a hilarious scene when they decide that they should probably say some ‘magic words’ to make it appear as if they’re really causing it. Quatermain quotes random poetry, Sir Henry the Bible and Captain Good curses. And Quatermain remarks how impressed he is because he could go on for almost ten minutes, barely ever repeating a word
- Since no proper adventure novel can do without a beautiful woman our heroes do save one from the evil witch who wanted to sacrifice her to the tribe gods. Said beautiful woman immediately falls in love with Captain Good and accompanies them until she is actually killed by the evil witch. Of course, she doesn’t die immediately but has time for a long death scene in which she explains that really it’s better that way since she’s black, and Good is white and darkness and light can never and so on (Quatermain shares this sentiment by the way)
So yeah. Fun for the whole family
I also got the audiobook of The Innocence of Father Brown by Chesterton and really I'm a good Catholic but there's a limit to the number of 'You see he's an atheist and that's why he's evil and that's why he's the killer' stories I can stomach. I also read more British Crime Library Classics I got from various places and will hopefully remember doing a second writeup post for those (alone for the one where Ibsen and drunkenness solve the case) and before KU dragged me down the hole of questionable literature I read the fourth Cormoran Strike novel and it made me wish Rowling would just stop retconning Harry Potter and just keep writing Strike books because it was brilliant and since I have given up on Inspector Lynley (because Elizabeth George somehow ran out of ideas what to do with her characters and decided to just have them forgot all the character development so that she could start from the beginning again) I have never been as emotionally invested in crime novel protagonists while also being in awe at how well the plotted the mystery plot itself was.
Currently I'm reading Lies Sleeping and am in that odd state where I enjoy it but also have a hard time bringing myself to pick it up. So I somehow end up listening to random audiobooks instead (random means: about murder)