Murder in Scorpio by Martha C. Lawrence

Murder in Scorpio is the first appearance of psychic private investigator Dr. Elizabeth Chase, who is gifted with paranormal abilities. She uses these powers to solve mysteries and is called upon by a detective with the San Diego Police Department, unofficially of course, to investigate the death of a friend.

All indications are that Janice Freeman died in a tragic car accident. Tom McGowan is convinced that there is more to this ‘accident’ than meets the eye. He describes a paranormal experience that led him to Elizabeth Chase.

Her powers tell her that Tom is correct and begins to investigate Janice’s death. The trails take Elizabeth from the halls of a multi-million dollar real estate corporation to the broken-down shack inhabited by potheads to a secluded house in the desert, sitting in a sea of junk.

One thing that becomes clear to Elizabeth is her growing attraction to her benefactor, the handsome Tom McGowan. When an attempt on her life luckily fails, Elizabeth is forced to take refuge in Tom’s house, a situation that neither finds uncomfortable.

The key to the whole mystery comes from the murdered Janice, herself. She appears to Elizabeth in a dream and shows her the location of this ‘key’. Elizabeth discovers real estate fraud and a meth lab but at the peril of her life.

I found myself turning the pages rapidly at the end of the book as Elizabeth gets trapped by the responsible party and barely escapes with a young girl in tow, rescued by Tom her knight in shining armor.

The fast pace doesn’t help the reader much as Elizabeth unravels the mystery. Lawrence piles on the facts and those of us without a basic knowledge of real estate ownership and business ownership details are left re-reading Elizabeth’s logic to keep up.

There are places where a section feels as if it were inserted only for the sake of lengthening the novel with no added value to the story. For example, an interview with a waitress, who claims to be an eyewitness to the crash, is ominous and appears to hold a vital clue. However, after the scene, no more mention is made of the waitress or her story.

None of these detract significantly from the novel with is an enjoyable and easy read. The story is interlaced with intriguing paranormal events but never gets bogged down or burdens the reader with the feeling of a science fiction or fantasy tale. Lawrence keeps the novel believable and exciting. The reader will fall in love with the divine Dr. Chase.

(originally published on ezinearticles.com)

The Novice's Tale by Margaret Frazer

Margaret Frazer has a long and successful series of medieval mysteries featuring nun sleuth Dame Frevisse and it all started with The Novice’s Tale. Set in 1431, the ninth year of Henry VI disastrous reign, Frazer’s novel portrays a vivid picture of the simple lives of nuns during that era.

The novice of the title is Thomasine, the young frail girl who is two weeks shy of her final vows when her great-aunt Lady Ermentrude bursts into St. Frideswide unannounced. The lady is no lady. Loud, boozing and bossy, Ermentrude is impressed however when she meets Dame Frevisse’s uncle, Thomas Chaucer, untitled but very well connected. Even she won’t dare snub him.

Soon after Ermentrude departs on a sudden unplanned trip to Thomasine’s sister’s estate, and then returns, just as surprising, to St. Frideswide, the next day. Shortly after she returns, a woman who was formerly in Ermentrude’s employ dies under mysterious circumstances. Then the lady, the stuck-up crab herself meets her demise.

Dame Claire the infirmian declares that the cause of death in both cases was poison. The crowner quickly decides that Thomasine is the vicious killer and Frevisse’s problems are confounded by Ermentrude’s son, who is a chip off the old block. She is forced to take the novice into sanctuary to keep her from being nabbed by the crowner and his men at the angry command of the son.

The prioress of St. Frideswide, Domina Edith, aged but shrewd and intelligent, charges Frevisse to clear Thomasine’s name and find the real culprit.

Frazer’s eye for detail and her ability to portray the political nuances of life at court and elsewhere give the reader a sense of realism for life without the modern conveniences and nuisances. It was simple but not necessarily miserable.

Earlier, I criticized Ms. Frazer’s work A Play of Dux Moraud for its lack of suspense and action but The Novice’s Tale has no shortage of intrigue and mystery. I’m glad to start reading Dame Frevisse’s adventures from the beginning, since Ms. Frazer is a wonderful and talented writer and Dame Frevisse is an exciting sleuth on a par with Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael.

Rum: A Social and Sociable History by Ian Williams

Rum, NOT money, makes the world go 'round. That is the clear, simple, double-distilled message of Ian Williams's very tongue-in-cheek work on the delicious spirit. It's interesting how one can skew history by focusing on one aspect, viewing it through rum-soaked goggles and thereby turning history on its keg...er, head.


All the American text books will have to be re-written. For example, the American Revolution, dubbed the War of Independence by the British Williams, was not fought for freedom from English rule. It was to protest the high tariffs that the sugar lobby in London forced the crown into imposing on the colonies for rum, sugar and molasses imports and exports.


The Boston Tea Party wasn't to protest taxation on tea, or any other form of rebellion. "It was really all about the rum." (pg 166)


Paul Revere stopped at a tavern and threw back a few snorts of rum before setting off on his famous midnight ride. (pg 172)


Williams could not help but take a few shots (no pun intended) of George Washington, who according to the author loved rum SO much, he named his historic home after the man who introduced grog to the navy, Vice Admiral Vernon. By the way, the anniversary of that momentous occasion of the order for grog, August 21, 1740 is just a few short months away. You had better start planning for the big holiday now!


A few days before that, however, is the big bash for Black Tot Day, the day the Admiralty abolished the grog rationing, July 31, 1970.


Williams has other writing credits to his name, but his style of prose makes this book a difficult read. I had to re-read many complex and compound sentences to understand them. He drops in names, perhaps once, with no introduction or follow-up. The reader who may not have been exposed to as many annals of history as Williams is left wondering who he's talking about and why they were included. He digresses often, although I'm (so) sure the logic in these tangents made perfect sense to him and his editor.


He loves to throw in terms like "eleemosynary efforts", "Panglossianly optimistic" and "scofflawlishness". Wow. Flowery language. Yawn.


Stephen King once wrote the road to hell is paved with adverbs. That's all I'm saying.


It's hard to tell if Williams was taking himself seriously with this book, but the reader should not. Rum is worth a look or at least one to keep on the shelf as a reference guide to other references on rum in history.

Under Three Empires - The Thorns and Roses of a Life by Izyaslav Darakhovskiy

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Darakhovskiy in the gift shop at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC where he was signing copies of his book. I spoke to him for a few minutes and felt that he was a warm and personable man. He had a friendly and affable demeanor.

I thought his book would be a biography of his life under Nazi German, then Communist USSR and finally the United States. But it was more of a social commentary on life under those three empires.

It would seem logical that someone exposed to oppression under the Nazis and Communism would be bitter and jaded. That is not the case with Dr. Darakhovskiy. He gives an even-handed and mostly impartial glimpse into the political and social environments under the evil empires. One can forgive Dr. Darakhovskiy when he tends to step up onto his soap box, since even then he shows great restraint and professionalism when discussing the events that took the lives of his mother, sister and many other family members during the Holocaust. These horrendous events would try anyone's ability to persevere and move forward.

He paints a candid and interesting view of Americans when he covers his immigration to this country. He received a great cultural shock when realizing an American's obsession with wealth and how it clearly defined one class of people from another. Coming from a country where salaries were determined by a government scale to a country of free enterprise, Dr. Darakhovskiy found the disparity of the distribution of wealth to be almost incomprehensible.

Even this did not cloud Dr. Darakhovskiy's views of the United States. He talks for many pages on the wonderful Americans he met after settling in Rochester, NY who helped him adjust to a culture and a country that were vastly different from anything he had seen before and beyond his wildest imagination.

He wrote about the frustration and barriers to getting employed and the typical responses from potential employers he dubbed as "masterpieces of bureaucratic writing." But many people can attest that these remarks are not reserved for immigrants. We've all heard these same statements.

The only fault I found with the book was the editing. Dr. Darakhovskiy should consider another publisher for his next work. I have never read a book with so many spelling and grammatical errors. I understand that the editor may have wanted to keep Dr. Darakhovskiy's own words pure, but as he doesn't have a firm grasp on the American language, grammar and proper word usage are more important to the reader than verbatim. Some sentences just did not make sense, and this is where an editor can give us at least an idea of Dr. Darakhovskiy's message.

I'm glad to have met Dr. Darakhovskiy and read his book. It is a pleasure to read and if you're not careful, you might learn something. It is a must-read for scholars or anyone interested in the Holocaust or Eastern Europe and Russia.

(This article was previously published on ezinearticles.com)

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Saturday afternoon, Fuzzy and I visited the Holocaust Museum here in Washington, D.C. It is 4 floors of information and sensory overload. There was is so much much on display, so many items to view and media presentations that the brochure suggests that you take 2 to 3 hours to see everything. We stayed just over an hour and that was enough time to see a bit more than we wanted.




The Holocaust Museum sugar-coated nothing. The exhibits include photographs of mutilated bodies, body parts and even bodies of children being used for medical experiments. There are videos of Hitler, Nazi propoganda and murders. When we first stepped out of the elevator onto the 4th floor, the first stop in the permanent exhibit, we heard a woman sobbing. She must have had a personal connection to the Holocaust.

The Hall of Remembrance

The museum is a very solemn place as well. Although the building was crowded, there was very little talking. Any conversation was spoken in whispers as if everyone was afraid to raise their voice to a conversational tone. In a sense, it was out of respect for the dead and in awe of the enormity of such a tragedy.



It is definitely a museum to visit. However, it is best viewed on an empty stomach. But don't worry about being hungry when you leave, because you will lose your appetite, too.

Murder in Miniature by Margaret Grace

Camille Minichino's first work under the pen name Margaret Grace is a great adventure set in the sleepy hamlet of Lincoln Point, California, nestled near Mountain View and San Jose Airport. Geraldine Porter is a retired high school English teacher and, since widowed, has become immersed in her hobby of crafting miniature dollhouses.

During her granddaughter's summer visit, Gerry is selling her wares at a local craft faire when her high-maintenance best friend Linda skips out, leaving Gerry in the lurch and then calls at 2am needing to be picked up at an abandoned gas station just off Route 101. (I think I know where that is!)

The body of a woman is found at the exact spot where Gerry rescued Linda, and Gerry can't keep her nose out of her police nephew's business as she probes the mystery surrounding her best friend.

Minichino, as Grace, seems more at ease in writing about the world as miniature dollhouses or maybe crafts translate to the written word better than physics research. The pace of the book moves at a comfortable speed, and never bogs down or becomes overwhelming. The characters do not seem contrived or two-dimensional, rather believable and realistic.

There are frequent scenes where Grace shows subtle but hilarious comic wit, as Gerry Porter is appalled at the numerous errors in grammar and spelling in a city populated with people she taught. In one instance, Gerry is mortified more at her granddaughter's grammar than she is of her bluntness. Then she fights the urge to correct the spelling on a picketer's sign. Grace's Porter is very lovable as she has to adjust to her ten-going-on-thirty granddaughter, who's more tech savvy than Gerry will ever be.

This is a very enjoyable read and I liked the mystery very much, but I hope Dr. Camille does not abandon her Periodic Chart Mysteries. I am looking forward to The Fluorine Murder.

America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation by Michael MacCambridge

The first three weeks of this year, I had a brief, superficial but more intimate-than-usual glimpse into the hiring process and practices of the National Football League. I came to the conclusion that the owners were spineless, two-faced slugs; the head coaches back-stabbing; the players self-absorbed and self-centered; and the fans thought they knew the game better than the entire NFL organization.

According to Michael MacCambridge, I'm right! His meticulously researched book, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation is a close look at the history of football from the end of WWII to the present. Like Anya Seton, another author that uses exhaustive research for her stories, MacCambridge starts slow, almost painstaking, in the first two-thirds of the book, stating facts and figures and events in a somewhat chronological order up to ca 1970, about 25 years. He tends to backtrack, spring forward, and then backtrack again within chapters. The pace picks up considerably toward the end of the book, covering more than 30 years in the last one-third.

I understand the need to build a basis for the book, but it seems as though MacCambridge skipped over important football events and information of the post-1970 era. Of all the great accomplishments of coaches, Tom Landry is only mentioned a handful of times. But he fared better than other greats like Mike Ditka, who's name appears once only as a possessive; or Bill Cowher, mentioned twice in the context of an unwritten rule to not sleep at the office. Instead, MacCambridge favors numerous quotes from less-great coaches like Brian Billick.

Deion Sanders (introduced as ushering in a new era of the NFL, which is the self-absorbed, self-centered player era) garnered almost as much print as Roger Staubach, which is very irksome to me. Staubach has always been one of my heroes, on and off the field. Neon Deion will NEVER be the legend or the man Staubach is.

America's Game isn't written for the casual football fan. MacCambridge assumes the reader has much more than a basic education of the sport. I am not one of those readers, and am not familiar with terms such as: "down-and-in pass", "1-2 passing attack", "shallow drag routes", or he hit the receiver "on an out pattern".

I do not have the name of every owner, head coach, and general manager memorized. MacCambridge's tendency to return to a person, identified only by last name pages after last addressing them, made re-reading necessary and enjoying the book harder. Who's Thomas (p. 351)? I had to refer to the index to find a person mentioned on the last page to find the last reference to him in the prologue. He also chronicled games using only players' names and not the teams. More re-reading to find out who won this one or that one.

Another aspect of MacCambridge's writing that makes this a difficult read is his flair for the dramatic. When Frank Borman, in orbit in Gemini 7 in 1965, told Tommy Nobis to "sign with the Oilers", MacCambridge dubbed it as an "interstellar" bidding war. Being in orbit above the earth hardly qualifies as interplanetary, much less interstellar. He describes a Jets-Colts game as a "harmonic convergence of elements"; and an argument over the Properties Trust had the feel of the "Spanish Civil War".

Some sentences just did not make sense, at all. For example,

"On the field, the checkoff system allowed the quarterback to audible to a different play at the line of scrimmage if the defensive formation threatened the one called in the huddle." (p. 201)

Huh? To audible? I know what the sentence means but it could have been worded much more clearly.

He described the midnight convoy of Irsay's Colts defection from Baltimore as "limned in radiation lights..." Baltimore radiated the Colts as they left?

Despite these obstacles, the book offers several funny moments in the form of very candid quotes from players and coaches.

But there are as many instances of two-faced owners: Rosenbloom moving the Rams from LA to Anaheim against the NFL's orders or Irsay trading Elway to Denver without consulting Coach Accorsi.

How about back-stabbing coaches? Bill Walsh found out that the reason he had been passed over for the top position was his own head coach Bill Johnson had been bad mouthing him to numerous interested teams. Al Davis and Jerry Jones, 'nuff said.

Kudos to MacCambridge, however, because he addresses those fans, who think they know the game better than anyone involved with the NFL, very diplomatically:

"Thus one had the great conundrum of pro football's popularity: fans, without access to the team's playbook, scouting reports, game plans, and game films, aren't really given the tools to perfectly understand their team's actions and responses." (p. 412)

Touche!

The best part of the book for an ex-Cowboy fan like me was the affirmation that I have known for decades is that Cowboy fans are fair-weather! MacCambridge has documented quotes from Staubach and facts surrounding Jones egotism among other stats to illustrate this clearly.
If you're a die-hard, know-it-all about football, you will still find this an interesting read. For the rest of us, it gives us a slightly better insight into the confusing world of football. But at least, when we finish reading it, we are fully cognizant of the fact that we don't know everything.


This review was previously published on ezinearticles.com