I was going to create a list of hot, sultry reads, and by that I mean setting-wise. I was thinking of hot locales or places enduring a heat wave, which as a last hurrah we are experiencing here. As always, the first week of school bring super sticky temperatures. But it would be adding insult to injury since my A/C decided to give up the ghost a couple of days ago. Of course. So I am living the hot stickiness of these dog days of summer (are we in those days now?) and maybe reading about them would not be so much a pleasure. More a commiseration.
It's too bad I don't have a cold, snowy read, but this too shall pass. I have plenty of other good books on the go. I was going to tell you about my last library haul, but that was last weekend and I will be going tomorrow for a fresh batch, so I will wait and share those instead. Good library news--a few branches of the public library are going to open, though I am not sure how limited their hours and services will be. My branch is not one that will be opening, but the remaining branches might be open in October. Until then I find curbside pick up of food and library books quite convenient.
September is just days away and thus a new prompt. My prompts, as you know, are hit or miss this year. I think I will give myself permission to skip months where the book just did not grab me and move forward. 2020 has been a pretty abysmal year so I will take any successes and call them good and let the misses just float on by. So my new prompt is going to be "Ready for New Beginnings". Was there ever a more true wish? How do I interpret that in stories/book talk? Hmm. We'll see what I come up with next week.
While I have that turning in my mind I think this weekend will be spent mostly with Kinsey Millhone. It is so good to be back in her company. She rarely seems to get involved in murder cases (well, Q was a cold case murder). I like how Sue Grafton can make some boring sounding crime (embezzlement anyone?) actually quite interesting. I think it helps that the supporting cast in these stories creates a very believable environment. And, while I think Kinsey is a pretty determined singleton these days, she has started a new romance with a cop (and he isn't married this time).
For a while thrillers were not especially appealing to me. There was this sameyness to them it seemed. Must every thriller be compared to Gone Girl? I think most are still marketed to be like some other bestseller, but I guess I am paying less attention to those blurbs these days (or have mellowed to them). I have started reading Alice Feeney's His and Hers. Only a few chapters in and already it is twisty turny. The story is told from a his and hers perspective. He is a detective and she is a news broadcaster. The body of a murdered woman is found. You think it is perhaps the beautiful and perfect anchorwoman who has returned to her job displacing the 'her" in the story, but it's not. She is, however, a woman the detective slept with the night before. Ah, so many secrets and lies. He is pretty smarmy. She has a tendency to drink too much and forget. Kind of a mess of a story really, but not in the bad way you might think.
And for something a little different. This month's prompt book is Sophia Tobin's A Map of the Damage. This is a dual storyline narrative set in 1940s Blitz London and 1838 Victorian England. It concerns an architectural wonder called The Mirrormaker's Club--built then but used still in wartime Britain and a very large, lost diamond. The women in the painting in the club was the recipient and now it is lost. The woman tasked with trying to find it has lost her memory due to a bomb blast. There are more smarmy characters--maybe I should call them villains? I wasn't sure how it would go as one of the main protagonists is rather prickly and hard to like. Must I like a character, though? Sometimes it doesn't matter and sometimes they are the most interesting. I'll give her a chance--I want to know her story.
Happy reading everyone. I hope you have some good stories to take you away this weekend, too.