Patricia Cornwell's "Book of the Dead"

Cornwell is one of the most enduring and reliable mystery writers on the face of the earth. The fact that she has been a police forensics professional and knows that subject from the inside out gives readers a real picture into the procedure of finding a killer-- not the pretend picture that we get from the crime scene investigation shows on TV.

"Book of the Dead" does not disappoint. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, her niece, Lucy, and the other cast of characters that have surrounded this super CSI for years have their hands on the latest devices to detect composition and origins for grains of sand left on the victims' bodies and latent blood left at the crime scenes. Crime scenes in this book span the globe from Rome to Charleston, SC to Hilton Head where the reader gets to soak up a sense of place as well as a sense of character.

To add some additional drama to the book, there is trouble in the lives of Scarpetta and her cohorts. Secretary, Rose, is down with a mysterious persistent cough, Lucy is disappearing for days at a time, and Pete has a new girl friend who is definitely a bad influence. Scarpetta and Benton are alternatively hot and cold, though all is well with their relationship in the end.

The team has settled in to Charleston to run a private lab. Things are going well in terms of business. There are plenty of cities and counties around the world that need the expertise of Scarpetta's private forensic lab. The problem is that her team has not entirely settled in. Scarpetta is not entirely trusted by the natives either.

This is a great addition to Cornwell's list of Scarpetta forensic mysteries, and is sure to please Cornwell's fans.

Liz Nichols

"The Serpent's Tale" by Ariana Franklin

"The Serpent's Tale" is an absorbing historical mystery set it 12th century England around the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine's rebellion against her husband, Henry II. There are many accurate historical details in the book, and the Franklin has the social context of women in that society pegged right.

The heroine, Adelia Aquilar, is in secret a medical doctor who has been trained to forensic work, a "doctor of the dead" as she calls it. She was transplanted to England in the wake of Henry II's crusade, along with her Islamic servant, Mansur, who must pretend to be the doctor because of the low tolerance of women in professions during that time. If left on her own, she would have been considered a witch. Adelia's lover is one of Henry's knights, who has been rewarded for his loyalty with a bishopric- Rowley, Bishop of St. Albans. Together they have a baby girl.

The mystery revolves around finding the killer of Rosamund, Henry II's consort, and to determine if there is a tie between that murder and the death of a young lord who loses his life on his way to elope with a young woman who is being educated at the Godstow Convent.

Franklin does a masterful job of drawing interesting characterizations that are multi-dimensional. Even the villains are complex and worthy of consideration as to why they are the way they are. The details about how people lived in medieval times are accurate and interesting.

Two thumbs up for "The Serpent's Tale."

Liz Nichols

Goodbye to Bookwise

I am saddened that Bookwise has decided to merge into another company. What I found so attractive about Bookwise is it fed my passions for reading and writing all in one affiliate-based company. The writing aspect of Bookwise is also being pulled out and saved under a different company name. I will have to see if that will be worth joining stand-alone from the online book aspect.

I'm undecided about the new company. It seems more oriented to lifelong learning, similar to Success University, but it is more expensive than Success University. I have so many other opportunities for lifelong learning that I don't know that I want to pay almost $80 per month for the privilege of learning from Brian Tracy and the like. Been there; done that.

What I want to do is manage a great online bookstore. What I think I'll need to do is to focus this blog increasingly on Amazon.com, or on the independent bookseller site I also belong to.

I also plan to create another book review blog specifically on current mysteries. I'll give a shout out when I have that one up and running.

Liz Nichols

Janet Evanovich's "Fearless Fourteen"

It's another home run for crimestopper, Stephanie Plum, in the wacky "Fearless Fourteen." She manages to find Loretta, a kidnap victim and catches the kidnapper who is looking for information leading to a hidden robbery treasure. The kidnapper seems to be everywhere and able to stop every plan to circumvent his plan to recover the treasure. When Stephanie is able to figure out how the kidnapper is getting all his information, she easily unravels the mystery.

In the meantime, the plot takes a lot of twists and turns through the lives of a bunch of wacky characters, including a teen video addict nicknamed Zook and his gamer buddies, a stalker named Gary who makes weird predictions about the health and welfare of an aging country rock star who is visiting Trenton. All these extra characters make Stephanie and her male buddies, Morelli and Ranger, look pretty normal.

This may be the most inventive and wacky of all Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books and gets an A plus on my list of summer reads.

Liz Nichols

Mildred Kalish's "Little Heathens"

I like social history. That was actually my major field of study during my college years. While I was growing up everyone thought I would have been best suited to have lived during the wagon train era in the 1840s, or as a member of the "Little House" family.

Mildred Kalish has documented her childhood during the depression years on a farm and in a small town in northeast Iowa. That's an era in American social history that has not been over-explored, and I think it is a pivotal era. The depression shaped the values of those who grew up in that period. I could see so many traits familiar from my mother and her Iowa family roots in so many of the stories that Kalish tells.

Kalish recounts family stories about thrift, using everything without any waste, family closeness, discipline, modesty, the farm work ethic, social life and entertainment, pets that very probably will end up on the dining room table some day, one room school house education, and the list of interesting topics goes on and on.

This is a well written memoir that is devoid of sentimentality and is highly descriptive. When you are done reading you'll hold the Urmy family in admiration and have a much better understanding of the Iowa farm experience in the 1930s.

Liz Nichols

Don Piper's "90 Minutes in Heaven"

This is certainly my most serious read of the summer.

Piper, with the assistance of Cecil Murphey, recounts the story of how he died in a car crash in January 1989 and was brought back to life 90 minutes later through the prayers of a pastor who stopped to see if he could give any assistance at the crash site. For at least the first 90 minutes after the crash there was no indication of a pulse, and it seemed to EMTs unlikely that Piper's body was without serious trauma to the chest and head. At least one arm and one leg were missing their long bones, and there was extreme loss of blood. The EMT's merely awaited a coroner to pronounce Piper dead before they could move him.

And yet, when the minister began to pray and sing with his hand on the shoulder of the apparently departed, all of a sudden the dead man began to sing along. Piper had a strong sensation of someone holding his hand, which would have been a physical impossibility given the position of his body in the mangled car. Piper later attributed that hand to being an angel on the scene.

Piper does not mince words in any aspect of this book. He describes in detail his experience with the greeting party of deceased friends and relatives who met him at the gates of heaven, the sights and sounds that he experienced that were beyond anything he could describe adequately in words. He talks frankly about the excruciating pain experienced in the healing process, which included 11 months in a contraption screwed directly into his leg to help regrow the missing bone. He suffered months of depression, something that subsided only after he was counseled by a colleague to accept the kindnesses and support of the people who came to help him out. He was hard on himself, and he hard on other people, at least until he better understood why God brought him back.

The story has been read by millions of people around the world. I dare say it has converted many into believers. The question it does not answer is, what about similar stories from people who are not believers? Are they false or mis-guided, or are they signs of God's abiding grace and inclusiveness?

I do not know the answer to the question of what experiences non-believers have in comparison to those Piper experienced. I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is some form of after-life. When my mother was close to death with pneumonia she saw a shrouded figure whom she recognized as one of her deceased brothers. He told her that it was not her time to go, and she lived. She now knows that she has a guardian angel and who it is.

Within an hour of my dad's death my brother-in-law in Wisconsin and my cousin in San Francisco, and I had all experienced freak car accidents that in timing and nature would have astronomical odds if they were not all tied to my dad's death. I believe that some heavenly announcer was alerting us, or possibly my dad's soul.

"90 Minutes in Heaven" is necessary reading for all Christian believers, and for anyone looking for answers about the here-after.

Liz Nichols

"Frill Kill" by Laura Childs

Childs is the author of the Tea Shop Mysteries series and the Scrapbooking Mysteries series. This title is the 5th the the latter series.

The setting is New Orleans following Katrina. The heroines are a couple of women entrepreneurs in the French Quarter, Carmela Bertrand and Ava Grieux. Carmela, the about-to-be-ex-wife of a prominent banker, owns a scrapbooking shop, while Ava owns the Juju Voodoo Shop.

Halloween festivities cast into motion the killing of a local model in the alley behind Carmela's shop. I have to admit that I didn't guess the murderer until just before that person is revealed near the end of the book. In the mean time there were several suspects that had to be eliminated.

I felt that the plot was weak and confusing. For such an atmospheric place I did not feel that the author made the most of the setting. I never really identified with the two main characters or particularly cared what happened to them. I found my mind constantly wandering and thinking about things other than the book, so I basically just skimmed the whole thing.

While I plan to go back and read some of the earlier ones in this and the Tea Shop Mysteries, I can't say that this was more than a "ho-hum" read.

Liz Nichols