Dolan brings Kinsey a cold case — an 18-year-old case of homicide for an unidentified Jane Doe.
What I Liked
The plot device of Kinsey working with Dolan while helping out a retired old-timer who was one of the original detectives on the case is flat out awesome. Kind of like the series Cold Case that was on TV a few years after the book was published. And the teamwork of three of them is a nice twist on the traditional “go it alone” storylines of most of Kinsey’s cases. As with some of the previous stories, she ends up in a small town where everyone knows everyone and the motives are all potentially interconnected. Finally, while there is some drama with Kinsey’s extended family, for once it ends up being relatively positive overall.
What I Didn’t Like
Dolan and Stacey bicker like an old married couple, and it gets tedious. The story is also about 30% longer than most of the novels, and it does drag in a few places.
This is the annual observer’s guide published by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
What I Liked
Each year, the Observer’s Guide is produced and sold to amateur and professional astronomers across North America, and those astronomers vary considerably in their capacity and interests. It’s hard to serve any “one group”, but as I am at the intro stage to the hobby, I’ll review from that perspective. Some highlights include:
List of observatories, star parties, planetaria (pp 11-14);
Observable satellites of the planets (pp 25-26);
Observing artificial satellites (p 38);
Overview of filters (pp 64-67);
Deep-sky observing hints by Alan Dyer (pp 85-87);
Lunar observing (pp 158-161);
The brightest stars (pp 274-283, 285); and,
The deep sky (pp 307-337).
Of course, it also has the key reference materials:
The Moon (pp 148-157);
The Sun (pp 184-193);
Dwarf and minor planets (pp 241-251); and,
Double and multiple stars (pp 291-294, 296-297).
And it has specific highlights for the year:
The Sky month-by-month (pp 94-121);
Times of sunrise and sunset for 2019 (pp 205-207);
2019 transit of Mercury (pp 139-143);
The planets in 2019 (pp 211-229); and,
Comets in 2019 (p 264).
I’m happy too that some of the errors in URLs published last year have been corrected.
What I Didn’t Like
I still find the pages on telescope exit pupils (pp 50-53) to be incredibly dense. I keep meaning to find a more basic set of explanations online of it, but I never seem to get around to it. I would add the next section on magnification and contrast in deep sky observing (pp 54-57) as equally confusing. I have to believe that dense text can somehow be explained more easily to the newbie with some basic guidelines for common scopes and ages of users. Equally, I’m not thrilled with the astrophotography section (pp 91-93) which still lists the “big cameras” as best, in the same way that many photography websites ten years ago suggested that professionals would never go digital. There is an emerging market for people sharing prime shots they take with their smartphones — souvenir quality shots, not NASA shots — and it is almost completely ignored by the section (grudgingly it says “even cell phones”). I also find that the economic bias of last year towards higher-end binoculars and scopes continues. But those issues are mostly me just being picky — they aren’t enough to reduce the overall rating.
Disclosure
I received a copy of the guide as part of my annual membership in RASC.
Kinsey is hired for a missing persons case, a retired family doctor, running a nursing home.
What I Liked
The mystery opens with a nice quirk — it’s the ex-wife who hires Kinsey, not the current wife. Like all Kinsey’s cases, it gets complicated really fast — cheating wives, messy divorced families, a search for new office space, Medicare fraud, kids who murdered their parents, etc.
What I Didn’t Like
The sub-story about kids murdering their parents and the convenience of some evidence that comes to her from Henry by coincidence really detracts from the story.
Kinsey gets a blast from the past from her ex-husband, Mickey Magruder.
What I Liked
Kinsey finds out that when she walked out of their marriage thinking he was guilty of murder/manslaughter, he actually had an alibi that he didn’t reveal. He was never convicted, and in the years since, they’ve had no contact. It’s interesting to see her work through a sense of guilt and a desire to know the real truth. Before she finds him, someone shoots him on the street and he’s in a coma. Soon she’s wearing his leather jacket and hunting down his shooter. The story is solid but does jump around quite a bit to get to the final bit.
What I Didn’t Like
The solution is a bit “out there” for pieces tying together, and like a couple of the previous books, feels a little unfair to the reader. Not as bad as previous, however.
Kinsey is hired by her cousin Tasha, the lawyer, to track down the long-lost fourth son of a recently deceased construction company owner so they can file the will for probate.
What I Liked
Kinsey does a quick short-cut on finding the missing heir, and sets in motion a series of interactions with the rest of the family that results in death. Add in an old fraud, the return of Dietz to her life, and some emerging feelings for the prodigal son, and it is a full novel.
What I Didn’t Like
A couple of the final pieces to the puzzle are completely hidden until the last chapter, and it’s not even Kinsey who finds them. I didn’t feel it was playing fair with the reader, holding back some key elements until the end that no one had a chance to see being uncovered so much as like working on a puzzle for several days only to have someone spoil the ending by just telling you the solution.
The Bottom Line
Great novel, good characters, let-down for the ending.
