It’s a 35-year-old cold case of a missing mom, and the now 40-year-old daughter wants to know what happened to Violet.
What I Liked
Daughter Daisy needs to know what happened so she can move forward in her messed-up life — did Dad kill her? Did she run away? And why did she take the DOG but not her daughter? The people with info include the husband aka Daisy’s Dad, a babysitter who saw her get ready to go out, a best friend, a brother, a car salesman, some men at the local bar, etc. The story bops back and forth from the past to the present, like most cold cases do. And the tension ramps up when Kinsey finds out that not everyone seems to like her looking for Violet…either that or they just don’t like the tires on her car.
What I Didn’t Like
The characterizations of the kids and what they’re thinking or feeling back in ’53 seem “off”, more like adults guessing how they feel or act, and the interactions come off really clumsy. And I don’t think there is a single character that I actually like.
The Bottom Line
The story is okay but the characters are depressing.
Kinsey is hired to be a babysitter for a newly-paroled wayward daughter who apparently turned to embezzlement when her gambling losses got too high.
What I Liked
The description of the daughter’s original crime, the limited evidence against her, and a rapid guilty plea sound a tad suspicious, and so it isn’t a great surprise to find that her former boss (the one she supposedly embezzled from) is sniffing around her in an oddly-friendly manner just after she is paroled. It also doesn’t take long for the various federal agencies to all show up hoping Kinsey will convince wayward Reba to inform on her former boss about money laundering and drug cartels. Reba’s definitely a handful, and there are some moments where Kinsey and Reba almost act like friends, even if can’t last.
What I Didn’t Like
The financial stuff is a little too simplistic, the feds are mostly caricatures, and the ending has almost nothing to do with Kinsey, she’s just along for the ride (as the book itself notes in the epilogue).
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.
