Tag Archives: novel

The Lolly-Madonna War by Sue Grafton (1969) – BR00160 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 22 2019

Plot or Premise

I loved Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, and since I’m a bit of a “completist”, once I like an author’s books, I try to read everything by them. Although it was made into a movie, this book has been long out of print. Which made no real sense…how could a book written by an author as prolific and popular as Sue Grafton, and that was made into a movie, not be available ANYWHERE? Now that I’ve read it, I can see why. Like Keziah Dane, one of her earlier books, the characters are dirt poor backwoods families. Isolated from town, this story takes place entirely on the properties between two neighbouring families. If you have ever heard of the old Hatfields and McCoys feud of two warring families, fighting for reasons they no longer remember, you have the Lolly Madonna War.

What I Liked

The book picks up mid-war with the latest skirmish. The one family, the Gutshalls, has let slip to the other family that there is a girl coming to their house, a girl named Lolly-Madonna who will be a potential mate for one of the sons. Except it is entirely fictitious. Until the second family, the Feathers, sees a girl hiking along the road and decides it must be Lolly Madonna and therefore kidnap her to get back at the Gutshalls, depriving them of their prize. The girl protests, but to no avail. The war escalates with incursions on each other’s territory, shots fired, stills overturned, pigs slaughtered. And a budding romance with the girl.

What I Didn’t Like

The story is incredibly depressing from start to finish. With a giant plot-hole right in the middle…three of the kids are still friendly and talk occasionally, pretending to fight when they need to but not doing any real harm to each other. And when the Feathers tell their Gutshall friend that they have Lolly Madonna, he doesn’t say, “But we made it up”. It would have ended the story. Instead, he decides to say nothing, tell his parents, and they get it in their head to say nothing but maybe they should rescue her. Just as an excuse to keep the feud going…if one does something, even in retaliation, the other has to respond. And the ending is beyond depressing, not to mention you don’t really “see” the ending, you just turn the page and find out how it all ended.

The Bottom Line

There’s a reason this is out of print.

Unlucky in Law by Perri O’Shaugnessy (2004) – BR00159 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 19 2019

Plot or Premise

Nina Reilly gets a call from her old mentor to sit second-chair on a murder case that started with a grave robbery.

What I Liked

The story that the client tells is surprisingly plausible…he was hired to rob a grave, which he did. Except when he’s caught, the cops go back and check the grave he robbed and find out that there’s now a fresh body in it so he’s charged with murder. It’s a simple twist but there is little doubt through the case that he’s not guilty and that there is “something else” going on. And just to complicate things, her mentor is basically dumping the case on her, has done almost no prep, is showing early signs of dementia, and the PI he hired did almost no work either. Nina has her hands full just as Paul proposes.

What I Didn’t Like

There are two threads running through the story that are less than optimal. First, the premise of the mystery is that the dead body that is stolen is tied to a society of Russian conspiracy theorists who suspect he was tied to the Romanoffs (hey, he’s Russian, he must be, right?). This is about the fourth book I’ve read in the last two years that threw in a Romanoff angle, and it’s not handled that well, although most don’t anyway. Second, the marriage proposal from Paul leads to a bunch of emotional drama and angst, and detracts heavily from the story. It reads more like a bad romance novel than a mystery.

The Bottom Line

Good story with the mentor, but the other stuff detracts.

The Holland Suggestions by John Dunning (2014) – BR00158 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 12 2019

Plot or Premise

A man receives a photograph in the mail and starts having weird dreams and compulsions to go to the spot in the photo, even though he has never been there.

What I Liked

The story has some interesting elements — a mysterious past dealing with hypnosis, suggestion, regression, etc. Equally, he’s a man trying to “recover” his life a bit, as his daughter starts to push back wanting to know more about her absent mother. Finally, there are rumours of “gold in them there hills”, stories of old wars, native tribes, miners, and tunnels. He is searching for a treasure that he feels compelled to find, but he doesn’t know why.

What I Didn’t Like

There are hints in a few places that are partly about memory, or perhaps even past lives, and as such, it seems like they’re about to reveal that he’s the reincarnated version of someone. I probably would have thrown the book across the room for the cheesiness if it had, but there are other parts that are almost as bad — a finale with a series of weird action scenes that don’t fit the characters, interactions with individuals that should be more compelling and urgent yet instead come off as “wait and see”, and false and inaccurate tensions with snow storms.

The Bottom Line

Love John Dunning’s prose, but not as good as his book mysteries.

The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning (2006) – BR00157 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 8 2019

Plot or Premise

Janeway is hired to appraise part of an estate, a collection of first-edition children’s books amassed by a woman who died 20 years before. Now the husband has died, and his children want to distribute the money, but first, everything has to be totalled up.

What I Liked

Early on, the case has some interesting bits including the discovery that someone has been slowly replacing some of the books with cheap duplicates, but not in any strategic way. Someone who knows something about value, but skipping some obvious choice books. It doesn’t take much for a daughter who also loves books to want Janeway to figure out if the mother was killed, and if so, by who. A bunch of brothers run around, and they’re all a little bit crazy, but who is the craziest? The dead husband was a horseman, and Janeway works for one of the brothers as a stable boy / horse walker to get in with the horse crowd. Reads a lot like a vintage Dick Francis book.

What I Didn’t Like

As with most Janeway novels, there are two mysteries interwoven — the death of the young wife 20 years before and the theft of the children’s books. Unfortunately, the story spends a LONG time with the horse crowd with not much happening. It read more like a personal diary than a mystery novel. Huge stretches of time with NOTHING RELEVANT to the mystery. Equally, neither of the mysteries are unraveled in an interesting way, just plodding in one case and almost happenstance in another. And one ending is so obvious yet it takes forever to get there. 

The Bottom Line

Slow book, too much about horses and not enough detecting.

The Sign of the Book by John Dunning (2005) – BR00156 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 8 2019

Plot or Premise

Cliff’s friend Erin asks him to go help an old girlfriend charged with murdering her husband. It seems like a strange request considering the woman stole Erin’s boyfriend aka the dead guy, and they haven’t spoken since.

What I Liked

I am a bit of a sucker for stories involving unresolved emotional issues, and the story has a bit of that rolling around in it. There are even BOOKS, gasp, BOOKS involved in the story (shocker, right? The guy had a lot of high-end signed copies of middle-of-the-road scarce books, too many for a small-timer). So of course there are two stories — the death of the husband and the mystery of the signed books.

What I Didn’t Like

There is a bent local sheriff’s deputy who is almost a caricature at times, and the sub-story of the autistic boy is handled a little manipulatively (shows his grandparents are evil, for no real purpose — they didn’t need to be in the story at all — and two other kids that are referred to but hardly seen) plus he isn’t just autistic, more like Rain Man with drawing, of course. And the ending for the murder mystery is written taut, and supposedly riveting, but I just found it ridiculous. 

The Bottom Line

Good book mystery, poor murder mystery.