by Leslie Meier is the perfect read if you're ready for Fall to arrive. The Great Pumpkin Fest is in full swing, complete with pumpkin catapults, an underwater pumpkin carving contest, and a pumpkin boat regatta. But the event isn't going as planned. Someone is destroying the candidates for the title of biggest pumpkin and tearing apart the scarecrow displays. And when the first pumpkins start to fly from their catapults, a corpse is discovered in the trunk of the junky old car that they were using as a target. The book opens with a chilling prologue and, as the plot unfolds, more and more details of a decades old crime are revealed. I enjoyed the contrast between how women of different generations deal with things.
by Mary McHugh is the third book in the series and the first one of the Happy Hoofers mysteries I've read. The five member dance group is performing on a dinner cruise in Paris when a body is discovered on the upper deck. While they try to figure out who the killer might be, they spend their days seeing the sights. There's a lot of detail about the city here, and a cooking class in one of the chapters, but not a whole lot about the characters or the mystery itself.
by Lea Redmond isn't like any knitting book I've come across before. These are ambitious projects that will take weeks or months at the very least (one will take eighteen years and another even longer than that!) The title project asks you to collect balls of blue and grey yarn and knit a scarf a stripe at a time, matching your colors to that day's sky. You can knit on sharpened pencils, or sewing pins, or on a project that you keep under your bed and only work on in the dark when you can't sleep.... These are definitely geared towards process knitters, because there's not going to be any rushing to the end. But just think of the stories that these projects will have to tell!
by Shirley Jackson, I jumped on it. I loved Haunting of Hill House and, maybe more than that, I loved Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages. Those last two are books about raising children and I can't think of more perfect titles for the subject.
. Alanis has settled down in the small town of Berdache, Arizona, taking over her mother's shop and trying to make amends with as many former customers as she can, without letting them know that they'd been conned in the first place. It's going well until Martha, one of her mother's victims, realizes that Alanis hasn't been honest with her. Hurt and betrayed, Martha returns to her abusive husband. Before Alanis can find her and explain, the husband is dead and Martha has been jailed for the crime. Alanis isn't like any cozy mystery heroine I've come across before. She was raised by a pair of con-artists and, while she's distanced herself from their ways, she doesn't hesitate to use the skills they taught her to clear her friend's name. I can't wait for the next book in the series. The authors do an amazing job of capturing the part of Arizona the books are set in.
by Natasha Preston, sixteen-year-old Scarlett Garner has no memories of her early childhood. Her parents say her memory loss was caused by a traumatic house fire. When Scarlett starts to remember things that don't match up with the stories she's been told, she begins to suspect that her life is a lie. I can't share more details than that without getting into spoilers...which means I can't tell you what caught my interest in the first place. (I think the cover copy changed a bit after I requested my review copy.) It's a young adult book and reads like one, complete with the perfect new boy in school who's happy to help Scarlett find out what really happened in her past. The scary secret, when it is revealed, is two dimensional and not all that scary.
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by Karen Tiede has me convinced that I need more little rugs for my house.
