A BROOKINS BOOK REVIEW

A PUREE OF POISON
By Claudia Bishop
ISBN: 0425193314
Publisher, Berkley Prime Crime
December, 2003, 260 pgs.


This small-town cozy comes with two squabbling sisters, one a gourmand cook, the other an established painter. They collide in a little upstate New York town called Hemlock Falls. Aptly named. Together the sisters Sarah, called Quill, and Meg, own and operate an inn on a perfect plot of property overlooking the namesake falls. The novel comes with a list of the huge number of characters at the front and an unremarkable recipe at the back.

The 133rd anniversary of a minor Civil War skirmish is approaching and the town is planning big doings. Things get rapidly complicated. Re-enactors are arriving to stage the battle, a poisonous couple of independent film-makers appear, and Quill, who cannot manage a business to save her soul, is trying out various practices on the Inn’s employees she is picking up from a business course at Cornell. Cornell ought to sue.

Then people start dying. They are old and not exactly in the best of health, but they weren’t at death’s door, either. The one thing they had in common was the Inn. All three victims had had meals at the Inn on the same day. The town doctor, who’s in love with Meg, the aforementioned sister, is mightily distressed. He asks Meg’s sister, Quill, to investigate. This of course adds to the number of subjects over which the two sisters can disagree. As one might imagine, there’s a great amount of shouting, stomping about and door slamming.

Quill, of course, agrees to look into the deaths, if only to protect the reputation of the Inn and her sister. It isn’t like she hasn’t enough to occupy her. She has to deal with a twit of a receptionist who’s trying to finish a PhD and her own inept efforts to force worrisome new business practices on her employees without any preparation.

All of this is handled with a light touch and there are several clever scenes, helped by some imaginative and interesting characters, but it all never quite comes off. The sisters’ constant squabbling, the irritating front office receptionist who should have been fired for insubordination, and half a dozen other offenses, overshadow some strong writing and clever plotting.

Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com, www.agora2.blogspot.com
Devils Island, Bloody Halls, Reunion, Red Sky
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P. J. Tracy's 5th, SHOOT TO THRILL, Was Found to be a Thrill to Read

There was a firmly held conviction that my reading gears were badly worn after accumulating more book miles than one would find on the odometer of a 1963 Dodge Dart being used as a taxi in Tijuana.

The procedure for me had become, with very few exceptions, a process of completing a novel, having the thought, “Okay,” and moving on to the next one on the TBR list.

But one book⎯grabbed at random off the library shelf⎯just became one of those exceptions. And it once again made me think that there must be something special about the state of Minnesota’s air or water that produces good authors.

And in this case, it’s TWO authors, the mother-daughter team of Patricia and Traci Lambrecht, writing under the pseudonym of P. J. Tracy. The book is SHOOT TO THRILL, the fifth in a series.

The approach to crime solving by the free spirits who operate a software firm called Monkeewrench in Minneapolis and two veteran MPD detectives combine to create a rare combination of characters. Throwing in a “buttoned-down” FBI agent who learns that life can be fun adds to the enjoyment.

I found myself alternating between holding my breath, thinking, “Oh, no,” and laughing out loud at lines of dialogue and observations. The storyline has multiple murders, but are handled “off-stage,” or in a way that only the terminally squeamish should find offense.

And I discovered, after reading the book’s back-fly notes, that other folks have enjoyed the Monkeewrench series. That group includes the people who select winners of the “Anthony, Barry, Gumshoe, and Minnesota Book awards.”

Reading is a lot like playing golf. One great shot now and then makes up for all the others. Now I need to find those first four books in the Monkeewrench series.