(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS - Mystery & Thrillers [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-16 I have some shelves in my home which still look like this, but most of my reading since my massive MI in 2011 have been of the ebook format. I'm saving trees! I have been addicted to books since around the fifth grade when I ran into a book called A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine l’Engle (which you can read more about here, at her URL https://www.madeleinelengle.com/books/middle-grade-young-adult/a-wrinkle-in-time). I read out the entire science fiction section of my Elementary and Junior High (what they call Middle School these days) library. Seriously, every book in the genre. Then I went on to devour what was available in the Fort Vancouver Regional Library’s main branch in Vancouver, WA during my early adult (and churchmouse poor) years. Because all it cost me was the gas to get to the library. For most people, the cost of a book once or (gasp!) maybe twice a year is nothing. But I’ve been a very fast reader (about 1,000 wmp when I’m really going at it) for most of my life, and I can say with certitude that I’ve read well in excess of 10,000 books in my lifetime. At one point, when my kids were very young, I read up to 3 entire books in a single day for about a decade. That’s as many as 3 x 365 = 1095 x 10 (yrs) = 10,950 But that was only a decade and I’ve been reading daily since at least 1967, because that is the year my youngest sister was born and we taught her to read before she turned three years old. Yeah, my entire nuclear family in the 1960s were all voracious readers from the earliest of our days. So another 40 plus years of reading. It’s anyone’s guess what my actual total is, but I’ve still got a few thousand books on the shelves of my living room (all but 100 of which will be going to the local public library system mentioned earlier and a local VA Hospital and a local women’s & children’s shelter), and I’ve been selling them off since the 2010s to Powell Books which is HQ’d in Portland, Oregon which is just across the Columbia River from me, about a 40 minute car drive away. Those books enriched my life over the years, because any book worth reading is worth reading again — and some books are worth re-reading many times. Some of my favorite books over the years which have been read and re-read will be the focus of this series, as long as it lasts. I’ll cover a different genre and at least two books in that genre in each edition. GENRE — Mystery & Thrillers I often find it hard to suss out the difference between Mystery and Thriller novels, they seem much of a sameness to me in a lot of ways. Someone has to discover something of value or escape and hide with something (or someone) of value. Either way, I have enjoyed a lot of stories in these genres. One of them is a series (okay, to be clear, most of my favorite stories are played out in series format, because in a single book, how can you learn enough about a character to get truly engrossed in their life to the point that you are willing to lose sleep late enough that it will leave you bleary-eyed in the morning at work) and it comes to us from an author whose work I was already familiar with. The author is Kelley Armstrong and the series is Rockton aka The Casey Duncan Novels. I first found Kelley’s work through my baby sister (who has been turning me on to extraordinarily good writers for many decades now), and I’m not sure anymore which book it was, but it’s likely in The Otherworld series. In fact, I may have been searching for a book in a completely different series and thought it was one in that series, because I was also turned on to the Kim Harrison novels of The Hallows by my baby sister, too. One of the Armstrong books is titled Dime Store Magic, which I could have mistaken for A Fistful of Charms, by Harrison. Keep in mind, this was back in my pre-eBook days, so I was most likely in the Portland, Oregon HQ of Powell Books, which is HUGE and covers a city block. So I could have picked up one, thinking it was the other. At any rate, on to Rockton, a town in the wilds of the Yukon forest, created to temporarily house people who need to disappear from the world at large, for one reason or another. You might think that means they were people who were in danger, and that might be true. But it might also mean that some of those people were dangerous — and that would absolutely be true of Rockton. Our entry in the Mystery category is… City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong Blurb for Book 1 of 7 in the Rockton Series, from Kelley’s own URL: Casey Duncan once killed a man and got away with it. But that’s not why she’s on the run. Her best friend Diana’s ex has found her again, despite all Casey has done to protect her. And Diana has decided the only way she’ll ever be safe is if she finds a mythical town that will hide people like her. Turns out the town exists, and it will take Diana, but only if Casey, a talented young police detective, comes along. Imagine a secret town, isolated in the Yukon wilderness, deliberately cut off from the world, where everyone is pretending to be someone they’re not. Even good people can get up to some very bad stuff. Mysteries abound in the Canadian Yukon forest surrounding the bare bones ‘town’ of Rockton. The various characters who live there are under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” paradigm, where they only have to disclose what they want about their past, and for most of them it is most definitely “don’t ask”. Who they are and why they are living there might seem to be the big mystery, but don’t be deceived by obvious answers. There are mysteries aplenty out in the wilderness forest, too. Casey comes to understand slowly what is going on, but it’s not easy, especially when the friend she came north to help seems to be growing further and further away from her the longer they stay. Once you read that book, you won’t be able to wait for the next one. Luckily for you all, the entire series is now complete. But you know authors, it is hard to stay out of a universe you built and people have come to love. All that I will say about that is Murder at Haven’s Rock. You can google that, but I hope you don’t, until you’ve read all seven books in this series, first. Another author who has provided me with many, many hours of enjoyable reading is Patricia Cornwell, who has written A LOT of books in the Kay Scarpetta series about a Chief Medical Examiner who continuously gets drawn into murder mysteries. But today’s entry is not in that series. It’s a new one with just two novels in the series, and a query to the author on whether or not there will any further entries has not (yet) been answered. Our entry in the Thriller category is: Quantum by Patricia Cornwell Blurb from book 1 of 2 in the Captain Chase Series from Patricia’s URL: On the eve of a top secret space mission, Captain Calli Chase detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below a NASA research center. A NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator, Calli knows that a looming blizzard and government shutdown could provide the perfect cover for sabotage, with deadly consequences. As it turns out, the danger is worse than she thought. A spatter of dried blood, a missing security badge, a suspicious suicide—a series of disturbing clues point to Calli’s twin sister, Carme, who’s been MIA for days. Desperate to halt the countdown to disaster and to clear her sister’s name, Captain Chase digs deep into her vast cyber security knowledge and her painful past, probing for answers to her twin’s erratic conduct. As time is running out, she realizes that failure means catastrophe—not just for the space program but for the safety of the whole nation. Are there car chases, guns fired, enigmatic twin sisters, space launches and a lot of science around evidence collection (a la Kay Scarpetta) and some about drones and chemical effects? Yes, there are. Is there a mystery worth trying to figure out? Yes, there is. Will you be glad you invested the time to read this book and it’s sequel? Hell yes, you will. I know that because I’ve already re-read Quantum twice since I first read it, and for a newer book, for me, that is not common. Most of my re-readable material is years or even moreso, decades old. Hell, I’ve read the PERN stories by Anne McCaffrey tens and maybe dozens of times, and there over 23 books in that series… and you can bet that it will be popping up in the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre episode of Let’s Talk BOOKS! If you have read either of these books or any mystery or thriller story you’d like to talk about, c’mon in, sit down and put your feet up and Let’s Talk BOOKS! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/16/2162861/-It-s-Sunday-Let-s-Talk-BOOKS-Mystery-amp-Thrillers Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/