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Latest review at Reviewing the Evidence (link in my LJ) - Undead and Unappreciated.

My review stack, not surprisingly, is now bursting... and sometimes there's even an assigned book in there. Hopefully I'll be back up to 2 reviews a week in a bit. Just as soon as I have time to write the 5 pending ones...

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I could rant and I could rave, or I could let two facts - both of which I had heard and not believed until I got direct confirmation - speak for themselves.

1) The Department of Homeland Security is not allowing the Red Cross into New Orleans because Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

2) The company already tapped to do the hurricane cleanup is a Halliburton Co. subsidiary that has come under fire for its reconstruction work in Iraq. To be fair, this decision wasn't no-bid and it wasn't made after the hurricane. But it was made all the same, and it smells as bad as the swamp right now.

These aren't local decisions. The response to the mortal peril of American citizens on American soil is blocking the lifesaving groups out of the area and giving millions of dollars of work to the Vice President's company.

And now for something completely different

You can tell the big proposal's over - I'm posting multiple times!

From twistedchick a couple of links. For those pissed at the White House, a series of icons. And it's not all Lord of the Flies - when faced with the collapse of modern civilization, one group banded together and created a functional hunter/gather tribe.

I came away from Bouchercon with nigh on to 30 new books... but I'm rereading one right now (to get in gear for its sequel) and it's so wonderful that I simply have to spread the delight. (jennetj, this is the one I was telling Linda about. Give her the right title, will you please?)

The Ghost and Mrs. McClure by Alice Kimberly

He's Jack Shepard. It's 1949, he's a private dick from the urban jungle, where a plugged nickel will buy a cup of java or a mook's life. The trail of his army buddy's killer led to a cornball town with a cornier name, anathema to a joe like Jack, but he'd promised his buddy that he'd follow the case to the end. He bet his everlasting life on it.

Bad move. Especially since he's spending that everlasting life locked within the foundations of a podunk bookstore, unable to move outside the confines of his unmarked makeshift coffin.

She's Penelope Thornton-McClure, widowed in 2003 and now betting the pittance she got in life insurance that she can build a going business out of Aunt Sadie's bookstore. Anything to get herself and her son away from her overbearing, overwealthy, overpowering in-laws.

Pen's first step is to invite famous author Timothy Brennan to do a signing of his latest book in her store. Everybody knew that Brennan was a cub reporter way back when, and based his best-selling hardboiled series off of a real PI. A guy named Shepard, who (Brennan announced to the surprise of everyone in the room) had disappeared in that very place.

Okay... not quite everybody. One person the room already knew that.

But they were all shocked when Brennan keeled over dead right after making the announcement.

Jack himself doesn't know who killed him, much less who killed Brennan. But as soon as he gets Little Miss Priss to realize that that strange voice in her head isn't in her head, maybe he can teach her enough to get her to use those pretty gams to do the legwork he is no longer capable of...

I'm not sure if Kimberly got hardboiled in my cozy or cozy in my hardboiled, but she makes them into two great genres that read great together. The book itself is more on the cozy side of things - it's told mostly from Pen's point of view - but it doesn't lapse into the cutesy coy that many cozies do. As the title suggests, the slightly romantic/mostly bickering relationship between Pen and Jack comes right out of the many incarnations of Mrs. Muir; fans of Muir will find much of what they appreciated in the original, but McClure has enough changes and updates not to be just a tired retread.

It passes my four P test with highest marks in every category:
- People are interesting, three-dimensional, and believable, with sufficiently different types of characters running around to keep the story nicely mixed. The author keeps herself out of the way, neither hammering home a message nor patronizing the readers.
- Plot keeps moving at a nice clip. There are no wasted or dragging scenes.
- Puzzle is well-paced. There are enough hints dropped that readers can play the home game and figure out whodunit, but with enough red herrings scattered throughout that the first time I read it, I was betting on the wrong suspect.
- The Problem of the Police was handled with particular panache. The cops aren't dismissed or ignored by the protagonist, but she really does have information that they don't have... and for once, the book has a darned good reason why the amateur has to do work that the detective on tap can't!

This is highly recommended for people in the mood for a light read. The sequel, The Ghost and the Dead Deb (which had been delayed for almost a year for reasons unknown) has just come out. But for my opinon on that, you'll have to read the next issue of I Love a Mystery Newsletter.

While I'm making book recommendations, I'd also like to put in a plug for We'll Always Have Parrots by Donna Andrews. It's set at a science fiction convention by someone who really knows what she's talking about... this is sort of the Galaxy Quest of books. Copies of the hardcover are still floating around, but the paperback has come out.