The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Had I but known how good a Mary Roberts Rinehart story was, I would have read one sooner. At least, that would probably be the logic of a Rinehart heroine. Rinehart came from Pittsburgh, and her mysteries fall in the category of the "have I but known" plot that Elizabeth Peter used to such good effect in her Amelia Peabody mysteries. I downloaded The Circular Staircase onto my Kindle and had an enjoyable read.

The Circular Staircase was one of Rinehart's first books, written in 1908. Rachel, a spinster, raised her nephew and niece, making sure to safeguard the siblings money. As they got older, they started to live lives away from Rachel, so as one of the last flings for the family, Rachel rented a house from the Armstrongs in the country for the summer while her house in the city was being renovated. That's when things take a turn for the eerie. Rachel starts to hear knocking noises, and she thinks that she sees people hanging out, maybe trying to get into the house. When Rachel's charges, Halsey and Gertrude show up, things take a turn for the worse. The son of the man who owns the house gets shot entering the house. Halsey and his friend, who left earlier in the evening, are suspects, and the friend, Jack Bailey, gets arrested when the bank that the Bailey worked at had funds stolen from it. Bailey is suspected, but so is Paul Armstrong, who owned the house that Rachel rented. Armstrong is now in California, but he turns up dead. The incursions into the house seem to be ongoing, and the mystery around the Armstrongs, the house, and the missing money deepens.

I really enjoyed reading The Circular Staircase. Humor abounded. My favorite interactions were being Rachel and her life-long maid, Liddy, were constantly bickering with Liddy threatening to quit while Rachel threatens to fire her. The mystery is a puzzle, and I have to admit that there were several times I wanted to shake Rachel and say "don't keep quiet about what you just learned." all in all, the book was very enjoyable, and I look forward to reading more Rinehart.

The Heist by Daniel Silva

The latest Gabriel Allon, The Heist by Daniel Silva, was released in July, but I was just able to get it from the library this week. I've enjoyed the Gabriel Allon series, although I have to admit I was starting to get tired of Allon getting into near death situations in every book. Yes, I understand that he is a spy and risking his life, but having it happen in every book was straining credulity.

The Heist is different from some of the other Allons is that there isn't a terror attack behind the action in the book. Instead, Allon is pulled into an investigation of a former diplomat's death because Allon's friend, Julian Isherwood finds the body. The diplomat turned out to be a former spy, turned rogue, who was now in the business of selling stolen masterpieces. Allon's role is to find the Caravaggio that was rumored to be in the possession of the dead man. What Allon finds is that the man was onto the Syrian president hiding away funds for his future use. Allon is determined to track down the funds and remove them. Also, he wants to find the Caravaggio. In order to gain access to the money, Allon recruits a girl who works for the investment officer who is hiding the fund for the Syrian president. The girl is a Syrian whose family was massacred in Hama as threats to the president of Syria.

As I mentioned, this book is different from the others because Allon isn't being tortured to near death. At times though, the story just seemed to drag along. The overall plot was interesting, but I think there could have been more action and less repetition. I think Silva needs to take a break from Allon, especially since Allon is moving into more of a managerial role in the Israeli secret services. Perhaps, he can revisit the Michael Osbourne character.

The Lost Island by Preston & Child

I have enjoyed the books by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, both together and separately. However, I haven't had a chance yet to read anything in their Gideon Crew series. This is a new series that just started a few years ago. Well, when I went into the library the other day, I saw their latest book, The Lost Island on the new books shelf. I figured that I would give the book a try, and boy, am I glad that I did.

Gideon Crew is a master thief, who is also a physicist. He also has a medical condition, tangled blood vessels in his brain, that leaves him with only ten months to live. Preston and Child love to have characters appear in multiple series, and it's no different here. Eli Glinn, who is the person behind EES, Effective Engineering Solutions, appears in The Lost Island. Glinn's EES was the group behind the meteorite recovery in The Ice Limit.

Glinn asks Gideon Crew to steal a page from the Book of Kells while it is on tour in New York City. The task appears to be an impossible one because the security is so high, but we are talking about Gideon Crew, and he manages to come up with a way to steal the page. Imagine Gideon's shock when Glinn takes the beautiful illuminated page and removes the paint! But there is a reason. Hidden under the illumination is an ancient map. This map shows the route to the lotus, which can cure bodily ills and injuries, and give the consumer of it longer life. Glinn has a mysterious client who wants the plant because it would be an amazing discovery that could cure so many illnesses. Why, it might even cure Gideon's problem! The map appears to led to the Caribbean, where the ancient Irish monks were the first to reach the Americas. Glinn partners Gideon with Amy, who is an expert in classical languages and boating. Of course, the voyage is more difficult that Gideon imagines, and what they find is beyond his wildest imagination.

The Lost Island is a thrilling adventure story. Preston and Child throw in some Greek history, and the Odyssey. Is it believable? Well, of course it is. Preston and Child do such a great job of weaving high adventure into a fast moving plot that you find yourself caught up in the action. I really enjoyed this book so much that I have to get the two earlier Gideon Crews!

Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

I happened to be shelf browsing at the library, and I saw the Harper Connelly series by Charlaine Harris. I liked the earlier Sookie Stackhouse books, so I thought I would give this series a try. Harper was struck by lightning as a teen, and this has given her the ability to find dead bodies and to see the person's final moments. She uses this talent to find missing people who are dead, as long as she knows the general location of the body. Also, she can see what the person experiences in the last moments, so she can explain the death. If it was murder, she can't see the murderer, but she knows the person was murdered. Harper's step-brother Tolliver Lang, acts as manager/bodyguard when Harper does her work for money. It seems that people don't like that Harper can find the dead, even though it helps them find the missing loved one. People tend to want to hurt her.

Grave Sight is the first book in the series, and Harper is called in to find a missing teenage girl, named Teenie, in Sarne, Arkansas. It seems that everyone in power in the town is related to everyone else, and after Harper finds the body, and discovers that not only was the girl murdered, but her boyfriend, who was found dead in the general area of supposed suicide, was also murdered. This doesn't go down well with the townsfolk, who make Harper's life miserable. Then Harper discovers that the Teenie's sister was murdered earlier. Then after Teenie's mom talks to Harper, she winds up dead. Obviously something is going on, and Harper and Tolliver are stuck in the town. Harper decides that while she is stuck there, she might as well figure out why everyone in Teenie's family was murdered. However, someone in the town is determined to stop Harper at any cost.

The plot was interesting. I mean who would think of a person being struck by lightning then being able to discover dead bodies. Harris does come up with some interesting ideas, but she really does need to work on her mechanics. First, her grammar is atrocious. This is an example of one of her poorly written sentences from page 10: "The waitress filled my coffee cup and taken my first swallow before the sheriff spoke." Wow! So the waitress took the sip for Harper. With the number of grammar errors, it's obvious that Harris isn't an English major, and it's also obvious that her editor sucks. Then there's the matter of common sense and research. On page 46, Harris talks about an approaching thunderstorm: "A boom of thunder was followed by a brilliant bolt of lightning." Anyone who has any common sense, or lived, knows that light travels faster than sound, and that you see the lightning and then hear the thunder. The errors in the book really detracted from my enjoyment of the story.

The book was okay. Harper is a stupid and sloppy detective. Harper finds out from Hollis, cop and former husband of Sally, Teenie's murdered sister, that right before her death, Sally had been cleaning the house of Dick Teaque, father of Teenie's boyfriend, after Dick died. She then came home in a bemused mood and looked through one of her high school textbooks. Well, Harper lumbers in, grabs the biology textbook, and shakes a paper out. Duh! Idiot! She should have flipped through so she could see where the paper was placed because that would have been a clue. However, Harper ain't known for her smarts. She can just find dead people. I may give the second book a chance just to see if Grave Sight was an aberration. It it's not better, I would suggest skipping the series because the first book is not that good.

Things That Matter by Charles Krauthammer

Although I love to read fiction, especially mysteries, that doesn't mean I don't like to read other things. I've noticed that others seem to think that people can only read one type of book, but I would think that would be a boring and bland diet. I just finished one of those non-mysteries today: Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics by Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, and he's a frequent commentator on Fox News. I've seen him a few times with Bill O'Reilly. Things That Matter is a collection of short essays that Krauthammer has written over the past thirty years for the Post and Time.

I learned some things about Krauthammer that I didn't know before I read the book are that Krauthammer was paralyzed in swimming accident when he started medical student, that he was a practicing psychiatrist, and that he used to be a Democrat and a speech writer for then vice president Walter Mondale! I have to admit that I was struck because Krauthammer is the voice of conservatism. I know that I've often thought that liberalism is for the young and naive, because they have such a rose-colored vision of what the world could be. As you age, at least, as I aged, I found that my views became much more conservative. I think that with age comes wisdom and a greater understanding of how the world works. Basically, as I started to make money, I wanted to keep my money. Also, I learned that issues may not always be as black and white as I originally thought.

Krauthammer's essays are very well written and thought provoking. He broke the books into sections:

• Personal
• Political
• Historical

In those essays, he talked about a wide variety of topics, contemporary and long past. Krauthammer's parents were Orthodox Jews, and he went to a Hebrew Day School, and I think that makes his voice even more poignant as he mentions the Jewish/Israeli situation in the world. Although Krauthammer is a passionate about his views, he also writes with a sane, calm voice. I think it would be sad if you passed up Things That Matter. I know that I read works by both liberals and conservatives because I want to get the full picture. I know that personal bias and viewpoints color a writer's work, sometimes even unintentionally. I found myself as I finished the book, admiring Krauthammer, and having a more enlightened view on some of the topics he mentions. Give his essays a try. Just read a few, and I think before you know it, you'll be reading the whole book.

Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab

When I was a kid, I used to love books with mystery, magic, and adventure. i would browse the shelves of the children's section of my local library, looking for titles or covers that would catch my eye. Yeah, yeah, you can't judge a book by its cover, but you don't know until you read the inside. Anyway, as I was in the library with my nephew, I started browsing the shelves. The nephew has no interest in reading, so I was just amusing myself. That's how I noticed the Nick and Tesla adventures. So far, there are three that are available and all are newly published. I started with the first book in the series, Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab. Nick and Tesla are 11-year-old twins, who have been sent to spend the summer with their Uncle Newt, who lives in California, while their parents go go Uzbekistan to study soy beans. Uncle Newt is a weird, mad scientist, who seems like the last person who should be watching children for the summer. But Uncle Newt has a lab, and he tells Nick and Tesla that they can use it all they want. After making a bottle rocket, the pair set it off, where it lands in the yard of a haunted looking mansion. The mansion may be haunted, but it isn't empty. There are two men there who are supposedly doing construction work on the house, two very nasty Rottweilers, and a little ghostly girl who warns Nick and Tesla away. As Nick and Tesla try unsuccessfully to recover the rocket and Tesla's pendant that can off as the rocket whizzed by, they become embroiled in the mystery of the house.

The reason this book series caught my eye is because of the bright, colorful covers. What is really cool about the books is that they contain instructions on how to build the gadgets used in the books. In Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab, the reader can learn how to make:

• a low-tech bottle rocket and launcher
• a mints-and-soda fueled robocat dog distractor
• a semi-invisible nighttime van tracker
• a Christmas-is-over intruder alert system
• a Do-it-yourself electromagnet and picker-upper

The instructions are easy to follow, although they will require some help from an adult. In fact, I know that I want to try some of them with the nephew to see if i can encourage an interest in science and reading. The authors are "Science Bob" Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith, and they do an excellent job of melding mystery with science. The series also has a website, where Science Bob demonstrates the projects in the books. The website and the books are really cool, and I highly recommend them for the budding scientist in your household. I wish that there were books like this when I was a kid!

Other titles in the series are:

• Book 2: Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage
• Book 3: Nick and Tesla's Secret Agent Gadget Battle
• Book 4: Nick and Tesla's Super Cyborg Gadget Glove--available October 7, 2014

Death in Disguise by Caroline Graham

I read the third book in the Inspector Barnaby series, Death in Disguise. The book starts with an inquest into the accidental death of William Carter. He died while falling down the stairs at a local commune, with a bunch of folks practicing various New Age beliefs. They are lead by Ian Craigie, the Master. Months later, Sylvie Gamelin, is a member of the group, and she is going to turn 21 and come into her trust fund. Sylvie now goes by the name, Suhami, and she has decided that she will give her trust fund to the Master and the commune. The Master has invited Suhami's parents down to the commune, and Sylvie's father, a rich, powerful, jerk of a man named Guy, decides that the Master is a fraud. When the Master is stabbed to death in a darkened room where the whole commune, and Guy Gamelin and his wife, Felicity, have gathered to watch May Cuttle have a regression to a previous life. Of course, Barnaby and Troy are called in to solve the case.

This was an enjoyable book. The story was somewhat similar to the series depiction. There were some added characters in the book, and two of the later deaths in the book were different in the show. Gavin Troy is extremely different between book and television series. As I mentioned, he's married in the book, and in this one, he is a new father to a baby girl. Also, Troy is definitely not PC in the book. Graham has Troy express rather negative and outdated views about women, homosexuals, and people with mental disabilities. I can understand why the TV Troy is so different. The character's view in the book would never be okay with the viewing public. Even though I knew whodunit and why, I still enjoyed the book. Graham does a great job with giving the reader insight into how her characters think and feel, and she throws in some unexpected humor by making fun of the characters. All in all, Death in Disguise is an entertaining mystery.