This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

I really enjoyed this book. After listening to the first book in the series, Lady Anne and the Howl in the Dark, I was pretty excited to get to this installment because I felt like Darkefell and Lady Anne had some unfinished business to deal with. Once I started listening, I was quickly taken with the new mystery in Lady Anne's life and couldn't wait to see how things would work out.

After leaving Darkefell's home, Lady Anne goes to visit a friend for a while. She isn't there for long before she sees the Barbary Ghost and decides to figure out what is really going on. Lord Darkefell isn't ready to give up on Lady Anne and finds her in Cornwall and before long is helping her investigate everything that is happening. I found the mystery to be quite complex and liked the fact that I couldn't quite put all of the pieces together on my own. There were definitely a few surprises thrown into the mix.

Lady Anne and Lord Darkefell make a great team. They really do work well together and they have a lot of chemistry. They are both great characters and I really want to see them work things out. Lord Darkefell is used to being in charge and can become too authoritative with Lady Anne. They both want each other but Lady Anne isn't sure that she wants marriage since it will mean giving up her freedom.

I thought that Danielle Cohen did a fantastic job with the narration of this book. I seem to be enjoying this narrator more and more each time I listen to her work. I like the different voices that she uses and I think that she adds a lot of emotion into the reading of the story. I think she has a very pleasant voice that is easy to listen to for hours at a time and I think that the accent she uses works wonderfully with this series.

I would recommend this series to others. This is the second book in the Lady Anne Addison Mysteries series which is best read in order if possible because of the ongoing character relationships. I cannot wait to get started on the next book in this series.

I received a review copy of this audiobook from the narrator.

For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

Another excellent collection of Phoebe and Marigold's misadventures, this time with a few goblins thrown in. I just love this series so much. In my head, I think I like unicorns, but honestly, most of the time I find stories about them kind of boring. However Marigold is lovely (duh!) and magnificent and I just love her relationship to Phoebe. They are funny and adorable and I don't think I will ever get tired of reading about their time together. 

Phoebe is such a wonderful character who is un-apologetically herself with all her strengths and flaws shining through. Simpson has created some truly lovable and remarkable characters. Heck, at this point, I'll even put up with Dakota because of all of the complexity she brings to this series. 

Great books for kids and adults alike, even better when read together.

I was prompted recently to buy the book "SPITFIRE DESERTER?" because of a story I had come across years ago from reading the book 'Malta: The Spitfire Year 1942' about an American fighter pilot flying Spitfires with the Royal Air Force (RAF) who was regarded as a deserter because he was the only pilot of his squadron to fly off the American carrier USS Wasp on the morning of April 20, 1942 to the besieged Mediterranean island of Malta who failed to arrive there.

Indeed, "Malta: The Spitfire Year 1942" states that "[at] 1117 [on April 20, 1942] , a message was received from Malta that 46 aircraft had arrived safely, and that one was missing. This was the aircraft flown by one of 603 Squadron's Americans, Sgt. Walcott, who had been with the unit for only a month. He had confided to a Canadian pilot that he had no intention of flying to Malta. Consequently, as the Spitfires began their 660-mile flight, he turned for Algeria (some 55 miles to the south) where he force-landed BP958 in the area to the south of the Atlas mountains. Making contact with the US Consulate, he claimed to be a lost civilian pilot in need of repatriation!"

Well, in "Spitfire Deserter", Bill Simpson provides the reader with some background history about Salvatore "Bud" Walcott, his flight training with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in Canada and the advanced flight training he received during 1941-42 with the RAF in Britain. To his credit, Simpson makes an earnest attempt to determine -- given what information he was able to obtain about Walcott from U.S. and British sources, as well as from former squadron mates and people in Massachusetts (where Walcott lived for most of his life, dying there in July 1962, age 42) --- whether or not, as has been alleged by the RAF authorities, "Bud" Walcott was a deserter and a defector. 

From what I read, I don't know what can conclusively be said to account for Walcott's failure to reach Malta in April 1942. Walcott himself claimed that shortly after taking off from the USS Wasp, his Spitfire could barely sustain airspeed to remain aloft. So he increased power to his aircraft's engine and was able to gain altitude. But by that time, he was lagging behind his squadron mates. He increased power as a way to catch up with the formation, but became concerned that he might exhaust his fuel prematurely. After all, he had more than 600 miles to fly over the sea --- most of it deep in enemy territory. So, Walcott dropped down to sea level, endeavoring to independently make it to Malta. Some time later, Walcott passes over a small white ship and noticed black smoke coming out of his engine exhaust. His cockpit filled with smoke and the engine temperature began to rise alarmingly. What to do? Walcott thought he might have to bail out and so climbed to what he regarded as a safe altitude for doing so. He was now at 1,200 feet and headed toward the Algerian coast. (Algeria was then a part of French North Africa which was administered by Vichy France, a client state of Nazi Germany set up shortly after France's surrender to Germany in June 1940.) The engine temperature of Walcott's Spitfire had at this point returned to a normal range. But once over Algeria, the engine cut out and Walcott had no choice but to try to make a landing as soon as possible. His Spitfire crash landed and Walcott was knocked unconscious by the impact. Subsequently, he was picked up by Vichy authorities and placed in an internment camp on the edge of the Sahara Desert where conditions were austere, at times brutal, and harsh. There Walcott would remain as a de facto prisoner til the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, when he was freed and repatriated to Britain, where he made a report about what he had been through since he had been reported as missing. Subsequently, Walcott would be commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF), fly combat with a fighter squadron in North Africa, and later be sent back to the U.S., where served out the remainder of the war as a flight instructor. 

In my view, given the scope of information the author was able to obtain about Walcott and the matter of determining whether or not he was a deserter while with the RAF, the book could have been much shorter. There were so many fillers about the part of Massachusetts in which Walcott grew up, the history of the affluent family into which he married while with the USAAF, and a short history of the island of Malta and its significance during the Second World War as key to Britain's strategic position in the Mediterranean. What I found useful in understanding who Wolcott was through learning about the extensive flight training he received as a fighter pilot, as well as the treatment he and other Allied combatants received during his internment at Laghouat by the Vichy authorities. Hence, the 2 stars.