The point of these quick takes posts is to catch up on my "To Write About" stack—emphasizing pithiness, not thoroughness.
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The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues by Ellen Raskin Paperback, 170 pg. Puffin Books, 1975 Read: January 7-8, 2020 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

I've never claimed to have an exhaustive knowledge of Ellen Raskin novels, yet I was surprised to find a passing reference to this one last fall. So I grabbed it up and jumped into it with relish. It's been since I was in MG that I've read other works by her that aren't The Westing Game, so I can't say for certain if this is her usual kind of thing or not (I think this is closer to her norm than Westing, though). There's an over-reliance on funny names (frequently some sort of wordplay involving food) and outlandish eccentricities as a source of humor, but that's a minor thing.

This is really 3-4 short stories linked together with an overarching narrative to make a novel—which actually works pretty well. The pair have a few smaller mysteries to solve while a bigger one builds. This reads like a collaboration of Donald J. Sobol and Daniel M. Pinkwater—which absolutely would've been up my alley when I was the right age, and is still amusing enough right now for me to enjoy the quick read.

Is it my favorite thing ever? No. But it's a clever read that's entertaining enough.

This is a little more mature than usual for MG books (especially given its publish date, I'd think), but it's not mature enough for YA. Not that it matters, that's just me trying to categorize it. I think it's probably appropriate for MG readers, though (there's one scene that might push it over the edge, but...I'd risk it).

(the official blurb)
3-4 paragraphs

Bloody Acquisitions by Drew Hayes, Kirby Heyborne (Narrator) Series: Fred, The Vampire Accountant, #3 Unabridged Audiobook, 9 hrs., 52 mins. Tantor Audio, 2016 Read: January 31-February 4, 2020 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

(the official blurb)
I continue to enjoy these lighter UF books about the world's dullest Vampire and his supernatural friends. Of course, the joke is that he's not really that boring at all, Fred just thinks of himself that way.

The core of this novel is Fred dealing with a group of vampires coming to town to set up shop. The big question is: can they share the city with him? Typically, the answer is no, and he'll either have to join with them or leave. The last thing that Fred wants to do is to leave his home and business==he'll just have to figure out a way.

I think this works better as a novel than the previous two installments and is overall just a touch more entertaining. I'm not sure that I have much else to say—these are fun reads/listens.

Dark Harvest Magic by Jayne Faith, Amy Landon (Narrator) Series: Ella Grey, #2 Unabridged Audiobook, 8 hrs., 32 mins. Tantor Audio, 2017 Read: February 22-25, 2020 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

(the official blurb)
I have even less to say about this one. I didn't enjoy it as much as I did the previous one, maybe because just about all of it felt like Faith was setting things up for the next book or two in the series more than telling a story now. This does mean that the next book or two should be really good, because I liked most of what she was setting up.

Aside from that, Dark Harvest Magic really feels a lot like it could be the next several chapters in Stone Cold Magic. Which means that pretty much everything I said about it applies here. An entertaining read/listen, I still like the characters and really want to see where Faith is taking this all, even if I wasn't gaga over this sequel.

Door 17:  Winter Solstice

Book:  Read a book that takes place in December, with ice or snow on the cover

"The Twelve Clues Of Christmas" is a Christmas Cracker of a book where the prize is solving an ingenious set of Christmas-themed murders, the wrapping is a colourful evocation of a 1935 English Country House Party made all the more believable because it's being constructed for paying guests by gentry who can no longer fund their way of life, and the explosive energy comes from an engaging heroine who is instantly likeable, even though she's thirty-fifth in line to the throne.

it takes talent to sustain a truly light-hearted tone, especially while delivering a clever and complex plot for multiple murders and making gentle fun of the English class system. Rhys Bowen makes it look easy.

The puzzle of the murders, which seem at first to be accidental deaths, is beautifully constructed. It's complex, dramatic and feels just a little far-fetched until the moment when all was revealed and I was left slapping my forehead in a "why didn't I think of that?" way while grinning at the impudence of the idea.

The Country House Christmas Party, running from Christmas Eve until New Year's Day, provides the perfect setting and cast of characters to deliver both a rich suspect pool and lots of gentle humour about the nuances of the English Class system. The paying guests include an American family, a new money rich Yorkshire family who are in Trade, and a formidable Dowerger who has out-lived everyone else she might have spent Christmas with, all of whom are expecting to experience a "genuine old-fashioned English Christmas."

The main energy of the book comes from our the heroine: Lady Georgiana Rannoch. She is a wonderful creation: young, penniless, well-connected but with plebian as well as royal roots, vulnerable but unable to step back from doing the right thing, even when it puts her in danger and in love with a man she may not marry and who is often absent. The story is delivered as instalments in her journal, so her personality shapes the whole tale. Fortunately, she is fun to listen to, easy to like and impossible not to root for.

I strongly recommend the audiobook version. Katherine Kelligran's award-winning narration is extraordinary. She gets everything right. Her pacing enhances both the humour and the tension. She gives all her characters easy to identify voices, the accents she uses are spot on and she can even sing the Christmas Carols in a believable upper-class English voice.

"The Twelve Clues Of Christmas" is the sixth book in the "Her Royal Spyness" series about Georgiana Rannoch but it can be read as a stand-alone story. Diving into this Christmas tale with no knowledge of the previous books didn't cause me any problems or expose me to any important spoilers but it did make me hungry for more so the "Her Royal Highness" books will be on my 2020 TBR pile.

Book: Read a book that takes place in December, with ice or snow on the cover.

It's the Winter Solstice today and at 15.30 the sun has already started to drop through the rain to the western horizon, like a festive party-goer sneaking off early from work in a hurry to get home..

I hate these long nights and brief, often grey, days. They make the clock of my own mortality click too loudly.

So...

I've switched on the Christmas tree lights, made a pot of coffee and am about to lose myself for an hour or two in "The Twelve Clues Of Christmas", a piece of whimsical imagining from Rhys  Bowen.

Although I've been aware of the "Her Royal Spyness" series for a while, I've never gotten around to it before. In need of festive cheer, I dived in at book six in the series.

So far, not having read the first five books hasn't gotten in the way. The story is light, the humour is well-judged and the world is an easy-to-relax-in fantasy version of 1930s Britain.

I've just reached the point where the first body has been found in the grounds of the country house in darkest Devon that our heroine is ensconced in for Christmas. Her room has a view of the orchard in which the body was found. I'm expecting my first clue to arrive shortly.

I feel like this book was both better than I thought it was, but not quite as good as I expected.  The former because my reading was more fractured than I'd like and the book never got a chance to really suck me in; it was always getting interrupted.  The latter, because its novel-to-mystery ratio was higher than I'd have wished.

Isaac Severy was a brilliant mathematician whose last act before dying was writing a bombshell of an equation, which he hid away.  Days after his death, his granddaughter receives a letter from him with his last wishes: to burn all his work save this equation, which she should delver to one trusted colleague and no one else.  But first, she must find the equation using the clues left for her as she goes about fulfilling his final requests.  

At the same time, the rest of the Severy family - blessed with brilliance and saddled with dysfunction - is left to pick up the pieces of their lives, re-orienting themselves after they lose their axis and another death unmoors them completely.  Hazel's uncle, Philip, is receiving mysterious notes and visits from someone eager to meet up with him and discuss his father's work, someone who was harassing Isaac in his final days. 

I ended up caring about most of the characters except Hazel herself.  She was pretty unmoored from the start, and never felt like she had much resolve.  For me this resulted in the impression that she never took any direction action to find the equation, so much as the clues threw themselves at her in desperation. 

Speaking of clues, my biggest annoyance of all was that one of the clues was not only not discovered by Hazel, but the reader didn't got left out too.  Both discover the solution after the fact, and it's a letdown.

These are minor grievances though, and I'm not sure I'd have felt the same way about these things had I been able to commit my time and attention to the book as it deserved.  Perhaps more focus would have allowed me to connect more with Hazel and the story's mystery.  Either way, it was an enjoyable read and kept me entertained, if not deeply invested.

You'd think that I get to read more than enough files (though not typically crime files) in my day job -- but gluttons for punishment that some of us mystery lovers are, there's nothing we like better than tracking down the murderer ourselves, instead of just reading about some super sleuth doing it for us ... or so the makers of the 1930s' Crime Dossiers / Crime Files series figured, and of course they were dead on target.

The idea was first conceived by English authors Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links, whose Murder off Miami (aka File on Bolitho Blane) was such a raging success on both sides of the Atlantic that it inspired follow-ups in both the U.S. and in the UK: in the latter case, three more "Crime Dossiers" by Messrs. Wheatley and Links; in the U.S., Helen Reilly's File on Rufus Ray (Crime File No. 2), as well as File on Fenton and Far, and File on Claudia Cragge by Q. Patrick (aka Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Wheeler) (Crime Files Nos. 3 and 4).

While the American "Crime Files" Nos. 2 and 4 (Rufus Ray and Claudia Cragge) are true collectors' items that continue to elude me for the moment, I've now read all four "Crime Dossiers" created by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links, as well as Q. Patrick's File on Fenton and Farr, and I'm in awe at the amount of ingenuity that has gone into creating these books.  They really are extremely close to the real thing -- you get correspondence (including cablegrams) and file entries by the investigators as well as witness statements, handwritten documents, crime scene and witness photographs, entire newspapers containing reports on the crime (not merely individual reports but actually entire broadsheets!), and even honest-to-God tactile evidence such as blood-stained pieces of cloth, strands of hair, tubes of lipstick, and other items found at the crime scene or in a witness's possession.  One can only guess at the amount of time and effort that must have gone into the creation of each and everyone of these books -- and they must have been tremendously expensive to produce, too; so no wonder that many of them (and all the originals from the 1930s) are rare collectors' items these days.  Crimes scenes range from a yacht off the Florida coast to an English village not far from London, a castle on a remote Scottish island, small-town New Jersey, and a London night club; and the cast of characters -- in each book as well as in all of them taken together -- is as diverse as any that you might expect to find in the best of crime fiction.

This all being said, obviously you can't like all books equally well, however lovingly they are put together; and so far my favorites are Wheatley / J.G. Links's sophomore effort, Who Killed Robert Prentice? (which has downright fiendish elements; it is, however, solvable on the basis of the evidence provided) and Q. Patrick's File on Fenton and Farr ... the latter, if only for the fact that the authors even managed to work a funny-sweet romance between one of the detectives and the police chief's precocious secretary into the file.  (Obviously it also helped that I managed to solve both of these cases substantially (Robert Prentice) / partly (Fenton & Farr) correctly, even if I reserve the right to quibble with some of the evidence in Fenton & Farr.

The weakest of the lot is, IMHO, The Malinsay Massacre; not so much because it consists very largely of correspondence but because the solution just plain doesn't make sense to me and some of the conclusions allegedly "forcing" themselves on the reader from individual pieces of evidence are implausible beyond belief.  (OK, sour grapes, I admit.  Still ...) -- Herewith the Clues, the final Wheatley / Links outing, is generally decried as weak as well; however, I actually prefer it to Malinsay -- it does present a genuine puzzle, and even if some of the clues / proposed deductions are maybe a bit far-fetched, a fair amount of them actually do serve a logical purpose in eliminating innocent suspects on the one hand and nailing down the murderer on the other hand.  (Besides, the sheer number of fellow writers and society celebrities of their era that the authors managed to rope in for purposes of posing for "suspect" photos for Herewith the Clues is mind-boggling in and of itself -- in fact, this is the only volume where the true identities of the persons portrayed in the photographs are unveiled -- not least as this is a story dealing with IRA terrorism and some of the suspect biographies also point to Nazi Germany ... surely, in 1937, not exactly connections that many well-known Brits would have welcomed to see associated with their names; however much in a fictional context and with a disclaimer reading "the particulars regarding [name of fictional suspect] which are given in the script have, of course, no reference whatever to [real name of person portrayed], who very kindly posed for this photograph.")

Now, if only I could get my hands on at least halfway affordable copies of the File on Rufus Ray and the File on Claudia Cragge ...

In the interim, File on Fenton and Farr gets me another square in the Detection Club bingo -- "Across the Atlantic" (chapter 22), which at the same time completes bingo no. 4 ( all 4 corners + center square).

Individual ratings:

File on Fenton & Farr - 4 stars

Murder off Miami - 4 stars

Who Killed Robert Prentice? - 4.5 stars

The Malinsay Massacre - 3 stars

Herewith the Clues - 3,5 stars