The books in this series are hard to describe.  They're both a tiny bit twee and interesting studies of small-town America during WWII.  I pick one up every once in awhile when I'm jonesing for a Homefront setting.

The mystery should have been better for me; it had the right elements: reclusive artist murdered, and paintings gone missing, but it just failed to hook me.  I love the characters though (except Miss Dimple; she's a little too Mary Poppins for me to really like her); Charlie, Annie, Virginia... they're all of their time and fun to read about.   And I really appreciated Ballard's choice of innocent suspect:  a Japanese American woman freshly graduated from medical school, forced to hide after her family in California is sent to a 'relocation camp'; she was acting as the artists companion/nurse when the murder occurred.  Ballard uses the story to spotlight the horrible situation these American citizens found themselves in because of their heritage, something I don't see written about very much. 

Generally, not a bad book; I enjoyed it enough, but I didn't love it.  

 Set in small-town Northern Georgia during WWII, this series gives a great sense of time and place; it reminds me a lot of that old TV series Homefront (early 90's?).

As for the mystery though, it was o.k., but overly-convoluted.  If Ballard had been able to structure it differently it would have worked a lot better, but as is, it's more than a little hard to follow.  A skeleton is discovered during a school outing, the money from a bond rally goes missing, the town slacker goes missing, Miss Dimple's landlady is getting mysterious notes and someone is shot during the follies.

There are a lot of characters in this book and, told in third person, from the POV of several of them, the first few chapters felt like a hot mess - I couldn't keep anybody straight.  Even after they sorted themselves out I never felt entirely confident about who was who as the POV shifted - I had to remind myself often about how someone was related to everyone else.  Each chapter starts with the internal dialogue of one of the characters, but it's never the same one, and they all remain unnamed.  This is likely done on purpose because it's the criminal, but when it wasn't, it became overly confusing.

The author kept using rifle and shotgun interchangeably; for someone who knows the difference, this is a big deal: a rifle shoots a single bullet at a time; a shotgun shoots a single shell full of tiny bullets (called buckshot) that spray outwards soon after exiting the barrel.  So, when a shotgun was reported missing, but later someone was shot and had a single bullet wound, it messed with the plot and my head; until the terms were used interchangeably again and it became obvious what was going on, I thought there were two weapons.

Still, I enjoyed the story and the characters.  The series is "Miss Dimple" but really the mystery solving is a team effort on the part of the women holding everything together while the war rages on.  At the end it becomes clear that there are several threads of mischief running through Elderberry at the same time, but really, I stuck around to see if Will would show up for Charlie one last time before being shipped off.

Page count: 262
Dollars banked: $3.00

This haul looks bigger than it is, as the first 4 are the only new books I received this week.

The last 6 are 'upgrades' - hardcovers I bought to replace paperbacks, during the Memorial Day sale at BetterWorldBooks.  

I have to say I was mightily disappointed with BWB this go around.  I think I have a fairly open mind about what they consider a 'good' book, and I expect their books to be just a little less nice than used books elsewhere with equivalent ratings.  But when our order arrived... ugh!  The box was well packed and jostling wasn't possible during the very long transit, but it looks like when they packed the box, they shoved the books in without any care - several the of the book jackets are wrinkled or ripped - all suspiciously in the same way, in the same area of the book (the bottoms).

We also got two without any jackets at all, which irritates me, but I can't swear the listing didn't say 'no jacket' so I'm willing to believe I wasn't paying close enough attention.

Ah well, c'est la vie.

Total new books: 4

Total books read: 3

Total physical TBR: 215

Happy weekend everyone! 

So I came home to find this waiting for me on Tuesday:

My bookoutlet.com order arrived!  From the USA via Belgium if the bag and tag are to be believed.  In addition to the new-to-me goodies listed above, I got three more: 2 Illona Andrews books I've read but don't own (Magic Bites and Magic Bleeds), and an upgrade from ebook to hardback of Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs.

None of the books were more than $3 each, which is good, because there's no way I could afford the shipping costs otherwise - especially with the side jaunt to Belgium it took.  

Is anything better than coming home to a load of new books just waiting for you?  Well, yes, there are a few things better, but precious few. 

An historical mystery set in the south Georgia during WWII, Miss Dimple is the highly vaunted spinster school-teacher everybody respects and adores.  She goes missing the day after the janitor of the school is found dead under questionable circumstances.  

I enjoyed reading this one, but I'm a bit stumped about how to describe it.  Each chapter starts with someone's internal dialogue (in italics, so it's an easy flag that you're inside someone's head) and it's almost always a different character.  The main character is Charlie, and she and her best friend Annie get the most page time, but they don't really investigate the murder and Miss Dimple's disappears so much as worry over it and gossip about it.  There's a small romance too, but it's almost an afterthought and lacks any read tension; the story is no more or less than it would be without it.

Ultimately there aren't any surprises; it's a low-key read that's easy going, neat and tidy.  It's the reading equivalent of a digestive biscuit: pleasant, satisfying but not something you're going to run out to the market for at 11pm because you have to have it.

I have one more of the Miss Dimple books on my TBR (I bought it for a buck at a book sale) and while I won't be rushing to read it, it likely won't languish as long in the TBR strata as this one did.