Book Review Thursday - 6/16

I have only finished one book this week. I am about 100 pages from finishing a paper back, but I just haven't devoted the time to it.

The Sugar House by Laura Lippman is the next installment in the Tess Monaghan series. I was saving the rest of the series until I got to June so that I could read them quickly for the summer reading program at one of my local libraries. Barbara Rosenblatt narrated this installment which is a change from the previous books. For some reason, there are times when I just shake my head because her voice doesn't fit Tess in my mind. I think it's because Barbara narrates the Goldy Bear, the caterer, series so I associate her with Goldy.

Anyway, this book starts out with Tess going to a church dinner in Baltimore with her father and other family members and a few politicians are introduced as well as a waitress who knows Tess's father. Mr. Monaghan has set up a meeting between Tess and the waitress who wants to investigate the woman that her brother went to prison for murdering. Turns out that the brother was murdered in prison shortly after being sentenced and the waitress just wants answers.

Tess's investigation leads her on quite a journey through prostitution, arson and corruption in local government. In the past books in this series, I noticed that Tess seems to know everyone and in this book, it was no different. With her father and uncle in government jobs, it was easy for them to be known around town. And as Tess gets closer to the truth, there are calls made to Tess's father that bring some of his past decisions to light and Tess is not too pleased to know how she was affected by the corruption.

All in all, this was a solid continuation of the series. I can't really say that I have been disappointed by one yet and not writing at least one book in a series that is a slight dud is hard to do for authors. Way to go Ms. Lippman!!

I also wanted to take a minute to mention an awesome tool for other mystery lovers out there. Stop, You're Killing Me! is a site devoted to compiling information about all mystery authors. It has a database of authors and a separate one of characters. Here is Laura Lippman's page. You can see that it lists out her books starting with the series books in order of publication date and then the non-series books. I have found this site to be an awesome resource when I am looking for a new author and I want to start at the beginning of the series. I hope you can get as much use from it as I do!