Book Review Thursday - 6/30

Even though this has been a very busy week at work, I was able to get two books read again. Hopefully after tomorrow, things will calm down at the office and I will be able to get some sewing done as well as reading.

I finished A Stitch Before Dying by Anne Canadeo just under the wire tonight. It was a nice book to unwind with after a long day at work. This book is the third in Canadeo's series - I reviewed the second one last week. Murder and Mayhem seem to follow this group where ever they go... Wouldn't you think they would see it as a sign that they shouldn't be knitting as a group? But I guess if they did that, there wouldn't be anything to write about...

In this installment, knitting shop owner Maggie is invited to teach at a spa resort for a weekend and she decides to ask for a cottage with room for the rest of the knitting group to join her. The rest of the group eagerly agree to join her in spite of the New Age feel of the spa's website and the promise of being in close proximity of Dr. Max Flemming, one of the newest self-help gurus of the day who has a pretty rocky past.

Once the knitters get to the resort, they give the activities a try in spite of the hokey-ness of some of them. On the first night at the resort, Dana and Lucy take part in the Moonlight Meditation retreat which involved spending the night in a little hut away from the resort. They wake up in the morning to EMTs trying to revive a fellow guest. After being questioned by the police, the group continues with the weekend in hopes of finding the murderer and supporting Maggie who still has classes to teach.

It was nice reading about about the group outside of their small town. It was also nice that the author doesn't bombard you with a ton of new characters that would make the story a lot more cumbersome. This was a good summer read!

The Last Place by Laura Lippman is the 7th in the Tess Monaghan series. This books starts off with Tess posing as a teenager online to catch a predator who had been going after her best friend's younger family member. Tess and Whitney spent weeks engaging the predator, Mickey, online which led up to meeting in a bar one night. When Mickey goes to the bathroom, Tess finds that he has brought an unmarked bottle of pills with him and she drops 2 into his drink.Once he passes out, Whitney and Tess take him back to Whitney's house where they proceed to cover his chest, back and head with Nair and remove his hair! Unfortunately, Mickey has a reaction and the police show up at Tess's house the next morning to arrest her.

This was probably one of the funniest things I ever read! Tess ends up in court and is sentenced to probation and 6 months of anger management sessions with a shrink much to Mickey's and Tess's dismay. She sees the whole process as a waste of time since she has probably saved countless girls from Mickey's wrath.

As a thank you for not turning her in, Whitney gives Tess a job that on the surface seems like an easy investigation. But things are not always what they seem. It turns out that the investigation brings up emotions and people from the first book in the series, Baltimore Blues, and Tess spends a fair amount of time reminiscing on the past. Of course, if she wasn't spending so much time reminiscing, she might not have missed the fact that she was being followed and stalked almost to death.

I thought that this was a great addition to the series. I love the way that Lippman writes her stories and that she packs so much into them. I really cracked up at the whole Nair'ing episode! A thoroughly enjoyable read!