Book Review Thursday - 8/9

I'm still doing my best to catch back up to my prior year's numbers for books read. If you recall, I was at almost 10 books behind my numbers for 2010 and 2011 at the end of April. Here is where I am right now. I feel much better about my stats now!

2009 - 31
2010 - 43
2011 - 49
2012 - 38

This week, I started 3 books and the first one that I finished is the last one that I started. I could not shut off my phone when the book was up. It was another eBook I checked out from the library! The book was A Vision of Murder and it is the third in the Psychic Eye Mystery series by Victoria Laurie.

Abby goes into business flipping houses with her handyman and her sister and the first house that they buy is haunted. Haunted by evil, angry spirits who used Dave's power tools against him. On top of that, Abby has to play nurse maid to Dutch who has been shot in the ass while on the job.

So far, I have thoroughly enjoyed this series! The characters are quirky and the books have been fairly quick reads because they are so hard for me to put down. The majority of the characters are main characters and I've learned more about them with each book instead of having the characters remain one dimensional and bland.

Rest in Pizza is the newest Pizza Lovers Mystery by Chris Cavender. Another new shop is opening on the town square in Timber Ridge, NC and Eleanor and Maddy get roped into helping with the grand opening. The shop is a bookstore with a special guest to bring in the shoppers. Unfortunately, the guest is a melodramatic chef who cancels the entire shindig less than an hour before the opening. And then, he winds up dead in the pizzeria.

While this was a nice, cozy read, it wasn't my favorite in the series. Perhaps it is because after you write so many books in a series, it is hard for the author to keep things fresh and different from the other books. Yes, the murders are different, but the investigation and the interactions seem to be repeated. And the same things that were present in the previous books are repeated until they are resolved. There was a particular scene between Eleanor and Maddy's boyfriend that actually made me check to see that this was a new book because I could have sworn that it was the same scene that was in the previous book. But for a light, cozy mystery and a pretty fast read, I may just be expecting too much.

The last book I read this week is one that I finished today and I don't have a picture of it. Red Mist is the latest novel in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. Kay is in Savannah, Georgia investigating the past of Jack Fielding, her deputy chief who was killed in the last book. I didn't particularly care much for the last book and the tediousness of it, but it has been a year since I read that book so I figured it was time to get this one out of the way.

Fielding's death left many unanswered questions for Kay and she decides to meet with the woman who molested Jack when he was 12. Kay is shocked to learn that Jack and Kathleen kept in contact over the years in spite of the physical relationship at Jack's young age. Gosh, I am not sure what else I can say about the plot of the book without giving anything else away and without having it sound like the most convoluted thing you might have ever read!

One of the main things that I remember about the last book, Port Mortuary, was Benton and Kay driving down the road and being so fixated on the mirrors and watching who or what was following them and that the entire drive lasted for 5 chapters or something crazy like that. In this book, it immediately starts off with Kay reading into every little detail of everything - the wrong car at the airport, the wrong name on the reservation, finding 5 different meanings of every sentence spoken by the prison's warden when she meets with her. I was hoping that the book would not be the same as the last one. I think that this one was marginally better, but I hope that Cornwell can get off the kick of having Kay paranoid about everything.

I can only guess that Cornwell is trying to prove a point that women in positions of power, like the one that Kay is in, are held to different standards as well as being very susceptible to attacks on their characters and actions. But I preferred the Kay character when she stood up for herself and didn't second guess every little thing that happened. I was starting to feel like Kay was no longer the strong woman that she started out to be when she was the ME for Virginia at the beginning of the series. It's a little disappointing. Maybe she will change in the next book. One can always hope, right?

Leave a comment and let me know what you are reading! And check out my GoodReads widget on my sidebar to see what I am reading now.