Book Review Thursday - 9/27

I guess there hasn't been a lot of reading going on this month, but I think that mainly has to do with the time that I was off of work. I finished a book today that I started on Tuesday, so that is promising!

The Bone Vault is the next in the Alex Cooper series by Linda Fairstein. While attending a Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Met director pulls Alex aside to explain that a security dog found a corpse in a sarcophagus that was to be shipped to Cairo. The body is that of a museum researcher who was assumed to have returned to her South African home 6 months prior to the discovery.

Alex works with Mercer Wallace and Mike Chapman to investigate the museums and try to find the crime scene that would have preserved the body in the way that it was. With the many different areas of the museums, the investigators meet with plenty of opposition.

Not one of my favorites in the series, but I thought this book was a good read. There was a lot of information on items in the museum and how they are gathered, but I am not sure that it all related very well to the killing and the resolution of the crime. The last book in the novel seemed to have occurred around the time of 9/11 and I don't remember the event being discussed and I figured that it was probably because of timing with the publication and the manuscript being finalized. I like that Fairstein wrote about Alex's and Mike's experiences with the attack instead of just ignoring it altogether.

The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz have been in my To Read list for a while and I decided to give it a shot this week. In spite of being narrated by one of my least favorite narrators, I could not turn the book off! It took me until at least an hour and a half into the book to realize that the chapter numbers are not sequential but are broken up by category and spread out through the book and numbered sequentially by category. That cracked me up when I finally caught it.

Isabel Spellman is a 28 year old private detective in her family's PI firm. She has done work for the company since her early teen years and it seems that investigating is all that the family knows. Much of the book is background on Izzy's antics growing up - lists of ex-boyfriends and of undiscovered teenage rebellion - as a sort of how we got to this place. It turns out that Izzy's younger sister has been missing for several days and Izzy is being interrogated by the police to try and locate her.

I absolutely enjoyed this book! The characters are all a hoot and a half! Izzy is trying to learn to keep her PI work and her dating life separate and when it collides, hilarity ensues. If you haven't read this book, I would highly recommend it!