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Book Review | Play the Fool by Lina Chern

From the publisher: A cynical tarot card reader seeks to uncover the truth about her friend’s mysterious death in this delightfully clever whodunit.

Play the Fool is a screwball comedy/mystery about a new adult trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life in the Chicago suburbs. Katie True has a mysterious and fascinating friend, a throwaway job at a Russian tchotchke shop at the mall, and a family with normal family issues. When she accidentally sees a photo of her friend, dead, and starts investigating, an attractive cop enters her life as well.

As a suburban Chicagoan myself, I enjoyed the setting. The main character even mentioned one of my favorite places, the Bristol Renaissance Faire on the Illinois/Wisconsin border! The library plays an important part in Katie’s investigation, always happy to see props from authors. The narrator is most definitely too stupid to live at times, as she is careless with her safety as she tries to figure out who killed her friend. Her relationship with her autistic brother is sweet and her rocky relationship with her sister believable.

Katie reads tarot cards, taught by her Aunt Rosie as a child, and is constantly both dealing and consulting her tarot cards and comparing situations to them. I’m not familiar with a tarot deck, so this meant less to me than it might to some readers, but they are a winsome touch that help define Katie. The book cover is very eye-catching.

The mystery is not terribly mysterious, and there is never any real sense of danger, but the cast of characters is fun. I sense a sequel in the future. I read an advance reader copy of Play the Fool from Netgalley.

It is scheduled to be released on March 28 and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library.

New Adult Fiction — March 2023

Spring is just around the corner, which means we’re getting lots of rainy days. What better way to enjoy the showers than curling up next to the window with a good book? This week is mystery week, with five new books that hit the shelves recently, ready for you to check out or put on hold!

Up first, we have Wolf Trap by Connor Sullivan. This thriller/mystery tells the story of over three hundred highly-trained agents who operate in the darkest shadows of the country’s covert wars. Plucked from the highest echelons of America’s special mission units, these individuals go through rigorous training by the Agency to perfect the arts of assassination, sabotage, infiltration, and guerrilla warfare.

Another thriller/mystery also hit the shelves this week: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murders by Jesse Q. Sutano. You see, Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—or rather, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing: a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of… swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands.

Traditional mystery is some of the most popular here at GPL, and the 32nd installment of Donna Leon’s bestselling series Commissario Brunetti, So Shall You Reap is sure to delight. On a November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the COmmissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice’s canals. The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Because no official record of the man’s presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city’s far richer sources of information: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim. 

Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour by Mike Lupica is another mystery for your reading list. In this entry in the Sunny Randall series, Melanie Joan Hall is back in Boston, riding high, refusing to have Sunny and Rosie move out. She has a Netflix series about to start shooting in Boston, based on her wildly popular new series of books for girls. Then it turns out that most of her fortune is gone. And her manager, who was in charge of the money, turns up dead. He’s been with her a long time. When Sunny begins to investigate, she discovers that a lot of Melanie Joan’s past is a product of her amazing imagination. And then Sunny’s loyalty to her old friend is challenged by her loyalty to finding the truth.

Last but not least, we have Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado. This thriller, which sold 2 million copies when released in Spain, introduces Antonia Scott, the daughter of a British diplomat and a Spanish mother. Antonia is gifted with a forensic mind, whose ability to reconstruct crimes and solves baffling murders is legendary. But after a personal trauma, she’s refused to continue her work or even leave her apartment.


All book descriptions courtesy of the publisher.

Book Review | The Golden Spoon — Jessa Maxwell

From the publisher: A killer is on the loose when someone turns up dead on the set of a hit TV baking competition in this darkly beguiling debut mystery.

I gobbled up The Golden Spoon in one afternoon. A cast of characters assembles for Bake Week, a long-running reality TV show that challenges six chefs to make desserts. The current season’s cast includes a former journalist running from a trauma at her last job; a young prodigy from Minnesota who bakes pies for the local diner; a precise, detail-oriented math teacher from New York; a bored millionaire former CEO of a tech startup; a retired nurse who specializes in traditional recipes; and a hobbyist baker whose day job is restoring old buildings. The characters weren’t as distinct as I would have liked, but they are a diverse cast.

The six contestants gather at the palatial home of America’s Grandmother, Betsy Martin, who started the show and has been judging it for nine years. Much to her annoyance, joining her this season is the host of a cutthroat cooking show, Archie Morris, who is fighting off middle age but still a smooth charmer.

The Golden Spoon is not about the mystery, many aspects of which I guessed long before they were revealed. It’s about the show. I don’t watch reality TV, and I have to guess this book will appeal even more to people who understand the baking terms and how challenging some of the desserts are to make. I do love dessert, and this book made my mouth water.

Although a prologue tells the reader someone is dead, two weeks of activity take place before we return to the crime. There are current mysteries, and a mystery from long ago. The Golden Spoon is a frothy dessert, full of sweets, friendship, and found families. Is this a great book? No. Is this a fun read? Yes. Unlike the book’s publicity, I personally would not put it in the same category as books by Anthony Horowitz and Richard Osman, but a TV series is in development, and with the right cast it will probably be terrific. I read a print advance reader copy.

This debut novel is available at the Galesburg Public Library in print, in audiobook, and as an ebook.

Book Review | The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh

From the publisher: It’s the party to end all parties…but not everyone is here to celebrate. On New Year’s Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests. His vacation homes on Mirror Lake are a success, and he’s generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbors. But by midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake. On New Year’s Day, Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects. The tiny community is her home, so the suspects are her neighbors, friends and family—and Ffion has her own secrets to protect. With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn’t who wanted Rhys dead…but who finally killed him. In a village with this many secrets, murder is just the beginning.

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Book Review | Hidden Pieces by Mary Keliikoa

From the publisher: Sheriff Jax Turner is staring down the barrel of his broken past. On the brink of ending it all, he feels like a failure following his daughter’s tragic passing and his subsequent divorce. But when a schoolgirl vanishes and her backpack is found in a sex offender’s backseat, the weary lawman drags himself into action and vows to nail one last sociopath. Can the jaded sheriff take down the culprit in time to bring the young girl home alive?

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Book Review | A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons by Kate Khavari

From the publisher: London, 1923. Saffron Everleigh is in a race against time to free her wrongly accused professor before he goes behind bars forever.

If you love historical fiction with a touch of mystery and romance, A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poison might just be a book for you. Main character Saffron is an intelligent and talented woman constrained by the limits on women in the 1920s. Alexander Ashton, her companion in investigating a mysterious poisoning at a party, is a scarred and handsome veteran of the Great War coping with PTSD.

I’m no expert on England in the 1920s, but nothing in the narrative struck me as outlandishly out of touch with the times. An author’s note discusses the research the author did in her attempt to be historically accurate…

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Book Review | One for the Money by Janet Evanovich

From the publisher: You’ve lost your job as a department store lingerie buyer, your car’s been repossessed, and most of your furniture and small appliances have been sold off to pay last month’s rent. Now the rent is due again. And you live in New Jersey. What do you do? If you’re Stephanie Plum, you become a bounty hunter.

About a decade ago I had been going through a really rough patch and I asked the Reference librarians for suggestions for books I could read.

“I need to escape,” I said. “I need something enjoyable that I don’t have to think about very hard.”…

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Book Review | The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz

From the publisher: Everyone has the same questions about best friends Owen and Luna: What binds them together so tightly? Why weren’t they ever a couple? And why do people around them keep turning up dead? The Accomplice examines the bonds of shared history, what it costs to break them, and what happens when you start wondering if you ever truly knew the only person who truly knows you.

This book has a hook. I still can’t identify what it is, exactly, but once I started reading I wasn’t going to stop. Luna and Owen have a frankly strange relationship. They are very good friends who make Luna’s husband say that he and Owen’s wife Irene “had a similar sense of being the third wheel in our own marriages.” (p. 157 of the Advance Reader Copy)

Luna and Own have both been on the periphery of more deaths than is normal for a…

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