Read the first SPQR short today. At 17 pages long, it was scarcely worth getting the book from the library. It was a tight little murder mystery set directly after the previous book, as Decius heads back from Alexandria.

I vaguely considered paging through the huge mass of other stories in Classical Whodunnits and finally decided that I'd do better to look at reviews or recommendations when and if I want another mystery series. So, with the 17 pages read, the book is going back to the Library.

Just finished The Day of the Muses, which is the fourth SPRQ book by John Roberts.

It was a very nice change-of-pace book because it took place in Alexandria (Egypt) rather than Rome. Decius still had his typical problems of facing disbelief or indifference from his Romans peers, but at least the Egyptian King was somewhat more interested (while not drunk). Mind you, the main villain got away, as ever, because of political influence--but this time Decius assures us that in 12 years' time he's going to get his (because Decius writes from the future, sometime after the fall of the Republic).

It was also neat to see this series move entirely into the time of Rome (the TV series) as we hear that the Triumvirate is sectioning up the world over on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Another fun little read.

Edit: Figured I was done with SPQR for the year, but I see that the next chronological story is a short story, so I've ordered Classical Whodunnits through LINK+ before I forget. I'll have to read about the other authors within, when I get it, and see if any are worth reading ...

Had a lost weekend, in which I pretty much sat at home and read. Since I've been a'home for about a week now, everything feels foggy and lazy.

One of the benefitors of that was The Shape of Dread (1989), the next book in the Sharon McCone series, which I picked up from the library on Saturday and had largely finished by Sunday night.

Muller continues to be an excellent mystery writer. This one was a no-body murder case where she got to have a lot of fun exploring whether everyone even was correct about who had been murdered. Some of McCone's early bad-girl stylings are gone, since she actually keeps in touch with the authorities and ask for permission to stay on the case in this work. It seems like Muller & hubby had their individual sleuths triangulating, with McCone getting more law-abiding and Nameless less law-abiding, as time went on.

In any case, another good read. Muller is probably at the top of the list of the older series I'm reading right now--the perfect author if I'm down, sick, or need something quiet and simple to read.

Quickly upon the heels of Chasing the Bear, I got the brand-new Spenser book, The Professional (from the library, as ever).

In short: not one of my favorites.

Oh, sure it had the great Parker dialogue and the great characters of Spenser, Hawk, and Susan, which are always are a joy to read. I read it in just a few days. But, it was even more pointless and meandering than most Spenser books.

In The Professional, Spenser gets a job to stop a guy from blackmailing some women that the guy had had affairs with. Spenser can't do the job, because the guy doesn't give in, but Spenser stays obsessed with the psychology of the guy and his victims and continues watching over them long after the case ends ... and eventually some other things start to happen, but in them Spenser is more of a witness than an active participant.

Over the years Parker has gotten more and more interested in psychology and what makes people tick. I mentioned that the ongoing psychological discussions of Chasing the Bear was its main weakness. Similarly here Parker tried to put out a whole book centered around some psychological sketches, and it became obvious that it was less a mystery and more a ... whatever this is that Parker is writing.

Hopefully the next Spenser role will have him taking a more active role, and maybe actually doing something he's getting paid for, rather than acting as a detective dilettante.

This was advertised as a "Young Spenser" book, and I had pretty low expectations. Would it have a Lil' Hawk I wondered? A Susie-Cutie?

It's actually a very authentic-feeling look at Spenser's childhood, centering around some of the same issues of morality as the typical Spenser book. The whole is laid out as a series of vignettes and short stories about Spenser's youth, from 10-18 or so, interwoven with a continuing conversation of Spenser and Susan in the modern day.

Though the modern-day conversation was interesting at times, I felt like it ran out of useful stuff to say about halfway in, and in any case, it interrupted the backstory narratives too much. Conversely, I found the backstory narratives very compelling, both in the spirit of Parker's regular narrative and (at least sometimes) as boy's adventure story.

I'd definitely read others in this series, though I'd like to see more of the past and less of the present. However, I'm not convinced that this book is a very good YA. There are just too many adult themes and too many philosophical discussions, particularly in the modern-day frame.

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In honor of banned book week, I expect to give Farenheit 451 a read next. Go read something that close-minded jerks and bobble-headed parents in America try to outlaw!

Here's the premise that got the book started, from the author's note: "Of course, in retrospect the concept was insane: to write a 50th book that would commemorate the (fictitious) 50th anniversary of the founding of Hard Case Crime, set 50 years ago, and to tell the story in 50 chapters, with each chapter bearing the title of one of our 50 books, in their order of publication."

The book is a mystery/pulp by Charles Ardai, who is the editor of the imprint and has previously written two superb books under the alias Richard Aleas.

This one is a fun romp. You can enjoy its cleverness as you look at the chapter titles, though the reviewer that I saw over on Amazon who claimed that they were never forced was incorrect. Still, it was a whimsical run through a 1950s world of gangsters, molls, down-on-their-luck girls, cheats, and liars. It was also a nice period piece.

But, unlike Ardai's other books, which haunt you, this one is pretty forgettable.

(And a note to myself, his fourth book is now out, Hunt through the Cradle of Fear, the second book in a new hero-pulp series.)

Reading them back to back, I'm impressed by how much a better writer than her husband Marcia Muller is. In particular, I'm impressed by how much of a stronger impression of San Francisco she gives. This one has so much San Francisco color: Golden Gate Park (which I'd love to go bike around today), the Windmills there (which I remember from the Mother's Day before last), the San Francisco Flower Market (which I think I remember from Tales of the City, though perhaps I saw it somewhere else).

The mystery's also pretty good, and though I'm not convinced I had the clues to put it together myself, it fit in the end. And, much like her last book, I felt this one was full of characters, many of whom were living in unfortunate circumstances that you had to empathize with.

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As you may have sussed out from recent posts, I'm taking a walk through all the mystery authors I'm currently reading. I've got the newest Spenser and Felix Castor books on hold too, though the library hasn't gotten their copies yet, and I'm also going to try out Robert Parker's YA book about Spenser, to see what I think

If you've read any of my commentary on the later Nameless Detective books, you know they tend to go something like this: "I like the setting and the writing mainly stays out of the way, but why in God's name does he insist on locked-door mysteries?"

So the next Nameless Detective story opens with ... a locked-door mystery, with the twist this time being that its 35 years' old. There's actually another twist, which is that the death was ruled a suicide at the time. I had real, real hope that Pronzini realized he'd overdone things and that this time he was going to offer us up a locked-door mystery tricked up to look like a suicide ... that really was a suicide.

No such luck. The second locked-door mystery (in the present-day) reveals how the first one was committed too. Sigh.

Still interesting reading, and I've actually stopped being majorly annoyed at the format, I'm just hopeful that we might get more of what the series used to be before this obsession.

And I still enjoy reading them for the Bay Area color. This one was was particularly interesting because it visited Berkeley. Pronzini describes Berkeley as an absolute cesspool, like a combination of a ghetto and an open-air drug market. That, I had to grin at, because he was writing in 1985, just four years before I moved here. I guarantee you his description was largely inaccurate unless there was an urban renewal of epic scale in those scant years in-between.

Sadly, at the time of the writing of this book, Pronzini was entering his early 40s, and think that the conservative curmudgeonly attitude that sometimes comes with middle age is clearly developing. "If kids these days weren't ruining things ... <hem!> <hem!>" I shouldn't be surprised given the curmudgeonly attitude of Pronzini's Nameless protagonist, who is his altar ego, but 20 (now 10) years older.

Finished off SPQR III today. This is third book in the series of Roman mysteries that I started reading earlier this year.

It indeed was much like the others (as Mary had promised was true of the series): Decius starts looking into a murder and (the semi-spoilers start here) finds out that major figures in Rome are involved and despite that he continues working away on the problem though he's in way over his head (politically).

This book was interesting in that Decius never got to make his accusations of guilt. Instead he's run out of Rome by, well, elephants. That was a bit different from the others in the series and a relatively brave way to end the book.

I also like the fact that we're seeing some increasing continuity, as Julius Caesar has taken an interest both in Decius' abilities and his romantic future. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.

Still a good series, both for its mystery and for its history, though the latter probably trumps the former.

This book was set in year 693 or Rome or 61 BC, which would be pretty shortly after the last one.

Finally got around to reading Moonraker, the third James Bond novel, after a several month hiatus. Honestly, it's because every time I looked at the book, I saw Roger Moore standing inside a moonbase in a bright silver outfit.

Turns out the movie was ahem loosely based on the novel, which is actually about an industrialist building a missile deterrent system and the test launch of that first missile, "Moonraker".

There's a great scene that opens the book with M and Bond working over the inventor of the Moonraker in a British casino, but from there I thought the book got a little slow, as Bond wandered around the Moonraker project, trying to solve a murder, and not making a lot of progress. It was largely police work, not spy work, which I think was part of the problem.

The book reclaimed some of the hard edge of these early Bond books by the end, but that tepid center just barely kept me reading.

Still, no Roger Moore in a bright silver space suit. No one even leaves the ground.