Poison Study

This novel by prolific fantasy author Maria V. Snyder is set in a medieval society and a different land. This is the first in her "Study" series set in Ixia, a country divided into eight military districts, each ruled by a general, and all of those reporting to Commander Ambrose. It is a dictatorship following the overthrow of a corrupt and cruel monarch, along with the court's magicians. Ambrose seems relatively benign in his dealings with individuals, but he does have some hard and fast rules. Everyone wears a uniform and everyone has a job. Uniforms make it nearly impossible to travel outside your home region without the proper permissions.  Killing, even in self-defense, or the practice of magic are punishable by death.
Yelena, an orphaned child adopted by General Brazell, a governor of one of the districts, killed Brazell's son in self-defense; she has been sitting in the dungeon for nearly a year awaiting execution. When she is brought before Valek, Ambrose's second in command, she learns that the Commander is in need of a new food taster, and she can escape the noose if she agrees to fill the position. It seems an obvious choice--death today or death at some unforeseen time. Valek now becomes her teacher and captor. He trains her to detect and identify every known poison; at the same time, he administers a daily dose of a lethal poison for which he has the only supply of antidote. As long as she does not leave, she will receive the antidote daily. However, danger for Yelena comes not just from the Commander's potential enemies, but from her own as well.  Brazell has put a bounty on her head. Moreover, a powerful magician from Sitia, the land to the south of Ixia where the surviving magicians have fled, first tries to kill and then to recruit Yelena. She asserts that Yelena is a fledgling magician and that she must come to Sitia to be trained so she does not damage the source of the planet's magic. Eventually Yelena is moved into Valek's own apartments for her protection, and their knowledge of and respect for one another grow. When Yelena overhears gossip about a threat to the Commander, she and Valek must work together to thwart it.
The characters are well-developed, the world they inhabit is less so. But the plotting is tight and intriguing and I read this in a day. I would certainly read the sequels.

There is a fairly detailed critique (perhaps not all of it warranted) in SFReview. Publishers Weekly provides a brief but glowing review.

Never Have I Ever

I bought this book by Joshilyn Jackson at Roundabout Books as part of my ongoing effort to support my local bookstores. It was their selection for the mystery book club in November. This is one of those books that started out with such heavy handed foreboding that I did something I rarely do; I skipped to the last chapter to see if this book was going to be a total downer. It wasn't, so I resumed reading. One night as mom and scuba diving teacher Amy Whey is preparing to host the neighborhood book club, she answers the door to find a stranger. This is the woman who, according to Amy's best friend Char, had moved into the ratty rental house in the neighborhood. But she wasn't just "pretty" as Char had indicated, "she was more than that. She was the pretty that's on television: symmetrical features, matte skin, and that kind of long, slim, yoga body that still made me feel self-conscious...She smiled, and I had no premonition as I smiled back. She didn't look like my own destruction to me." She says her name is Angelica Roux and, within days, she threatens to reveal Amy's secret past that could well put an end to the life Amy has so come to love--her husband, her step-daughter and infant son, her friends. Amy has to find a way to outmaneuver this apparently ruthless blackmailer and so she begins to dig into Roux's background, starting with finding out her real name. As Amy digs, we also learn about the tragic events of her teenage years that drove her to self-destructive behavior. And she also reveals what finally saved her--diving. Being in the ocean is a meditation for Amy, where she can leave the problems and her past behind. Amy's investigations also lead her to make further amends for wrongs in the past. There are several plot twists and you'll never see them coming. Overall a good book.
Glowing reviews from Kirkus and The New York Journal of Books, and a muted recommendation from Publishers Weekly.

The Silent Patient

I suppose, as some reviewers have said, that the plot is contrived. However, this twisty psychological thriller and inaugural outing by author Alex Michaelides, definitely surprised me with the ending. We supposedly know whodunnit from the beginning of the book. “The facts, such as they were, were simple: Alicia was found alone with Gabriel’s body; only her fingerprints were on the gun. There was never any doubt she killed Gabriel. Why she killed him, on the other hand, remained a mystery.”Alicia Berenson, an artist, is housed in a secure psychiatric unit, The Grove, outside London, after shooting her fashion photographer husband six times in the face. She has not spoken a word in the six years since the event. Therapist Theo Faber applies for a job there, convinced he can get her to speak. And so the story is revealed alternately from Theo's perspective (past and present) and Alicia's diary. The author draws upon a rather obscure play by Euripedes, Alcestis, in which Alcestis sacrifices her life to save her husband, King Admetus of Thessaly, from death. When the hero Heracles learns of her death, he vows to fight death and bring her back, but she cannot speak for three days before she is returned to life.  "But why does she not speak?" (Euripedes, Alcestis)
The play is a clue of course but the role of Theo is much more complicated, which we should perhaps also surmise, given his near obsession with Alicia. He goes well beyond the usual role of therapist to uncover the dynamics of Alicia's marriage and the circumstances leading up to the murder. I was engrossed and not put off by the overly elaborate entries in Alicia's diary. Worth a read.
The Independent described it as "a high-octane, thought-provoking read reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, but with its own completely fresh take on the psychological thriller."

Laudatory reviews from The Independent, Publishers Weekly, and The New York Journal of Books. A not particularly flattering review from Kirkus.

Sleight of Paw

This is the 2nd installment in Sofie Kelly's "Magical Cats" series; I fell in love with Hercules and Owen in her first book, Curiosity Thrilled the Cat. The two kittens followed Kathleen home one day and she has since discovered that one of them can walk through walls (or doors) and the other is capable of disappearing at will. Of course, she can't tell anyone this for fear of really being considered a crazy cat lady. A second murder has occurred in the small town of Mayfield, Minnesota, where Kathleen has been hired on a 2-year contract to renovate the town's library. She is often homesick for Boston, but has also made several good friends in Mayfield. And when one of those good friends is accused of murdering an elderly woman, Kathleen feels she needs to find the real culprit. Having been considered a "person of interest" in the previous murder, she has now come to be on better terms with the local detective, Marcus Gordon. In fact, her friends really think she should ask him to the community's holiday dinner. And although he also likes cats and helps feed the feral cat colony at Wisteria Hill, sometimes he also infuriates her. They are just too different. I would pick up any of this series for a fun cozy mystery read.

Heart Full of Lies

I have never read anything by Ann Rule and probably won't seek her out in the future. Given her wild success as a writer of true crime books, however, I must be in the minority. My mystery book group chose this book because significant parts are set in Bend and Oregon.
Liysa Northon is a smart, attractive and largely successful sociopath with a voracious appetite for sex and property. She manipulated her first two husbands with sex to get ownership of property in Kailua and also had a son with her 2nd husband. She originally got sole custody of him. Then she pressured her 3rd husband, Hawaiian Airlines pilot Chris Northon, into marrying her and had his child as well, another son. Almost from the time they were married, however, she had other plans. She had developed a fairly good reputation as a surf photographer under the guidance of her 2nd husband, Nick Mattson, an established photographer, and she pursued a career as a screenwriter while married to Chris. She made money as a photographer but never sold a screenplay, and no amount of money she made was enough to buy the huge pieces of property she desired to own. After her marriage to Chris, she would portray her husband as an abusive alcoholic to anyone who would listen, even though there was no physical evidence. She debased him in front of his friends and in public, all in service to create an image of herself as the terrified and abused wife, who would finally murder him in self-defense. Except that the circumstance of the killing just did not support her story. She says she shot at him while fleeing his violence on a camping trip. But he was found with a close range bullet through his head in a sleeping bag, his body full of sedatives but not alcohol. She served 12 years for manslaughter when her own attorneys convinced her that there was so much evidence showing premeditation on her supposedly stolen computer--which she had actually stashed with a friend--that the jury would never find her innocent. She is out of prison now and married to her 4th husband, the one who wrote the article attacking Ann Rule for slandering Liysa. 
There is a generally laudatory review from Publishers Weekly, although I would agree with their comment about the author's writing style as "flat." Apparently there was a damning review in the Seattle Weekly, which, it turns out, was written by a man engaged to the incarcerated merry widow (stories here in The Oregonian and The Daily Mail). I certainly did not find her writing compelling although it's clear she knows how to do her research and the story itself was a real-life soap opera, complete with villains and victims. There is something that feels a little too voyeuristic about this type of book to appeal to me. It's like stopping to watch a car wreck on the highway.

Dead Cat Bounce

dead cat bounce: stock market jargon for a small, temporary rise in a stock's trading price, after a sharp drop.
This first in the series "Home Repair is Homicide" by Sarah Graves, this book has nothing to do with cats and only qualifies as a cozy because it is set in a small town, Eastport, Maine. Protagonist Jacobia (aka Jake) Tiptree has fled an emotionally abusive husband and her high-flying career as a financial advisor in New York City to buy a 200-year-old house in the furthest northeast corner of the United States. And she has taken Sam, her teenage son, with her in a desperate attempt to save him both from his father and from an accelerating decline into drug use. Sam is basically fine but has dyslexia, which makes school difficult; he does have real talent in fixing things and Jacobia and Sam would like to see him enrolled in the local boat-building program when he's old enough. His father, Victor, is sure that Sam is just lazy and could excel at an Ivy League school if he would just try. You get a lot of background on just what a jerk said ex-husband is and also what a nice guy Jacobia has started dating in her new home, harbor pilot Wade Sorenson. There is a wonderful cast of characters who are all well developed, and there is abundant description of small town Maine and the challenges of winter weather faced with nonchalance by the residents.
There is, of course, a murder to be solved and it comes right to Jacobia's door, or at least to her storage room off the kitchen, where she finds a notorious local on the floor with an ice pick in his head. When Jacobia tells Ellie, her best friend and next door neighbor, of her find, Ellie is clearly upset. Jacobia calls George, who is sort of the local police, but by the time he arrives, the ice pick has gone missing, and Ellie has confessed to the crime. Although no one really believes that Ellie killed Threnody McIlwaine, apparently his fame as a ruthless corporate raider brings the law to their small town in force and Ellie is taken away to prison, leaving Jacobia with the clear instruction to figure things out.
Intermingled with her efforts to solve the mystery of who actually killed McIlwaine, we hear of Jacobia's ongoing challenges in restoring her old house, of her efforts to keep her ex from riding roughshod over their son, and of her own career as a former currency trader and then financial advisor to some not-so-savory characters. We learn a fair amount about repairing things and how to hide money. I liked this enough that I already started the 2nd book in the series, Triple Witch. Here is a short but glowing review from Publishers Weekly.