Audiobook Review: Angelica’s Smile by Andrea Camilleri

by Carol4 Comments
Title: Angelica's Smile (Inspector Montalbano #17) Author: Andrea Camilleri Translator: Stephen Sartarelli Read by: Grover Gardner Category: Mystery Audio published: June 24, 2014 by Blackstone Audio Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Audible | Amazon | Book Depository A rash of burglaries has Inspector Salvo Montalbano stumped. The criminals are so brazen that their leader, the anonymous Mr. Z, starts sending the Sicilian inspector menacing letters. Among those burgled is the young and beautiful Angelica Cosulich, who reminds the inspector of the love-interest in Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric romance, Orlando Furioso. Besotted by Angelica's charms, Montalbano imagines himself back in the medieval world of jousts and battles. But when one of the burglars turns up dead, Montalbano must snap out of his fantasy and unmask his challenger. I like this series more in theory than I do in fact. Angelica's Smile was okay, but not outstanding. Of course, it probably didn't help that I missed all the Orlando Furioso references, since I'd never heard of it, let alone read...
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Thursday’s Tale: The Seven Iron Slippers

by Carol8 Comments
"The Seven Iron Slippers" is a Portugese tale similar to the Twelve Dancing Princesses. It was told by Consiglieri Pedrosoin in Portugese Folk-Tales, 1882. A king had one daughter. Every evening, the princess wore out seven pairs of iron slippers, and the king couldn't figure out how this happened. He issued a decree issued a decree, that whoever found out how the princess wore out the shoes would be given the princess in marriage if it was a man or a prince if it was a woman. I like the equal opportunity here. Meanwhile, a soldier was wandering around the countryside and tricked people out of a cap that could turn him invisible and a pair of boots that could take him wherever he told them too. He had the boots take him to the city where he heard about the king's challenge. He figured that he could find out what the princess was up to with the help of his cap and boots. ...
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Review: Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

by Carol5 Comments
Title: Vintage Murder (Inspector Alleyn #5) Author: Ngaio Marsh First published: 1937 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Amazon |  Book Depository Death served well-chilled The leading lady of a theater company touring New Zealand was stunningly beautiful. No one-including her lover-understood why she married the company's pudgy producer. But did she rig a huge jeroboam of champagne to kill her husband during a cast party? Did her sweetheart? Or was another villain waiting in the wings? On a holiday down under, Inspector Roderick Alleyn must uncork this mystery and uncover a devious killer... I was having trouble deciding what to read. I'm halfway through a couple of books and just kinda stuck. I was sitting in the chair and happened to see this on the bookshelf, so I pulled it off. Marsh rarely disappoints me. Vintage Murder comes pretty early in the series. Alleyn is in New Zealand recovering from something or other, but none of these fictional detectives can actually have vacations. He happens to...
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Audiobook Review: Delicious! by Ruth Reichl

by Carol10 Comments
Title: Delicious!: A Novel Author: Ruth Reichl Read by: Julia Whelan Category: Fiction Audio published: May 6, 2014 by Random House Audio Rating: 2½ out of 5 stars Add: Goodreads Purchase: Audible | Amazon | Book Depository Billie Breslin has traveled far from her California home to take a job at Delicious, the most iconic food magazine in New York and, thus, the world. When the publication is summarily shut down, the colorful staff, who have become an extended family for Billie, must pick up their lives and move on. Not Billie, though. She is offered a new job: staying behind in the magazine's deserted downtown mansion offices to uphold the "Delicious Guarantee"-a public relations hotline for complaints and recipe inquiries-until further notice. What she doesn't know is that this boring, lonely job will be the portal to a life-changing discovery. Delicious! carries the reader to the colorful world of downtown New York restaurateurs and artisanal purveyors, and from the lively food shop in Little Italy where Billie works...
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Thursday’s Tale: The Song of the Armadillo

by Carol4 Comments
"The Song of the Armadillo" is a tale from Bolivia. I don't think I've featured many South America tales here, but it's one of those bittersweet stories that I tend to like. Once there was an armadillo who loved music more than anything else in the world. He listened to the frogs and crickets and canaries and wished he could sing like them. Meanwhile, the other animals made fun of him, knowing full well that there was no way an armadillo could learn to sing. The armadillo finally decided to ask the local wizard to help him. "Great wizard," he said. "It is my deepest desire to learn to sing like the frogs and the crickets and the canaries." At first the wizard was amused, because everyone knows armadillos can't sing, but then he realized how serious the little creature was. The wizard told the armadillo that he could make him sing, but the price would be too high. It would mean the armadillo's death. The...
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Teaser Tuesday

by Carol4 Comments
I feel like I've been in a bit of a reading slump lately. None of the books I'm currently in the middle of are grabbing my attention, so I pulled a mystery off my shelf. Ngaio Marsh never disappoints. This is from page 54 of Vintage Murder. Everyone had stopped talking. Alleyn, in the sudden silence, received a curious impression of eager dimly-lit faces that peered, of a beautiful woman standing with one arm raised, holding the scissors as a lovely Atropos might hold aloft her shears, of a fat white waistcoated man like a Blampied caricature, bent over the table, and of a red cord that vanished upwards into the dark. Suddeny he felt intolerably oppressed, aware of a suspense out of all proportion to the moment. So strong was the impression that he half rose from his chair. But at that moment Carolyn cut through the cord. And of course, this being a muder mystery, you can guess that someone dies in the...
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