Monday, December 27, 2010

Catching Up


The holidays, as you know, have a way of disrupting the flow, but if you don't take the time to celebrate them, you blink and they're gone. This is to explain my recent absence from blogging, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and GoodReading.

This fall/winter has been a season of catching up on old favorite series, and I'm happy to report that before I disappeared into the land of Holly/Jolly I did read the last book in the marvelous Julia Spencer-Fleming series chronicling the relationship of Clare Ferguson and Russ Van Alstyne and the murder mysteries that plague their little town of Millers Kill, NY.

I Shall Not Want takes place after the death of Russ's wife, and the first part of the book deals with the grief, guilt, and other various conflicting emotions that Clare and Russ experience. I finished the book a little over a week ago, and it took me a minute to recollect exactly what the murder mystery was all about (for the record, it is about illegal aliens, gangs, drug dealing, and rednecks), and that is par for the course because I have never read this series for the mystery plot but for the romance between the local Episcopalian priest (once and future Army helicopter pilot Clare) and local chief of police (Russ).

New on the scene this time was Hadley Knox, granddaughter of Clare's janitor and who had recently relocated from LA, escaping a thuggish husband and dead-end career, a rookie cop and refreshing addition to the closed environment of a small, remote town. I thought Hadley had some of the best lines in the book, and has lots of promise to figure largely in future installments of the series.

It will be interesting to see where Spencer-Fleming goes next with the series--despite Clare being shipped off to Iraq at the end of this book, the main tension in the series (i.e., how will Clare and Russ ever overcome the huge barriers between them and actually get together) is resolved. Even if Clare comes home to Millers Kill with a boatload of post-tramautic issues to resolve, the hook for me was always the angst between them.

Next book in the series, One Was A Soldier, is due out in April 2011. Here's the promo about it. I'm hopeful that it will prove as compelling as the series has been up to now.

I'm now currently reading Diana Gabaldon's The Echo in the Bone, the latest in her Outlander series. Feels good to get caught up and not feel so behind the times when it comes to favorite series.

1 comment:

  1. I've never heard of this series. Too funny that you're reading a murder mystery series for the love story!

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