Murder on Bamboo Avenue and Grave on Grand Avenue by Naomi Hirahara

Ever since I went to LA last August to see Lil Bub, I have been thinking about a trip to explore the city LA has a long noir and crime lit tradition, but I'm not familiar with recent stories set in the city. I was thrilled to find this new series with a young protagonist and a lot of issues any young woman can recognize. Plus, bikes!

Ellie Rush is a LA native, a new cop on bike patrol, and an expert at code switching. She's half Japanese American but looks more white than Asian, and speaks Spanish fluently. She has a college degree, and a native's understanding of LA and its cultures (including an ability to use public transit) along with deep roots in the city, but realizes she's in a job where as a minority and a woman she's battling the LAPD boys' network and dealing with issues of racism and sexism. She's ambitious and hardworking, but wants to get ahead on her own merits and avoid being seen as helped too much by her aunt Cheryl Toma, second in command in the LAPD ("more like fourth according to the org chart," Ellie's mom sniffs.)

Murder on Bamboo Avenue starts with Ellie being first on the scene at a woman's murder, and surprised when it's someone she knows. Jenny Nguyen's death is shocking but the mysteries of her life--Where was she living? Why do some swear she was interested in a job at LA City Hall, but others say she knew nothing about politics? Where is Jenny's notebook?--intrigue Ellie. Grave on Grand Avenue finds Ellie dealing with the theft of her car, and the death of a Mexican gardener. Supposedly the gardener was trying to steal the cello of a Chinese superstar classical musician leaving Disney Hall, but why was he answering Ellie's questions five minutes earlier if that was his plan? Ellie's best friend Nay quickly gets involved working the journalism angle (her new major) and adding to the havoc, and we meet additional allies and friends of Ellie.

Hirahara is best known for her other series with elderly gardener Mas Arai, modeled on her dad. I'm hoping for more Ellie Rush books in the near future. They are a solid mysteries with a great detective who is sensible and smart, and have a new and unusual look into police work.

Exciting Links To Read

I Found My Biological Parents, And Wish I Hadn't

I am a big fan of Lisa Lutz, and find her confession of distance towards her families interesting, seeing as her greatest success has come from a series of novels (The Spellman Files) about a family that is entirely too far up into each others' business sometimes.

Her Magic Touch by Sable Hunter

So over at Dear Author, they have a guest reviewer who has found a series of the worst self-published erotic romance novels of all times and is reading them and having her head explode. The misogyny. Tebow Ranch. Ridiculous tropes and scary cliches. The only reason to read is to write stunning critiques, and the only reason to read the reviews is to laugh your ass off.

All my friends/family with children, why are your children not old enough for this? Penguin Threads, which is a line of Penguin Classics with beautiful embroidery-inspired cover, would make a great gift. Oh well, these classics adapted for board books might have to do.

Meanwhile, The Billfold's Logan Sachon realized buying things for babies is kid of dumb.
. The auntie who has started to bring her little kin their tribute in the form of library books agrees.

Miranda's Kittens--John set up a webcam to show off his foster kittens, and now they are INTERNET STARS. Maybe Peaches would like to watch this, but I think she feels cuddling kittens is better.

McSweeney's Internet Failure Map.. I am about 2/3rds there! Wherever that is!

The Billfold takes on the risk of saving no money with backyard chickens And not just that, but now you have to find humane homes for retired chickens? Ugh, people--if you can home farm Novella Carpenter style, don't do it at all.

Look! A recipe for DIY Biore strips!

What I've Been Reading--Adult Edition

The Thousand--Kevin Guilfoile

This is an odd hybrid of mystery, thriller and science fiction that centers on Canada Gold, a pro gambler with a neurotransmitter implant to control her severe ADHD. The implant, or "spider" as she calls it, allows her to focus and process minute changes in the environment and gives her near superhuman powers of observation. (Yes, in case you hadn't thought of it, she's a veritable Lisbeth Salander clone.) Anyway, so there's a lot about her father the composer/murderer, the murder of her friends, a mysterious job she's given, a schizophrenic artist, and a giant society dedicated to mathematical secrets of the universe that's fighting amongst its two branches. Crazy. There's some interesting stuff here, but any time you've got some sort of gigantic secret society fighting over the mystical secrets of the universe, I snort and grow bored.

Guilfoile did write a hilarious series of stories about atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair as a detective in hell.

Gunshot Road--Adrian Hyland

I reviewed the first book in this series back in 2008, and this is a worthy sequel. Emily Tempest has a new job with the police as an aboriginal community police officer, but on her first day of training the superior who hired her and likes her winds up injured and off the job. So Emily has to face racism, sexism, assholism, and the death of an old friend of her dad's, a miner who was also a passionate philosopher. Her digging into the case leads her across the outback, into tiny towns and roadhouses, and into a ton of danger. It's a hard read, but has beautiful language and an economy of description that really gets the feel of Australia across with lines like "I threw a scrap of turkey, a lump of roo-tail and an orange in my little saddlebag and headed for the track to town."(5)

Tooth And Claw--Jo Walton

I first found Jo Walton through her Small Changes trilogy. Check it out, it's an awesome read. It's a fantasy series with aspects of mystery and thrillers. The story takes place in a Great Britain that made its peace with Hitler after the Battle of Dunkirk. But this book is even trippier. It's a Victorian novel in spirit and themes--but with dragons. The central conflict is the aftereffects of the death of a patriarch. He left clear instructions on the dispersal of his gold amongst his two sons, married daughter, and two unmarried daughters, but his intent for the dispersal of his body was less clear. (Yes, dragons eat their dead and their weak--this detail lends a great fraught quality to the story). His louish son-in-law eats more than is fair, and one of the sons decides to sue. Throw into the plot other wickedness of the son-in-law, the marital prospects of the daughters, the attempts of the son to rise in the legal ranks, and a Catholic-Protestant simile, and still more plot and excellent characters in this detailed world. A great read!

Knowle's Passing--Edith Forbes

I read her novel Alma Rose back in 2006 and recently decided to finish up reading her novels. Bless you, Phoenix Public Library for your interlibrary loan services! This is an interesting meditation/mystery looking at the after effects and cause of Vernon Knowle's death by gunshot in his Vermont farmhouse.

Stumptown--Greg Rucka

A graphic novel set in Portland about a PI with a gambling problem. So I've been really interested in this but it was $30 for a 159 page hardback. Thank you, ILL because this really was not worth the money. Dex Parios is set up to be a classic noir badass detective with her own code and a heart of gold, but she leaves me cold. I just didn't find the character interesting or sympathetic, even with the brother with Down Syndrome and the gambling problem. Too much action and not enough character-building. And the artwork is all hard edges and gray and blue and makes Portland look really ugly and kind of like Cleveland or Detroit. And the ridiculously leg-humping fanboy introduction doesn't help.

What's next--

We Need To Talk About Kevin--Lionel Shriver

I was on the reserve list for this book for 3 months. Since it's publication in 2003, it's been a perennial book club read because of its polarizing narrator, and the essential question of whether a psychopathic school shooter is born or created. It's now a film with Tilda Swanson. I've read about 10 pages and it floors me with its intensity.

Through The Heart--Kate Morgenroth

I've been in a dry spell of good mysteries lately. Several new-to me authors that I would be busily tapping my foot to come out with new books are busily writing screenplay adaptations for existing work (Gillian Flynn), concocting new stories (Tana French) or have released new material that requires reading a backlist that goes back to the early 90's just to remember what's going on (S.J. Rozan, who took a nearly 10 year break after 9/11 but is back to publishing Lydia Chin and Bill Smith stories).

But I picked up Through the Heart at Costco and wound up reading it so slowly to make it last. It's a good, smart, unusual mystery novel. It breaks format in that by the third chapter we've been introduced to our two major characters, Nora and Timothy, and know one is dead in a B&B. But which one? And why? And who did it?

Nora and Timothy alternate telling the story of how they came to meet in Nora's small Kansas town and fall in love. Nora has moved home to take care of her mom, who has cancer. Timothy has been dispatched to meet with Warren Buffet, but takes a roadtrip that leads him to the coffeehouse where Nora works.

Morgenroth does great characters--Nora's very capable and aware of her choices and what has brought her back home. Timothy isn't a white knight--he's more screwed up and on the cad side of the morality scale. But I bought that these two would have an attraction to each other and that they would for various reasons be a pair. And my rooting for them lead me to forget about that dead body that is hanging over the narrative. And Morgenroth layers her story with a meditation on what it means to love someone, the games and changes that brings, and questions of if we all deserve love. It's an excellent read.

Sharp Objects--Gillian Flynn

I really like this Midwestern gothic vein that Gillian Flynn is tapping. Sharp Objects was her debut novel, and like Dark Places, it's intimately concerned with the mores of small Midwestern towns. There's a glowing blurb by Stephen King on the back of the library's copy, and he's right--you dread the last 30 pages or so.

Camille Preaker is sent to her hometown of Wind Gap, MO to write about the recent murders of two little girls. Camille is semi-estranged from her family, has been from birth, and really doesn't want to be doing this. But she's a lousy reporter, just out of the mental hospital, and her editor thinks it's a great idea. So back in her hometown, Camille's investigation stirs up a lot of her own issues and memories, especially of her dead sister. She also encounters new creepy weirdness, such as her half-sister Amma, who is caught between being a mean girl outside the home and their mother's baby within.

It's an excruciating read. I could guess a lot of what Flynn is spinning out before Camille's revelations and discoveries, but so much of the book is dark and emotionally raw that I was pulled in and kept reading. It's a great example of how doing something with great style makes up for a story not being wholly surprising. I'm looking forward to more by Flynn.

Dark Places--Gillian Flynn

In 1985, most of the Day family was killed on their farm in Kinnakee, IL. The son of the family, Ben Day, was convicted of the murders of two of his sisters and his mothers. Satan worship was cited as a cause. His sister Libby, aged 7 and the sole survivor of that night, testified against him. Having run through a trust fund established by donations from the public, Libby has taken the Kill Club up on their offer to investigate what really happened that night and try to find evidence to free Ben.

The story's not suspenseful because of the plot but rather due to Flynn's characterization and the details in her storytelling. By showing the events of the day of the murder in flashbacks to both Ben and his mother Patty's points of view, Flynn creates suspense about the reason for the murders as the day descends from an ordinary level of awful to horrifying. She expertly depicts the tension between Ben, who's old enough to realize how sunk the family is and to be angry about it, and his mom Patty who is both sympathetic to Ben's growing pains and how he's grown up with a lousy dad and a houseful of women. Patty's tired desperation as she learns about Ben's secret life and what he's been hiding combined with her chronic stress about her failing farm add to the atmosphere of painful dread as one reads the novel.

Flynn also has a great eye for description--Ben's observations that his little sisters only have one and a half wardrobes of hand-me-downs to share among the three, the detail that as the farms crisis struck Kinnakee it opened a prison to replace farming as an industry, a notion of a Superfund Hooverville, Ben's fan club of women and their anger towards Libby, and Libby's pleasure that a former neighbor lost his farm while not remembering the reason for her animosity. Libby is an interesting creation--she's wholly unsympathetic, a thief, a liar, depressed and miserable the way only someone who survived a tragedy could be, but the reader is also sympathetic towards her as she tries to figure out what went on that night. Libby's capacity for redemption is also a source of tension as she is a character who believes herself beyond hope. The ongoing theme of the novel is the decisions one makes before adulthood that influence the future when one doesn't know better, and how one can't go back and fix things.

This was a great read, very tense and suspenseful. I've got Flynn's first novel, Sharp Objects , out based on my enjoyment of this one and will look for her books in the future.

In The Woods--Tana French

Will someone please read this and talk to me about it? Because it's an awesome thriller with an ambiguous ending, and great characterization. I was so bowled over that I put myself on the list for Tana French's The Likeness and took it out of a different library in the meantime. Yesterday, in fact. I'm almost finished with it (I spent a lot of time on public transit). I'm also on the list for French's third novel in this series, which is coming out in July.

Adam Ryan had a charmed childhood in rural Knocknaree until the day he and his friends Jamie and Peter went into the woods to play as usual, and Jamie and Peter vanished. Adam was found clinging to a tree, his shirt torn and his shoes filled with blood, with no memory of what happened. 20 plus years later, Adam is Detective Rob Ryan with the Dublin Murder Squad and one fateful day he and his partner Cassie Maddox catch an investigation in Knocknaree. A 12 year old local girl, promising dancer Katy Devlin, is found on an altar stone in Rob's old playing ground, raped and with her head bashed in. Knocknaree is being threatened with urban sprawl--the area around the woods is an archeological site under quick excavation as a motorway is going through at the end of the summer. Katy Devlin has a strange family, the archeologists are a funny lot, and the town is crawling with developers. Ryan is unnerved with his investigation into both the current crime and his own past, and isn't able to give up either despite the toll that's taken on him.

So the plot premise is one that would usually have me rolling my eyes and not bothering with the book, but I was so glad that I did. It's a first person narrative by Rob, who is as odd a fish as you would imagine, and warns the reader up front that he's a liar. Rob's only substantive relationship is with Cassie, and the two of them have created the best of his childhood friendship with an overlap of late teens puppyhood, each being the other half of a jokey crack team of investigators. Other than that, he's playing a role--with Peter and Jamie gone and his parents moved from Knocknaree and sending him to boarding school, Rob has been living a life removed from family and himself, donning the costume of a murder detective, living with a roommate he hates, and aside from Cassie, alone.

The writing is spot on and sometimes darkly funny, not only as Rob unravels, but in his observations before and during. This is a story with great mystery/thriller trappings, but it's fundamentally one about how we try to hide the parts of us that are missing and one person's disintegration.

The Spellmans Strike Again-Lisa Lutz

Hooray, the Spellmans are back! And contrary to their author's original intention, the fourth book in the series may not be the final one. While I'll read anything Lutz puts out, I must say I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to the Spellmans just yet, although the book ends with them in an odd state of peace all around.

So Isabel is back in the family business, and things are going pretty well. She's stepping into her role as the eventual boss after her parents' retirement. Strangely, her parents are pressuring their children for more family activities yet barring them from the house on Wednesdays. The economy is terrible, and that's hitting the business hard, leading to some strange clients. Boyfriend #12, the Irish bartender, isn't into surveillance or her job. Inspector Henry Stone wants to be her friend. He must have spent too much time around her sister Rae, as he has adopted Rae's special tactics for forcing people into friendship. And Rae herself has committed her first felony as part of her "Free Schmidt!" campaign, as she's left off working for Spellman Investigations and gotten into prisoner advocacy work with Maggie Mason. And Olivia Spellman is once again setting up Izzy on dates, this time blackmailing her with the threat of revealing all of the incidents that comprise Prom Night 1994.

It's a busy plot. Lutz manages to weave multiple Spellman plotlines in and out of the work Isabel is doing--a screenwriter who claims his screenplay was stolen, the mysterious disappearance and replacement of the perfect butler, and Isabel's own vendetta against fellow Pi Rick Hartley. One of the best things about the series is the growth and change in the characters. Izzy has grown from someone who pretends to be an adult into a mature person. She's more mentally stable than she's ever been. Read the previous books for details. Yet she's still funny, passionate and tough. Like the rest of the series, it's a visit with a family that is insane but loving in its own boundary-violating way.

Two More Writers Lost

There were two literary losses recently that got me down.

Dick Francis died. I read Dick Francis because his novels were widely available, especially in the Reader's Digest Condensed Books my grandmother bought me at garage sales. My dad also liked to take me to the track, although he was hopeless at explaining the betting and odds to me. Multi-variable systems analysis and parimutuel odds are a good thing to teach your daughters when their brains are young and pliable and they haven't been told they are bad at mathematics yet.

Francis didn't write the same book over and over--he fashioned his plots around different things that touched the racing world like wine or photography. I know, but who doesn't need a little general knowledge?

Kage Baker died at the end of January. She's best known for her series about The Company, an organization recruiting lost children and modifying them into cyborgs to travel through history and obtain objects and specimens (lost paintings, extinct plants, gold bars) that will become extremely valuable in the future.

If you like Connie Willis for her humor and ability to integrate many branches of liberal arts and her focus on big questions of humanity, Baker's right up your alley. I'm a little sorry they never managed to get the series based on The Company novels out of development although I can't quite figure out how they could shoot it since Baker's characterization and voice, particularly of the botanist Mendoza, is integral to the text and story.

Revenge Of The Spellmans--Lisa Lutz

I've previously talked about my love for this series. This is the third installment, and what made reading it extra excellent was that I found out Lisa Lutz would be at The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale to promote it.

The Spellmans are a family of private investigators in San Francisco. Izzy has mostly cleaned up her legal issues from the second book; she's faithfully following the letter of her agreement with the court and going to therapy. She's ducking her father's questions about when or if she might return the family firm. She's truly happy about Inspector Henry Stone's awesome new girlfriend. And if she just has that little chronic insomnia problem that developed after she moved into her brother David's secret apartment without his knowledge or permission, the fact that someone knows about that move and is blackmailing her, the prospect of her friend and lawyer Morty moving to Florida, and an inability to find her car--none of these are related at all, right?

When she's replaced at The Philosopher's Club by an Irish interloper, Izzy's left with only her downward spiral and a case she took on behalf of Milo's friend to occupy her. As she investigates a wife's mysterious behavior, she's forced to actually acknowledge some of the things that are bothering her. Oh, and visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Lutz delivers another funny and moving chapter in her series. Despite Izzy's near nervous breakdown caused by lack of sleep, the story is less dark than the second installment. This time around, it's the other Spellmans who are dealing with their own nuttiness--Rae is truly, unrepentantly monstrous, David is again behaving in an uncharacteristic and mysterious fashion and her parents are well, themselves.

Lutz was great to hear talk about her work. She admitted that these books getting called mysteries and nominated for Edgars is just the marketing machine doing its best. She set out to write comedic novels about a family, and that they are character driven and not plot-based is deliberate. It was funny because that's what I love about them; yet it's also reviewers' constant criticism. She worked for a family-owned PI firm, but as she put it "We never solved a 'mystery' that was anything like a detective novel." Instead, she works with the theme that mysteries are just ever present and it's a willingness to notice, snoop and ask questions that reveals them. And throughout all these books it's Izzy's journey and struggle to finally grow up, to figure out what it is that she wants and who she is as she asks these questions and digs into others' business that is the real story.

She also talked about the style of the books--the transcripts, lists, footnotes and file notations that help tell the story come from her scriptwriting background and she includes them because they get the story across in what might seem an unconventional format, but that works with her narrative style and Izzy's temperament.

The fourth book will be the last for the Spellmans, and in this book she laid the foundation for an epic battle between Izzy and Rae and some unfinished business with Stone. After that Lutz will move on to new projects, but she's one of those writers I'll keep reading no matter what.

And she was amazingly courteous to a woman who asked if freaking Janet Evanovich had been an inspiration, as if Evanovich is somehow the alpha and omega of comedic mystery tales. I felt like slapping her, I really did--Evanovich is a hack.

I bought the first book in the series recently if anyone local wants to read it. Or hit the library--really, I promise you, it's good stuff.

Where I've Been: Domestic News

This week I actually left the house to do something other than go along to awkward evenings in which I inadvertently pay for others' drinks.

I'm embarrassed to say, but I hadn't fully realized that I live so close to Scottsdale until Wende took me down there in January. And I hadn't realized that The Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore was so close. Last weekend I was checking the website when I erupted into epically shrill squeals of delight. S.J. Rozan brought her series with Lydia Chin and Bill Smith back! And she would be at PP on Monday night!

I didn't have any money for a copy, but she was a fascinating speaker. There were only 10 people there, which was a little sad--this is an excellent series that I think I've tried to hand sell to everyone I know at various points. There's a reason why I won't go into the plot but it deals with a little known intersection of 20th century Chinese history and the Jewish diaspora, and she says she has a lot of research that she might fold into other fiction projects. And she's happy her publishers were willing to wait for her to get back to Bill and Lydia and she still has a lot of stories to tell, and they are willing to publish.

Oh, and she's apparently left her architecture career to work on writing full time.

End of this month, Lisa Lutz will be promoting her new book and if her writing is a reflection of her personality, it will be fun.

Another Library Video Slays Me With Cute

Gumdrops by The Smittens.

By the way, now is an excellent time to pick up a copy of The Maltese Falcon. It's an atmospheric read, full of San Francisco gray and melancholy, a little bitter, and perfect for the fall and winter months. It's also the NEA's selection for The Big Read. The Phoenix Public Library has programming centered around it this fall. Hammet's a deceptively easy read--there's much more going on between the lines than the style and language suggest. He's one of my favorite 20th century writers.

Feed Another Quarter Into the Hype Machine

Dear NPR,

I get that Chelsea Cain's Heartsick was a good book. Super Librarian loved it, and I trust her judgment. But god, this was embarrassingly, irritatingly effusive. Can you turn down the gushing a bit, especially since she's only got one book out? Portland's a large and successful city and not that unusual a setting. My word.

Moonlight Downs-Adrian Hyland

You thought you'd never see another book review from me, didn't you? It was worth the wait, I promise. Published in the US by Soho Crime, Moonlight Downs won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Novel in its native Australia and is a fascinating, engrossing read.

Emily Tempest comes back to her home in Central Australia after 14 years away at school and roaming the world. "Home" is the Moonlight Downs community, a tribe of Warlpuju lead by Lincoln Flinders. First night back, Lincoln is murdered. Blakie Japanangka, sorcerer and enemy of Lincoln is discovered with the body and supposed to be the killer, but Emily isn't convinced and starts a discreet dig for answers.

This story really worked for me. First off I'm a sucker for Australia, and good writing in the "show, don't tell" style. This is a magnificently detailed book, and Emily an appealing and observant narrator. The small bits abound, like Emily's observation that a friend's little sister had "turned into an outback Naomi Campbell." Hyland's experience with native culture and the area he writes about comes through Emily's authentic narration, and her own difficulties figuring out where she as a young, mixed race, well-educated, bright and curious Australian fits. The difficulty of life in the desert, the roughness of the people drawn to the life and the harshness inherent are all well-depicted and three dimensional, from Emily's friend Hazel to the suspect Earl Marsh.

One of the rarer things to find these days is a fair mystery--one where clues are seeded but you as the reader can figure it out. This is a fair mystery--the solution and climax depend on Emily's knowledge and interpretation, but there's nothing that happens out of the blue to jury-rig an acceptable ending.

Great story. More, please!

From The Department Of Best Lines And Descriptions

I'll post a review of it later, but Moonlight Downs runs away with this category. My god, the descriptions:

"You wouldn't consider staying with your old man for a while?"

"I just come from the Jenny, Tom. I love old Jack, but do I want to spend my time sitting on top of a gold mine in the middle of a salt pan with him and his trained gorillas? I don't think so."

"You could come with us, back into Bluebush..."

"Bluebush!"

He appeared to be offended by the look of alarm that shot across my face. I was, I supposed, insulting the place he'd chosen to make his home. But Bluebush! What a dump! The sort of town where it's easier to buy a silencer than a decent coffee. When we visited town, I'd never leave my father's side: as a little black kid, you could feel the antagonism radiating out from the whitefellers when you passed them in the street.

And what a mob they were themselves. A bigger collection of dickheads and drop-kicks you'd have to travel a long way to find: boozers, bruisers and substance-abusers, rockjaw Germans and lockjaw Yorkshiremen, grease monkeys and gamblers, meatworkers, meat-heads, missionaries, maniacs, men on the run, men on the dole, men on the Witness Protection Program, Peddlers, pushers, whores and bores, desperadoes of every denomination. You name it, they were there, drawn to the town like flies on a carcass.

"Tom, the only way you could get me to go and live in Bluebush would be if you were to knock me out, handcuff me and throw me into the back of your paddy wagon." (46)

Curse Of The Spellmans--Lisa Lutz

Dear god, the Spellmans are back.

Dear god, the Spellmans are back!

As you may glean from those two statements, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this book. I really liked last years The Spellman Files, narrated by the saucy Izzy, who can't help telling a story that runs around the mulberry bush as police investigate the disappearance of her little sister Rae. Key to the tale was the history of her family of San Franscisco private eyes, a family for whom evasion, deception and suspicion are more of an identifying trait than any physical resemblance. Curse of the Spellmans continues Izzy's roundabout narrative tendencies as she tries to explain to her lawyer Morty how she's managed to get arrested 4 times in 2 months. She maintains that arrests 2 & 3 don't count as they were instigated by family, and 4 shouldn't because...well, it's complicated.

The main flaw levied against Lutz's first novel was that it lacked plot. Her second is chockablock full of major and minor mysteries, and she expertly spins them out. Why is Olivia Spellman sneaking out at night to vandalize a motorbike in the Noe Valley? Why is Albert Spellman hitting the gym after avoiding it for 35 years? Is David Spellman entering a downward spiral and personality change a la Uncle Ray? Why did his wife leave town? Who is recreating a series of pranks Isabel and Petra perpetrated in high school? And what is Inspector Henry Stone getting out of his friendship with the Spellmans, a relationship that leads to accidental attempted vehicular manslaughter, fake engagements, "it takes a village" parenting, and having Izzy as a roommate?

And that's not counting the cause of the arrests, the Spellmans' new neighbor John Brown, or "Suspect," as Izzy calls him. Most girls wouldn't be insanely curious about a locked bedroom, a common name, and a gardening habit. But it only takes a few dates and evaded questions before Izzy's insatiable need to ascertain the truth takes over and leads to dead end investigations, stalking, and a restraining order.

This book is as funny as the original, but there's also an undercurrent of fear and sadness--the Spellmans, for all of their eccentricities seem to be fraying and Izzy's obsessions in particular raise an eyebrow. But it's a great read, and I'm interested in seeing where Lutz goes with this (I presume) series.

If you liked this series, check out Lauren Henderson's Sam Jones and Liz Evans' Grace Smith series for more sarcastic female investigation. They're British, but much the same in tone and humor. I'm also strongly reminded of The Bagthorpe Saga in the way the Spellmans pile on the family crazy.