The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman--At last the fourth volume of the Thursday Murder Club has arrived, and they keep getting better and better as the personalities keep developing and showing deeper dimensions. This time they are on the trail of heroin smugglers as the body count keeps climbing. This story had more humor than the previous books, but also more pathos, as beloved friends pass and we learn more about the club members' lives.

Finished Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart. An English woman is married to a dashing man who cancels the trip planned for their First Anniversary because he was called by his company to handle an important matter in Stockholm. Then she sees him, and a beautiful younger woman, in a movie newsreel at the scene of a deadly circus fire in Austria and heads there to find out what's going on. I confess I chose this book because of the beautiful cover with the white horses galloping through the snowy forest, which turns out not to be a scene from the story, however, the Royal Lipizzan Stallions were important to the plot. It was a great old romantic mystery from the 1960's.

Finished the Alex Delaware book. Good enough to read the next one at some point. Now reading Son of a Liche by J Zachary Pike. Second book of a trilogy. I liked the tongue in cheek fantasy satire of the first book and it still had a story too, so now on this one. About seven chapters in and it is a good as the first book.

LadyCalico2 wrote: »

Finished Payback in Death by J.D. Robb (Norah Roberts) #57 in the series. This was one of the better plotted books in the series with the crime having scads of potential suspects, none of which are panning out. Right from the beginning Detective Eve is sure she knows whodunnit, but feeling someone is guilty is not the same as proving it. I found it an engrossing and entertaining mystery as Eve doggedly seeks the missing connections and motive.

I like that series but there are a lot of books, I think that I am up to about book 14 or 15 so far. It has been a while since I last read one. It doesn’t help me that all of the older audiobooks are published by Brilliance and only for sale by Amazon through Audible, therefore expensive, and not available at libraries through Overdrive anymore. I do enjoy J. D. Robb but haven’t read many Nora Roberts. The newer In Death books are at libraries on audio but I have a big pile to read in order to catch up.

Read Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary in which two broke friends desperate for income accept a job that runs them afoul of a Moriarty-like master criminal. This was a very early book and meant to be a fun one with lots of mess-ups, near death escapes, cute repartee, and a little romance.

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Getting a jumpstart on my Halloween reading, but sadly my first attempt, Howliday Inn, turned out less spooky and somewhat less fun than its predecessor, Bunnicula. This was certainly an entertaining kid's book but lacked something--it really could have used a celery sucking vegetarian vampire rabbit. The human criminals just didn't do it for me, I prefer paranormal bunnies.

I love graphic novels. I own a bunch of Stephen King's The Dark Tower graphic novels in hardcover, the entire set of Sandman by Neil Gaiman in paperback (10 books), Watchmen by Alan Moore, and Y The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. I remember @beccaboo1276414 was a fan of Saga when we were over at Sparks. I didn't know anyone else here liked graphic novels.

I finished Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, and like all collections of short stories some were great and some weren't so much. I found one to be particularly enjoyable where an artificial intelligence computer virus infected a refrigerator and replicated to other appliances through the electric wiring. The Roomba robot vacuum escaped the house and the virus leaked to every other machine it could get to.

Catfish_Fan wrote: »

I started City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky this weekend (an author I like) but I could not concentrate on it because I threw out my back on Thursday, that is too distracting for a complicated novel. I will revisit the book when I am feeling better.

I picked up The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston instead and it is a much easier read.

So sorry you are in pain. You never know how important the back is to every movement you make, until it acts up. Been meaning to try Adrian Tchaikovsky but he is one of so many I never get to in my mountainous TBR list. Someday!

Catfish_Fan wrote: »

I started City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky this weekend (an author I like) but I could not concentrate on it because I threw out my back on Thursday, that is too distracting for a complicated novel. I will revisit the book when I am feeling better.

I picked up The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston instead and it is a much easier read.

Hope your back is doing better - it can difficult to read when you can't get comfortable.

Regretting You by Colleen Hoover. This was overall a good novel but unevenly paced with some well-done engrossing parts but some dragged-out repetitive boring sections as well. The weakest part of the novel was the main character who constantly wallowed in self-pity. Her name was Morgan, so I dubbed her Morgan Moaner, however, once reality handed her something real to justify the self-pity, the story picked up and was worth reading. Usually, if the main character in the book has a teenager, I find the kid the obnoxious one, but in this one the kids are okay. Moaner's daughter, her boyfriend, and her best friend are really well-drawn characters with a lot of witty snarky banter that added some fun to the book.

Moved on to two Manga.
The Girl from the Other Side, Vol. 1-12 by Nagabe--The first 11 volumes completed the story, and the 12th was a collection of unused vignettes from the happy times in the early volumes. The story grows more serious, but all the mysteries are eventually explained when we learn about the main characters' life histories in the last few volumes. It takes a Taoist philosophical turn at the end with the last conversation between the little girl and the kind monster as they tried to deal with the troubles and suffering caused to mankind by the war between the Light God and the Dark Goddess when they ceased to work in harmony.
The Walking Cat: A Cat's-Eye-View of the Zombie Apocalypse Vols. 1-3 Tomo Kitaokah--This series, Inspired by The Walking Dead, is really good, but unfinished. It will probably need at least three more volumes to finish but was still a great story about a cat that passes into the lives of survivors trying to fight off the zombies. The good news is that animals can't catch the virus that turns people into zombies. The bad news is that zombies still eat cats or any other living creature they can catch.

Not one of the remaining letters I need, but I decided to check out Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. I enjoyed her Reading Lolita in Tehran much more than I did reading Lolita.

I finished The Midnight Witch by Paula Brackston tonight, which I really liked despite many vocal critics. I don't read reviews or synopses before plunging into books for this reason, I don't want my opinions to be skewed by the naysayers.

I started the 1100 page Ken Follett book Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy #3) after that. It will probably take me the rest of the month to finish this one, I would be surprised to get it done sooner.

I should add that I do like reading what you all write (I check this forum daily), and I am part of a Goodreads Audiobooks forum (again, daily) where people discuss what they are reading in more general terms, that isn't nearly the same as reading the popular reviews of a book I am picking up on Goodreads that may spoil a plot. I don't want those synopses and opinions of people I don't know to skew my opinion of a book I chose before I take the plunge. I am pretty good at finding books and authors that I think I would enjoy and rarely find duds, although it still happens. Keep telling us about what you are reading and if you liked it and why, I use information like this to form my TBR list and move things up in priority (or down as need be). The more participation here the better!

I still have a couple of Cixin Liu and Ken Liu books on my kindle that I found on sale to read because of discussion here. My buddy read Cixin Liu's trilogy (The Three Body Problem and it's sequels) and found it to be very compelling and cerebral. I have five of his books and three by Ken Liu to get to someday; I intend to or I wouldn't have gotten them from Amazon on my kindle on sale for $2.99 each or whatever. It is worth my time to look at the kindle deals daily too, I find a lot of books that I want to read that aren't widely available at my libraries, or are pretty long books and a good value for the three bucks.