Last August I was deeply and happily involved in the edits for South of Elfrida. This August the writers at Mystery Camp gave me some clues as where to start my mystery reading. (Besides Ruth Rendell, Henning Mankell, Dorothy Sayers, and Peter Abrahams, I was in the dark.)

On campers' advice, I started with Lee Child's Bad Luck and Trouble, part of his Jack Reacher series. The morality in this book (and probably the others) is "an-eye-for-an-eye", and, actually, I didn't mind because the characters were so obviously, truly and deeply bad. A friend thinks of Reacher as being the man in the white cape. Childs is a powerful, physical writer, who moves in fast and gets the story going; Reacher, smart with square roots, numbers in general, and gifted in figuring out next moves through fiddling with his hands (i.e. napkins and a sugar container) holds the reader's due to his personal anomalies. Character delineation -- writers struggling with defining characters should study how Lee Child does it.

Second book: Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny. She nearly buried me in the first fourteen pages when I was stuck four pages too many at a board meeting of the Lit and His Society, but perseverance paid off. No eye-for-an-eye mentality here in this "cozy" (apparently the style of mystery that Penny writes -- no thumbs through eyeballs in front of the reader, for example.) Inspector Gamache is charming and powerful in his own rich way -- I liked how she developed his power through his silence and gaze and lowering the tone of voice. In this book he is a man suffering guilt. I hung in to the very end, following the two cases, suspense building in each one, could have done with less overwriting (or maybe the term is underscoring) that I suppose mystery writers must do, to bring the flaky, distracted beach-umbrella reader up to date.

Third Book: Henning Mankell's new book, A Treacherous Paradise isn't really a mystery so much as as exploration of place, flimsily based on a woman who did actually exist. It's interesting to read a failure by the assured writer of the Wallander series that I thoroughly enjoyed, for their Swedish brooding about a case while viewing of the weather and worrying about one's outerwear, for one, and the completely believable character of Wallander with his smoking and sandwich-eating, and the other detectives as well. But Hanna/Ana in this book: Nope and nope. Some clumsy bridges as an editor tried to make it a novel is my bet.

Tomorrow's book: I start on This Body of Death by Elizabeth George.

... Days later: Elizabeth George is a very thorough, descriptive writer, for whom I had no patience after a while, and so skipped through this book, read the last few chapters, did not feel I'd missed much. Wordy.

Found A Lonely Death by Charles Todd at the library. It's "An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery". This writer is diligent and correct but doesn't hold my interest so I'm feeling a bit negative just now and want to run down the hill and pick up another Lee Childs.

However, Carl Hiaasen holds great promise. The voice of obit reporter Jack Taggert, narrator in The Basket Case, is engaging, entertaining and, most important to me in this kind of reading, the story moves right along...

Carl Hiaasen went back to the library zippo. The narrator was too cute and the story insipid.