Helen MacDonald. Vesper Flights. Grove Press, 2020.

I had read good things about the writing of Helen MacDonald. I was happy to receive a copy of Vesper Flights as a serendipitous gift. I can see why her writing has received such positive accolades.

Vesper Flights is a collection of essays. Most of them are about nature in some way. One somewhat humorous essay describes how the author as an idealistic recent college graduate got a job with a falcon captive breeding program. It was hard work and everyone who worked there drove one another crazy, but she lasted four years and learned a lot about hawks—and ostriches and cattle. The experience also reintroduced her to the real world after her time in the ivory tower.

A theme in many of the essays is how people relate to nature, especially to animals. She clearly has a love for birds, but she also emphasizes that if we attempt to anthropomorphize them or try to explain their behavior in human terms, we miss things. For example, traditionally, displays of male birds were seen as a means to attract females. Yet in many cases we have realized that they have more to do with setting up territories than mating.

A few different essays remind us that animals sense things differently. Migrating birds, for example, can sense the earth’s magnetic field to help guide them. They also seem to have an almost instinctive memory of constellations and certain landmarks. We understand how bats use echolocation, but it would be impossible for humans to blindfold themselves and then squeak or holler and expect to learn what objects surround us. These essays often get us to reconsider our perceptions.

MacDonald’s control of language and use of metaphor and simile is exquisite. She is a true prose stylist. For example, as she observes a fledgling swift hesitantly taking a flight for the first time, she writes that it reminds her of an insect emerging from a pupa. There is a struggle, there is flight, and in both cases they have been transformed.

The title essay “Vesper Flights” may be the best in the collection. Here she also describes the flights of swifts at night. It seems that near dusk and dawn they fly low but as the night advances, they go higher and higher into the atmosphere to chase the insects at the higher levels. And then they come down around midnight and rise up again until daybreak approaches. Even here discussing birds, she makes connections with her own childhood fascination with the different levels or “spheres” in the earth’s atmosphere.

One of the most moving essays has nothing to do with nature. It is the story of a young man in Iran who converted to Christianity. He literally was escaping from the back door of his home while the security forces were at the front door. “Through many dangers, toils, and snares” he eventually made it to England. Even the relative safety of that land he has to be alert for gangs connected to Shi’ite Islamists.

I confess that there might be a few duds. One essay, for example, is a kind of speculation on extraterrestrial life in the universe, but there are only two or three of those. Overall, this is a feast for anyone interested in nature or who wants to read good writing. I can easily imagine a few of these ending up in anthologies of rhetoric or literary nonfiction. I cannot help but think of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s “Clouds”:

Something’s lost and something’s gained by living every day.

Sometimes even loss brings growth and understanding.

Donna Andrews. Between a Flock and a Hard Place. Minotaur, 2024.

We have reviewed a few Donna Andrews books on this blog. Between a Flock and a Hard Place is her latest. As with her other books, the plot involves serious crimes but with a touch of humor.

In this novel, narrator Meg Langslow is back home in Caerphilly, Virginia. A television crew is coming to town because the Smetkamp family has just won a network’s home remodeling competition. They are going to have their 1930s Sears house gutted and remodeled. Most people in town are excited for them, but there has been some opposition. Meg gets involved because she a special assistant to the mayor.

Her ornithologist grandfather also gets involved because as the renovation team arrives in town, a flock of about 90 feral turkeys set up camp on the property that is to be repaired. Turkeys are aggressive and create quite a disturbance. These are not wild turkeys but domestic turkeys that have gone wild. They have no fear of people. They also tend to stay in one place, so people begin to immediately suspect that someone planted them there overnight.

Things get a lot more complicated. It turns out that the crew from Marvelous Mansions home makeover show knows little of construction. They remove a couple of load bearing walls, so the town has to declare the house unsafe for habitation. Meg offers the Smetkamps a guest bedroom at her house until the work is done. Mr. Smetkamp takes her up on the offer, but not Mrs. Smetkamp.

Across the street from the renovation lives Meg’s friend Gloria who rents out a couple of rooms to people. She rents out her attic space to a hard-core computer geek named Chris. She seldom sees Chris go in and out; he seems to stay in the attic most of the time. She has given up trying to carry on a conversation with him, and his first month there her electric bill rose $800 from all the computer equipment running. He did take care of that, but it does show us what a big operation he has in her attic. Although he seldom goes out, people have seen him watching the turkey antics from his upstairs window through binoculars.

At first the mystery is simply to find out who was behind the turkey transplant and how they did it. There also is the legal problem with the television crew and the building codes. And the mayor still has to deal with Charles Jasper, who used to live in the house and is now leading the opposition against the remodeling.

Those who read Lark! The Herald Angels Sing learned about the corrupt government in neighboring Clay County. There seems to a suspicious connection with Clay County here as well. And then Mr. Blomqvist, the leader of construction team suddenly leaves town—no one knows where he went, and none of the television or construction workers have been paid.

About halfway through Mrs. Smetkamp is murdered. It is clearly a murder since no one would stick a carpenter’s rasp through her neck accidentally or by suicide. The plot truly thickens.

As is true with many such cozy mysteries, no one likes Mrs. Smetkamp, including, it seems, Mr. Smetkamp.

The mysteries do take some time and persistence and luck to unravel. There are indeed several mysteries: the origin of the turkeys, where Blomqvist went, what Chris the computer guy is up to, and, of course, who killed Mrs. Smetkamp. The people involved are not necessarily related to each other or conspiring in any way, but they all come to a satisfying conclusion—though the plot goes in different directions, just as things usually do real life.

Spencer Quinn. A Farewell to Arfs. Forge, 2024.

Was it possible that anyone could throw out leftover bacon? How could bacon be left over? Yet that is what it smelled like. (122)

Yes, that is the typical canine perspective we have gotten used to and enjoyed from Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie mysteries. A Farewell to Arfs continues that entertaining style.

Bernie Little of the Little Detective Agency investigates a case that he may not really have a client for. In A Farewell to Arfs, his elderly neighbor, Mr. Parsons, gets a desperate phone call from his only son asking for two thousand dollars, just for the weekend. Parsons does this only to find out that someone has cleaned out his bank account of all its money, just under fifty thousand dollars. Bernie accompanies Parsons to the bank and offers to help him. One problem is that his son Billy has disappeared.

The second problem is that we know that Billy has not been the most respectful son. He has spent time in prison; however, from all accounts he has cleaned up his life. He now helps run a kind of twelve-step program for ex-convicts. Everyone who knows him now says that the old Billy has truly changed.

So what really happened? Mr. Parsons insists that it was his son talking to him on the phone, and also that it could not have been him that took his money. Still, his dog Iggy was barking just about the whole time he was on the phone.

As Chet and Bernie begin investigating, things get complicated quickly. They end up interviewing people from all kinds of backgrounds, including clients of Billy, Billy’s girlfriend, some brilliant computer geeks, professional gamblers, and contacts in the police department.

Bernie continues to have some girlfriend problems himself. He has actually proposed to longtime girlfriend and policewoman Weatherly. Almost as soon as he accepts, the relationship goes south. A certain thug has been harassing her. When Bernie visits the man and tells him to lay off, the harasser files a complaint. The gung-ho new district attorney tends toward the “defund the police” side in her politics and threatens to recall Bernie’s detective license.

As always Chet observes a few things that Bernie does not, but since he cannot communicate with words, Bernie has to make his own discovery later.

We note that this story has echoes of a Quinn standalone novel Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge in which a retired woman is scammed by criminal phone call. Indeed, A Farewell to Arfs even mentions in passing an article about a woman who tracked down the scammers to Romania and went there looking for them. In this case, the outcome is quite different. I compared that novel to something by Alexander McCall Smith. No one would confuse this story with something by him. It is a lot less mellow.

P.S. In my last review of a Chet and Bernie book, I complained that I guessed the “perp” from Hollywood stereotyping. Thankfully, this story did not do that.

Arthur Conan Doyle. His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. 1917; Project Gutenberg, 2024.

I confess that I thought I had read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories. After all, I had read and reviewed a collection that claimed to be the complete works. It turns out that the collection had a few stories missing. The recently reviewed O Jerusalem mentioned “The Devil’s Foot,” a story I could not remember at all. It turns out that the collection I reviewed omitted all but one story in this collection, which was the last collection of “new” Holmes stories that Doyle published.

The single story that was in the collection perhaps explains why the compiler missed the other stories. “His Last Bow” was also the name of the last story in this book. Apparently, the editor of the “complete” stories thought that that story was the only story in the collection. Anyway, now, I believe, my own reading of the Doyle Holmes stories is complete.

From his personal correspondence, Doyle indicated that he was not happy with many of the Holmes stories he wrote after Holmes returned from being presumed dead. Most of these stories are interesting and even clever, but for the most part they are not as entrancing as many of the earlier stores. Still, they would likely be published even today in a magazine that specialized in detective stories.

“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” has echoes of “The Red-Headed League” and may be the most interesting of these tales. A Mr. Eccles tells how a country neighbor named Garcia who recently moved to Wisteria Lodge has befriended him and turned up murdered the day after he spent the evening with him. There is a mysterious letter that makes it sound like Garcia was on his way to rendezvous with a woman, yet the only woman with any connection to the tale is a housemaid considerably older than Garcia.

“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” tells how Holmes managed to root out a spy from the Continent. This case is somewhat interesting because Sherlock gets hired by his brother Mycroft Holmes who, as readers may know, has some kind of high-level unspecified government job. This tale progresses well via a combination of dialogue and classified advertisements.

This story is also alluded to in O Jerusalem, though not mentioned by name. Set in 1895 it is supposedly about secret naval engineering plans for a submarines. In O Jerusalem, Holmes says that the British never acted on the submarine plans, and the Germans had underwater superiority throughout the World War in spite of the vessel the British had designed—they never put it into production.

We could call “The Devil’s Foot” a medical mystery. Holmes and Watson are vacationing in Cornwall when two brothers and a sister, all single adults, expire mysteriously while playing cards one evening. They are found sitting at the table with their card hands still ready to be played. This story involves some subterfuge on Holmes’ part. (For what it is worth, this story was mentioned in O Jerusalem—for a plot-related reason—and I could not find the story in that “complete” Holmes collection I owned. That led me to discover this book I am now reviewing.)

“The Adventure of the Red Circle” also has echoes of the “Red-Headed League” as well as The Valley of Fear. A Mrs. Warren engages Holmes because she has a mysterious lodger. He has rented a room in her lodging house, but he never seems to come out of his room. She takes his meals to his room on a tray and leaves the tray by the door. Someone is murdered in her neighborhood, and she thinks there is a connection.

This tale is probably the most mysterious of the ones in this collection. Its only weakness is that the conclusion is a long narrative explaining the mystery. If there had been an effective way to illustrate the same through the action rather than a multi-page explanation, the story could have been a lot stronger.

“The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” takes Watson through Europe trying to track down Lady Carfax who seems to have disappeared (in case you could not tell from the title). This is interesting because Holmes dispatches Watson to collect clues on his own by tracking down her last known addresses. Holmes disappears from much of this story, too. Watson is even more than usually self-effacing in this story. Still, together the two men do solve the mystery.

In “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” Holmes uses disguises effectively as he does in a couple of the other whodunits in this collection. Some stories depend not only on disguise but on Holmes’ acting ability. This is one of those. We admire Sherlock even if the plot is somewhat predictable.

“His Last Bow” was and is meant to be the last of the Holmes stories. Here we learn that Holmes indeed has retired to the countryside. He is in the process of having his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture published. He seems content but finds himself caught up in a German spy ring. Yes, this begins with “the most terrible August in the history of the world,” i.e. August 1914 when World War I begins. This is likely the most complicated of the plots in this collection. Readers will still find it intriguing, though Holmes seems a little too pat in this one.

All of these stories have an interesting feature. They all involve one way or another and international cast—whether it is foreign criminals, foreign spies, or foreign settings. I believe the earliest of these stories came out in 1909, and some clearly were written with the Great War in mind. We know that Doyle was interested in international affairs: The Crime of the Congo, his critique of the Belgian administration of the Congo, also came out in 1909. Holmes fans should not miss this, including those of us who thought we had read them all.

Laurie R. King. O Jerusalem. Bantam, 2000.

I went to the public universal library card catalog known as Amazon.com to see how many books were titled O Jerusalem. I found ten on the first three pages of my search. The title comes from the Bible:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! (Psalm 137:5-6)

The O Jerusalem by Collins and LaPierre was one of the most exciting books I ever read. I was visiting a friend who owned a copy. I started reading it before going to bed. I ended up spending most of the night to finish it in one sitting.

King’s O Jerusalem is very different. King has made a cottage industry by writing sequels to the Sherlock Holmes stories. The narrator of the tales taking Watson’s place is Mary Russell, a precocious teenager. In O Jerusalem she has just turned nineteen. Holmes recognizes her talent and is training her to become a detective like him, so he takes her along on certain cases that bring him out of retirement.

In this case, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft enlists his help for some government work in Palestine. The year is 1919, after the end of World War I, the defeat of the Turks, and the beginning of the British Mandate there. According to the novel, Holmes had spent some time in Palestine in the 1880s and learned Arabic. Russell is Jewish and speaks Hebrew, at least at the bat mitzvah level. Holmes and Russell, then embark to the Holy Land where their adventures begin.

Much of the tale is a kind of argosy through Israel. They visit numerous locations from Beersheva to Jericho and from Jaffa to Haifa. Much of the time they are accompanied by two Arabs who work for the British, Ali and Mahmoud. They encounter a few murders, and at some point each one of the four bails out at least one of the other members of the group.

However, the biggest mystery seems to be what Holmes and Russell are doing there. They discover some interesting facts and interesting people, but no one really knows what the actual purpose of their mission to Palestine is. About halfway through the novel Holmes and Russell meet General Allenby—a person whom Russell greatly admires. Finally they get a sense of what they are looking for.

It seems that there is a Turkish-rooted underground that wants to destabilize the British occupation and League of Nations mandate. Holmes deduces from what he observes that the plans of this underground include something big—think September 11 big.

Holmes begins to get close as he visits an ancient Orthodox monastery. He identifies one of the key operators in the underground group as someone thought to be dead. It is also pretty clear that someone in the British administration or army is informing the underground of what the British are doing. At one point they kidnap Holmes, and they clearly knew where his car was headed.

Some of the various parts come together, and the tale that begins with rambles around the Holy Land ends with a truly tense tale. The opposition works in the underground not merely figuratively but literally. Holmes and Russell have a claustrophobic adventure among the various tunnels under the city of Jerusalem.

There are some allusions to other Holmes stories. One is mentioned explicitly as they come across a ten year old issue of the Strand magazine. Another time Holmes disguises himself with the pseudonym of William Gillette. I had to laugh since William Gillette was an actor who made a living a hundred years ago playing Sherlock Holmes on stage. (A few chapters later, this allusion is explained for the uninitiated.)

Even though the story takes a while to get off the ground, the many fascinating, historical, and Biblical places they visit give us an idea of what the Holy Land was like, and in many ways, what it is still like.

One quibble with the storytelling: Our first-person narrator occasionally uses words or terms that would not have been in use in 1919. One might be able to excuse some of the wording by saying that Russell, born in 1900, is looking back in the 1980s or 1990s and has picked up modern terms in the meantime. However, when a character speaks of the Armenian genocide, that is a clear anachronism since the term genocide was not coined until World War II.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland, Vantage, 2009.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was one of those books I felt I had to read. It was very popular and got great reviews. I wanted to see what it was all about.

It is a riveting story. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist has just been found guilty of libel for an article he wrote about a prominent Swedish entrepreneur, one Hans Wennerström. The year is 2002. Just as he was resigning from being publisher of his magazine, the Millennium, he was offered an interesting assignment.

Another prominent businessman, now largely retired, Henrik Vanger will pay him a handsome sum if he works for him for a year. He has two things he would like him to do: (1) Look into the disappearance and apparent murder of his grandniece Harriet Vanger in 1966, and (2) Interview relatives and examine family records to write a history of the Vanger family, five generations of industrial success and wealth.

Henrik lives a day’s trip north of Stockholm on an island off a small coastal town. He has an estate there, and a few relatives live in the adjacent village. Mikael will live in a cottage on the estate. He looks over the files and photos Henrik has collected and begins his own queries.

The day seventeen-year-old Harriet disappeared was a holiday in town. It was also a time when the whole extended family (over fifty people then) got together. The last photos of Harriet were of her watching the holiday parade. To complicate things, there was a traffic accident on the bridge going to Herr Vanger’s island. There were many photos of both the parade and the accident.

Of course, the events happened 46 years before, but Blomkvist is able to track down many of the people in the photos, and he notices a few things other people have missed. So part of the story describes some fascinating sleuthing.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, would have been called a Goth in the United States. She indeed has a few tattoos, dresses in black with short hair dyed black, and shows various piercings. She keeps to herself and few people know much about her. She does contract work for a private detective who is always impressed with the thoroughness of her background checks.

That is how Blomkvist finds out about Salander. Henrik Vanger had the detective agency do a background check on Blomkvist before he hired him. When Blomkvist sees the report, he is impressed with how thorough it is. No one, he thinks, even his ex-wife, knows all this. So he hires Lisbeth Salander to help him in his research to find out what happened to Harriet Vanger.

The story of how they learn what happened to Harriet leads to the main plot. We also learn about Lisbeth’s life. Though twenty-four, she is still a ward of the state. Her new legal guardian is, to put it mildly, an unscrupulous lawyer. Lisbeth has learned not to trust anyone in authority. She seems to have her own way of dealing with crimes and injustices. The story is ingenious and clever as well.

Larsson clearly believes in Chekhov’s gun. I was able to correctly guess (at least broadly) what happened to Harriet about a third of the way through the story. A little more than halfway, I was able to deduce that another crime had happened. Neither one of those correct guesses detracted from the story at all. Larsson has the reader in his grip.

The story is not for everyone. There is a lot of sex. Some it is criminal, some is consensual, but one begins to get the idea that Swedes are obsessed with it. There are also a lot of Vangers. I had to refer to the family tree printed near the front of the book several times.

It turns out there are a lot of crimes. Harriet’s disappearance is just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the tale, then, is psychological. We learn something about why Lisbeth is the way she is and, maybe, get some insight into people who tend to Aspergers. We also get into the minds of some pretty crafty and maybe creepy criminals. If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is your cup of tea, you will drink every drop.

The Swedish title is very different, Men Who Hate Women. (Blomkvist is not one of them.) At one point Salander makes an interesting observation. She is doing a background check not related to the Vangers and learns that the man she is checking made a girlfriend get an abortion. She mutters, “One more man who hates women” (547). In the United States abortion is often seen as favoring women, but here Salander has it right. The chauvinist pigs want to avoid responsibility. The women are stuck. Some things are universal.

Amy Dockser Marcus. Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Viking, 2007.

Jerusalem 1913 looked like an interesting book to read in the light of continued conflict in the Holy Land over a hundred years later. Marcus served as a journalist in Israel for a number of years and describes the research she conducted in some detail. The story mostly focuses on two figures and reminds us that in 1913 things were quite different in Jerusalem.

In 1913 Palestine was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. A lot of the politics had to do with what the Turks would permit. If Turks were maybe a bit suspicious of Jews, they were no less suspicious of Arab nationalism. The last census done in Jerusalem in 1896 noted there were about twenty thousand Jews, and about eight thousand each of Muslims and Christians. Christians included both Arabs and Armenians.

The sad thing was that that the three groups had lived together for centuries with a certain amount of mutual respect and friendship. Yes, Jews were beginning to buy land and move there. The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had died in 1898, but Zionism was becoming a movement. I was reminded a little of T. E. Lawrence’s memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He noted that rural Arabs even back then were moving to the cities such as Damascus and Jerusalem. Demographic changes were already happening.

Also the Young Turk revolution had taken over in 1908. But five years later it was still hard for Arabs and Jews in Palestine to judge how the new Ottoman government would treat them. Would they sympathize with national movements of the empire’s ethnic groups, or would they still be emphasizing Turkish nationalism at the expense of others?

We meet the two principal figures from this time: Ruhi Khalidi, a member of a leading Arab political family (some might say “dynasty”) and Albert Antebi, a non-Zionist Jewish leader. Both men understood well the politics of the Ottoman Empire. We get the feeling throughout the book that one problem was simply that the Turks were losing grip of their empire even well before they joined the Central Powers in World War I.

Antebi’s grandfather had moved from Damascus to Jerusalem after he was imprisoned for one of the oldest accusations by anti-Semites, the blood libel. Even though he was released after over a year in jail, he realized that a Jew could never truly be trusted except in a place that tolerated Jews. This was in the 1850s, long before Zionism.

Albert never embraced Zionism, but he understood its causes. Because he and some of his associates were Ottoman citizens, they could legally purchase land in Palestine and then rent it out to Jews who had recently arrived. Indeed, one of the ongoing political conflicts was whether or not to allow Jews to buy land there. Sometimes they could; sometimes they were prohibited, but there were always ways to make a purchase.

Antebi would note after a violent confrontation in a rural village between Arab villagers and Jews who had recently moved there:

[I]f the Muslim role in the violence was not formally established and publicly acknowledged, then “tomorrow the story of the wolf will be applied to us,” he wrote, “our complaints will not be believed, and public rumor, well-formed by our adversaries, will accuse the Jews of systematic persecution of the farmers.” (111)

Plus ça change…

Khalidi was also something of a moderate. He tried to understand Zionism and would write essays and books on the subject. There was warning in his tone but also hope that the two groups could continue to co-exist peacefully. After all, Arabs were migrating to Palestine as well. (Later, Yasser Arafat himself would relocate from Egypt where he was born.)

We also meet Arthur Ruppin who lived well past 1913 and whose observations would be key primary sources. His Arab contemporary would be Kahlil Sakkini who kept diaries and whose observations from his perspective were prescient.

Jerusalem 1913 contains many other names as well. While it focuses on 1913, it takes us basically from the 1890s to the present (or to 2006, when the book was written). 1913, of course, was the last year with a relatively stable Turkish government. Starting in 1914, Ottoman citizens were drafted for the war, and neither Jew nor Arab were especially happy about that.

One interesting detail which I recall from my youth as a stamp collector—a number of European countries had post offices in the Turkish realms. The Turkish postal system was minimal at best. Once the war began, all those offices from Britain, Germany, Italy, and France closed.

The year 1913 was chosen because it was the first year that there was violence between Arabs and Jewish settlers. There were really just a few incidents, but both sides began to believe that the other side could not be trusted. In 1913 it was simpler: “the Muslims were convinced the Jews could never win, while the Jews believed the Arabs would someday yield” (50).

Even later under the British mandate, David Ben-Gurion tells an interesting tale. One of his best friends was an Arab leader named Yeya Effendi. Ben-Gurion had just been exiled by the British. Effendi said, “As your friend, I am sad…But as an Arab, I rejoice” (153).

Jerusalem 1913 is a fascinating account. Even at the time of the writing the author gave examples of toleration and respect that some Jews had for some Arabs and vice versa, especially as they attempted to understand each other’s history. The book does mention in passing the first proposal to divide the country among the two groups, but the differences were said to be “irreconcilable.” That has not changed even until today. No compromise at all has been possible.

One could argue that the conflict started much farther back in time, but certainly the modern conflict seemed to originate around 1913. It is a good place to start to understand why we are where we are today.

Alexander McCall Smith. The Kalahari Typing School for Men. Anchor, 2003. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
Over the years we have reviewed many books by Alexander McCall Smith, who is a favorite author of ours. Included are numerous books from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. The Kalahari Typing School for Men is an early one that we had somehow overlooked.

As always, the narrative is easygoing and relaxed, but it tells a delightful story. For readers of the series (or of our reviews) this one takes place while Precious Ramotswe is engaged but not married to Mr. J.L.B. Maketoni and Grace Makutsi has yet to meet the man she will marry.

As is typical of these stories, there is a lot going on. We read of some of the activities of the apprentices who work for Rra Maketoni’s garage, and none of these tales can happen without at least one visit to Mma Potkwane’s orphan farm. But there are a few things happening that do affect the Botswanan detective agency.

First, we learn that another detective agency has opened up in town. Its founder claims to be an experienced policeman from South Africa who has spent time in New York. His name is Buthelezi, a well-known name from South African news. He says his father was indeed Zulu, but his mother was from Botswana. His main advertising theme, though, is that men would do a better job as detectives than women would.

Her main client has an interesting tale to tell. Twenty years ago when he was a college student in Gaborone, he stole a radio from a family he was boarding with because he needed some money. He also badly treated a girlfriend from that time—no physical abuse, but as the song says, “he done her wrong.” He wanted to apologize to both the family and the ex-girlfriend and pay restitution for the stolen appliance.

He cannot locate either party and asks Precious to help. She does. Of course, there are complications, but Precious’s kindness and insight make his story work out well.

Mma Makutsi would like to earn more money than what she can from the detective agency. She uses her 97% graduation record from secretarial school to make some connections and begin an evening school for typing. She is seeing the transition from where typing was seen as a woman’s skill to something that, thanks to computers, everyone needs to know. She begins the night school that is the title of the book.

It gets interesting because one of the men in the class is falling in love with her. Could this be the one? While Precious does not do a background check on Grace’s suitor, she becomes aware of some information that might make Grace change her mind, but it also might break her heart. Again, we see Precious’s wisdom at work.

There is more, as always, in episodes about the detective agency, Speedy Motors, and the orphan farm. It does make the reader long for Botswana, or a least something better. One other thing: Though Grace Makutsi does have some problems in this story, none of them involve Violet Sephoto.

Donna Andrews. Terns of Endearment. Read by Bernadette Dunne, Dreamscape, 2019.

We have reviewed two other books by Donna Andrews. All her titles have something about birds. One thing is different with this one. Terns of Endearment does not take place at Christmas; however, the narrator and main characters are the same as in the other stories.

Our narrator, Meg Langslow, along with most of her family, accompany her naturalist grandfather on a cruise on an ocean liner. They took her grandfather aboard to give daily nature lectures on the voyage to and from Bermuda. She is accompanied by her husband, her two elementary-school aged sons, and various aunts and cousins.

Remember the folk song “Sloop John B” about a tragic sailing voyage in the Bahamas? One of the lines says, “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.” In this case, it is the captain, not the first mate, who gets drunk. But I am getting ahead of myself. Terns of Endearment tells of another bad trip. Oh, and a rare tern does figure in the tale.

It turns out that Grandfather is not the only celebrity aboard the ship. Desirée, a famous but possibly washed-up romance writer, makes her presence known, drawing attention to herself. But on the first night out, the ship is becalmed, and Desirée disappears overboard leaving a suicide note behind. Meg makes the discovery, so she finds herself once again in the middle of a crime/mystery. This time, though, her father the medical examiner is on the voyage. But the captain seems to consider the suicide a trivial matter. He says that authorities will investigate when they get to Bermuda.

The problem, though, is that they may not get to Bermuda. The ship is not moving because of a power failure. No propulsion, no electricity, so no running water, no air conditioning, no refrigeration. Things start looking really grim. And most of the crew is nowhere in sight. It turns out that they are first to get sick from rancid food. Things go from bad to worse. One ray of hope is that a cousin of Meg’s has a solar charger, so she can keep a few laptops and radios charged.

The captain has reported back to the port that there are a few minor problems, but they will be taken care of, no need to worry. Meanwhile, a crew member is murdered, and Grandfather’s assistant Trevor has never shown up. When they discover a book in Trevor’s cabin signed by Desirée—and he is not a reader of romances—they wonder if somehow he got involved with Desirée.

Also on board are four other authors. None of them have the sales or prestige of Desirée, but they are friends who each writes a different genre, and who blame Desirée for the death by suicide of a writer friend of theirs. In addition, they have uncovered evidence that Desirée may have plagiarized their late friend.

We also meet a few crew members, none of whom seem especially happy about the cruise line’s management. The implication is that such disasters would not have happened on a ship from a better run company like Royal Norwegian or Carnival.

As is true of Andrews’ style, there is a lot of humor (fish out of water?) but also she effectively tells the tale so that the listener begins to feel the heat of the steamy tin can in the water. Her “new age” cousin is convinced they are in the Bermuda Triangle, and things are going to get worse. Her two elementary aged sons don’t mind playing miniature golf if that is all there is to do, but they are getting tired of cheese and crackers. Andrews’ portrayal of the U.S. Coast Guard is reasonably accurate, too. We always enjoy appearances by Coasties.

As you might be able to tell from the bibliography, we listened to this on audio disc. Bernadette Duane reads exceptionally well. Not only is her pronunciation precise, but she voices the many different characters quite effectively. For those who prefer or who sometimes use recorded books, her reading makes this story even more fun.

Robert B. Parker. Walking Shadow. Berkley, 1994.

I have always had in the back of my mind to read a Spenser detective story. I knew they were set in my favorite city, Boston, and I recall back in the eighties students of mine talking about the TV show and Spenser’s buddy Hawk. Now I can say I have done it, and it was fun.

Spenser’s Harvard PhD girlfriend is on the board of a theater company in Port City. This fictional city sounds a lot like New Bedford, Massachusetts, except that it is north of Boston—a fictional mashup of a couple of towns. During a performance which they are attending, an actor is shot and killed while on stage. The shooter disappears before anyone can catch him, and Spenser gets involved.

There is a lot to get involved in. As is true of many such charitable boards, the board is mostly made up of serious donors. One of the board members is Rikki Wu, wife of a local tong leader. For the uninitiated, a tong is a Chinese criminal gang. Spenser gets a visit from Rikki’s husband and two bodyguards warning him to stay out of Port City. Of course, he doesn’t.

The chief of police in Port City is an acquaintance of Spenser’s, a former state policeman who left that force under some dubious circumstances. Port City was once a thriving mill town with a well known college (if it had not been in Massachusetts, I would have figured it for Brunswick, Maine). It also has a significant population of Portuguese fishermen and Chinese immigrants who work in fish processing or other menial labor in the area.

We get interesting views of Chinese immigrants (legal and illegal), organized crime, and struggling regional theaters. It also has a lot of the elements of classic noir: rain, beautiful but untrustworthy women, a criminal gang, kidnapping, corrupt officials, and dangerous love affairs. For those who like such stories, it is a lot of fun. And, yes, it gets the Boston vibe pretty well. (Spenser is fixing up a recently purchased house in the town next to the one where I grew up. Parker knows what he is writing about.)

As is usually true in such tales, things are not what they seem in Walking Shadow. The plot keeps twisting. The characters and stories keep us guessing with numerous interesting details and surprises. It also is quite literary with allusions to Chaucer, Shakespeare (more than just the title), Hemingway, Eliot, and Merle Travis among others.