An Open Book: February 2019

Some people binge watch television shows.  I binge read books.  When I find a new author that I enjoy it's like finding a pot of gold.  I want to read everything I can by that person.  Books by Rex Stout, Kendra Elliot and Carlene O'Conner are what I am gorging on lately.


Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout is the first novel in the Nero Wolfe series and was originally published in 1934.  The story revolves around the murders of an Italian immigrant and wealthy college professor.  As with all the books in this series, much of the fun in reading them is the banter between Nero and his assistant, Archie.

 “Some day, Archie, when I decide you are no longer worth tolerating, you will have to marry a woman of very modest mental capacity to get an appropriate audience for your wretched sarcasms."

The Red Box has Nero Wolfe trying to determine who is poisoning people with cyanide laced candies. 

It was after two when I went to the garage for the roadster, and there I got another irritation when I found that the washing and polishing job had been done by a guy with one eye. 

I received Merciful Fate by Kendra Elliot through a GoodReads giveaway.  Mercy Kilpatrick is an FBI agent that has recently moved back to the small Oregon town in which she grew up.  The skeletal remains of someone that had been involved in a bank heist thirty years prior are found.  Of the other people involved in the crime, three have vanished and one, caught at the scene, now resides in jail.  Mercy sets out to solve a seemingly unsolvable case.

Although this is the fifth book in the series, it read well as a stand-alone story, but at the same time made me want to read the rest of the series to learn more of the history of all the characters within it.

Merciful Death, also by Kendra Elliot, is the first book in the Mercy series.  Mercy Kilpatrick comes back to the small town in which she grew up but hasn't been to since she left fifteen years ago.  Someone is targeting the survivalists, murdering them in their homes and stealing huge numbers of weapons.  This has created federal suspicion of a possible domestic terrorism event.  Mercy is sent by the FBI to assist local authorities in stopping these murders.

Murder in an Irish Village by Carlene O'Conner is the first in the Irish Village Mystery series.  One morning as Siobhán O’Sullivan is about to open the family bistro she runs with her siblings, she discovers a man dead in one of the booths, a pair of pink scissors sticking from his chest.  With the local Garda suspecting her older brother of the crime, she sets out to find the real culprit.  This was a fun, sweet read.

Head on over to Carolyn's for more An Open Book.

AMDG