The Black Dove by Steve Hockensmith

Some of my friends might disagree that The Black Dove is a cozy, but I think it's close enough. Besides, I really liked the new book by Steve Hockensmith, author of Holmes on the Range, a book that was very popular with our patrons at the library.

Gus and Otto Amlingmeyer are a pair of cowboys in the Old West who want to be detectives. Their hero is Sherlock Holmes (they can't get enough of his adventures, which they read about in pulp magazines) and Gus in particular tries to use the great detective's methods of deduction to solve crimes.

The West isn't really a place for a couple brothers who think with their heads rather than their fists, so they don't have much luck getting work as detectives. So they make a case their own when a friend of theirs (Dr. Chan from On the Wrong Track) is murdered.

There's a little bit of salty language in The Black Dove, along with some violence. But this is still a book that I would recommend to my mother (82 years old and reads more than I do!), so I will recommend it to you, too.

Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

I was a big fan of Lisa Lutz's The Spellman Files when it came out last year. It reminded me a lot of some authors I read like Janet Evanovich and Sarah Strohmeyer. (It wasn't as good as Evanovich, but it was better than Strohmeyer.) It was about a young woman who works in her family's private detective business. Funny, but with a good mystery. I really liked it.

So when I saw that Lisa had a new book coming out, I ordered it right away from the local bookstore. This was something I didn't want to miss. Although it's not as good as the first one, Curse of the Spellmans is another good book.

Izzy Spellman is back and she gets into even more hilarious trouble in this sequel. She even meets a guy this time, although he's not what she thinks at first. The story is good and I really like Izzy's character. (One thing that bugged me is that the book has silly footnotes. At first I thought it was kind of funny, but then I got tired of them.)

One of the things we always looked for at the library was how an author's second book did. A lot of times a first novel would get a lot of attention, especially if it made the bestseller like like Lisa's first book did. In my opinion, her second book was a little bit of a letdown. I still wanted to write about it, because Lisa's a good writer and I think people who liked the first one will like this one, too. But I hope she does even better if she writes another one.

Welcome to my new blog

I'm a retired librarian living in Ft. Worth, Texas who loves mystery novels. As you can tell from the title of this blog my favorites are the cozies. But in my job I read everyone, from Chandler to Christie, Lippman to Bruen, and I still do today. Now that I only read for pleasure I'll mostly be reviewing the books I really love.

I hope you enjoy my posts. I'll try to make them interesting! Please leaves comments if you stop by.