Two more!

Death of a Dentist was okay, not the greatest. Death of a Macho Man was better, and it kept me guessing!



I'm almost finished with Death of an Outsider, one of the first Hamish stories. It's a little bit gruesome. After that, I have Death of a Traveling Man.

I'm not addicted. No, really!

I can quit whenever I want! :p



I finished Death of an Addict last night. I think it may be my favorite. Good story with Hamish going undercover as a drug lord!

So that's book number 36...I'm reading Death of a Dentist and Death of a Macho Man next.

I'm up to 35!

I've read seven books in the past ten days- all of them Hamish Macbeth!

They were all good:

Death of a Scriptwriter

Death of a Prankster

Death of a Bore

Death of a Celebrity

Death of a Nag

Death of a Village

and I just finished Death of a Perfect Wife.

Death of a Scriptwriter was my favorite, I think. I wonder if M.C. Beaton was thinking of the Hamish Macbeth television series when she wrote it (it came out a year or so after the show was over)? I loved the show, but aside from Hamish himself, the episodes really didn't follow the books much. I doubt she was upset by the changes like the author in Scriptwriter was!

I figured out the killer in Death of a Nag early on...and I didn't want the killer to be who it was. Beaton is so good in creating characters that keep you guessing!

Death of a Bore was not my favorite of the lot. It had another murder victim I just couldn't feel sorry for!

I have eleven more Hamish books on my shelf waiting to be read. I'll read them all, then I want to start the Agatha Raisin series. Before I read those, though, I have Wings of the Dove (still haven't read it!) and Middlemarch to read.


I think I should revise my goal to 75 books for the year...

Number 28!

Death of a Glutton is finished. That was a really good one! Funny and a little bit gross (the glutton of the title reminds me of the world's fattest man in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life!), and it one of the most creative deaths in the Hamish series! And again, the murderer's identity wasn't obvious until the end. I love that kind of mystery.

Well, thanks to Hamish Macbeth, I will not only reach my goal of reading fifty books this year- I will probably exceed it! I'm going to read every one of the novels the library has, and start on the Agatha Raisin series, too.

More Macbeth!

I finished Death of a Poison Pen last night. Another good Hamish Macbeth mystery! I can't stop reading these books! I'm halfway through Death of a Glutton.

Four more books, plus one I forgot!

Now I'm up to 26 books for the year. During my vacation last week, I managed to read four books! I'm completely hooked on the Hamish Macbeth stories. I read Death of a Gossip, Death of a Snob, and Death of a Cad. Cad was the best of the three. I actually had no clue about the murderer's identity until almost the very end!

I also picked up the Torchwood novel The Twilight Streets. It was okay. A very interesting premise, with glimpses into possible futures- but the dark vs. light aliens plot was a bit hokey. I'm still looking for the other two recent novels.

Finally, I had another book that I'd read earlier this year and forgot to list! Weird Virginia- part of the "Weird" travel guide series about odd and forgotten places in the world. There's a lot of stuff in Virginia I've never heard of...and it might be fun to take day trips to find them. I hope to read Weird USA, Weird New York, and Weird Kentucky sometime. I also hope there will be a Weird Colorado! Weird New Jersey has two volumes. Wow. I always knew New Jersey had a lot of weirdness in it...



I should be up to thirty books by the end of next week! I have four more M.C. Beaton Hamish stories to read, plus I'm almost done with Post Captain.

Another distraction!

My stack of to-read books keeps getting larger. My mom brought me Mr. Darcy's Daughters by Elizabeth Aston. I read it in a few hours. It was cute, but a little too much like the original Pride and Prejudice. The daughters are almost exactly like Lizzie and her sisters...especially the twins, who are even worse than Lydia! It's all the same story, daughters looking for suitable husbands- though the Darcy girls have an advantage their mother and aunts did not- they have money. Plenty of characters from P&P make an appearance, including Lydia, the horrible Caroline Bingley (now the Lady Warren), and Darcy's cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, now married with children of his own. He and his wife take charge of the young ladies while Mr. and Mrs. Darcy are away. It would have been nice to see Darcy and Lizzie themselves twenty-plus years after P&P, but they are barely mentioned! Not one of my favorite reads of the year. This is just one of Aston's series of novels about the Darcy family...I probably won't bother with the rest. Well written, but a little boring. We've heard it all before.