I'm not sure what genre I'd put this in. It's sort of a cozy-caper-Gothic, and I mean that in a good way. It incorporates some of the classic elements of the Gothic novel, but offers entertaining updates on them.

The central plot is this: Grace Hollister, American schoolteacher, PhD candidate, and devotee of the "bad boys" of Romantic poetry, is on a sort of research trip/vacation in the Lakes district of England when she stumbles over a body in a stream. The body turns out to be only mostly dead, and Grace is able to revive what turns out to be one Peter Fox, antiques dealer and a bit of a bad boy himself. It's clear from the circumstances that someone whacked Peter over the head and dumped him face-down in the water, and if Grace hadn't appeared in the nick of time the murder attempt would have succeeded.

Unfortunately for Grace, after she's seen with Peter the people who tried to kill him, apparently to get some sort of treasure, conclude that she's in league with him. The treasure appears to have something to do with the poet Lord Byron, and Grace soon learns that there are scarier things in life than trying to teach English to teenagers...

If the plot sounds far-fetched, that's because it is. What Gothic caper novel isn't? The thing is, this is internally-consistent, well-plotted, disbelief-suspending far-fetched, the kind that makes you hope for a rainy day so you can drink hot chocolate while reading it and really get the full experience.

The main characters are a major reason this story works as well as it does. Grace is lively and funny and deeply dubious about the wisdom of what she's involved in. She's also an update of the classic Gothic heroine--she gets in trouble more because of circumstances than because she goes wandering around in a diaphanous nightie with a guttering candle--actually, being a sensible California girl, I suspect she wears flannel pajamas and wooly socks to bed in Merrie, Chillie, Olde England.

I particularly liked the way the author handles Grace, who is occasionally wrong, sometimes downright silly, and not indulged by her author. You know the type of protagonist who is allowed to make ridiculous pronouncements and is never pulled up short, so you can't tell whether the author is having us on or really believes the words coming out of the character's mouth? Not here. Told that someone involved in the plot is a man in a turban, Grace immediately decides that turban equals cult. Oh, Grace, I thought. Shortly thereafter, Grace meets a local restaurateur, who is Indian and wears a turban. Grace feverishly wonders how thin the line is between stealing recipes and committing murder...

Stuff like the above is funny because the author recognizes that a schoolteacher in a mess like this isn't going to be Emma Peel right off the bat. There's a fine illogic to the proceedings, but as I say, there's also internal consistency. Characters do not behave conveniently to advance the plot, they're created and put in place on purpose to do so, if you see the distinction. This is fun and light-hearted fare, but when you look closely it's clear how much work went into getting the balance right.

Peter Fox is an important part of the balance. Let me say right here that I'm generally annoyed by Gothic heroes, who all-too-often strike me as pale imitations of Heathcliff (who I didn't like, either.) Peter Fox is more Mr. Rochester, sardonic but human--he's even funny. In fact, by the middle of the story I had stopped picturing him as looking like Rochester, or rather my mental image of Rochester, and was able to see the character described in the story, even to the blond hair. He has A Past, which influences his actions, but he doesn't endlessly angst about it so I almost never felt like cracking him over the head and dumping him back into the stream.

No book is perfect, and in this case I could have used a bit more exposition on the subject of Lord Byron's love life, which is important to the treasure angle. I know one generally avoids the expository dump, but as it was I had to keep flipping backward to remind myself who was who among the ex-lovers and wives and illegitimate children. A less serious problem is the fact that all the plotters appear to be...well, inept. They're far too prone to leave Grace with the tools she needs to engineer her hair's-breadth escapes. However, again, the story is set up so that this ineptitude is logical within the plot. I know some of the old noir writers claimed they were giving crime back to those who commit it, but most of us know that the vast majority of crimes are committed by clumsy amateurs. The final confrontation strikes the right balance (there's that word again) between the suspenseful and the grotesque. And the wrapup feels satisfactorily real--again, within the confines of the artificial but believable world Killian has created.

WAKING WALT is a caper novel, largely light-hearted, and this is
reflected in the fairly low body count. The plot revolves around the idea that Walt Disney has been cryogenically frozen, and needs to be thawed out to save his company. (Anyone familiar with the legends about sleeping giants like Glooskap and Fingal is nodding in agreement right now.) The Disney company
is in dire shape, and a possible cure has been found for Walt's cancer, so a collection of devoted geezers has decided that now is the time.

It would have been easy for this story to bog down completely in the minutiae of Walt's disease, the cryogenic process, and a detailed summary of where the Disney company went wrong. Instead, Pontius inserts a few crucial details about the disease and the new wonder drug, managing to sound authoritative and convincing while not bogging down on details. We don't need to know exactly how the "wonder drug" works in order to believe
it. The cryogenic process, not itself important to the story, is briefly outlined to a new recruit to "The Circle," and let go at that. We get much more information about where the company messed up, and this is framed as the cranky old men disgustedly telling each other who did what wrong. They sound so much like real old guys complaining about long-held grudges that I was on
to the next chapter before it occurred to me that I'd just read one of the most enjoyable information-dumps in history.

WAKING WALT isn't perfect: there are some minor characters who could have been used better, with the result that the mystery aspect of the story is a bit of an afterthought. It probably could be a little tighter and more active in the middle. But it's more a novel about characters than mystery, and several of these characters are very memorable. It has the kind of
ending a good, fun caper novel deserves.

I'll look forward to more by Larry Pontius.

CANIS is a dark story-- have you ever noticed that nearly all
good vet mysteries are dark? Robert Armstrong's main character, Duncan MacDonell, is the Houston city vet. He works for animal control in a city where the annual euthanasia statistics are given in TONS. He spends a lot of his time trying not to beat the snot out of local politicians who want to look good to the animal-loving public while doing absolutely nothing to help his
department, where morale is understandably low. And then something starts attacking homeless people.

CANIS is a good example of Lawrence Block's comment that people who really know their subject can confidently take you along without telling you every step. Armstrong injects credible information when and where it's needed, and he doesn't overdo it. At the same time, readers are so steeped in the miasma
of the Animal Control department that I had to stop reading several times, because I was getting as depressed as some of the euthanasia techs. A warning to sensitive readers: chapter twenty-four is very hard to read. We're taken along as Mac does his weekly walk-through of the shelter, and in few vivid lines he describes what the workers there deal with every day. There were a few descriptions of animals in the euthanasia ward that haunted
me all weekend, even though they were only a couple of lines long. (Your pets ARE spayed and neutered, right? Right?)

The thing is, by this point in the story, Mac is up to his neck in trying to figure out who and what is responsible for the gruesome deaths of at least four people, and the chapter reinforces our impression of his state of mind. It's atmospherically very effective. And his feelings of anger and
helplessness are channelled into his quest to solve this crime.

Mystery-wise, I suspected everyone. There's at least one unexpected turn of events that converts the story from a thriller to a true mystery, and although I suspected everyone, I completely missed a number of clues and so was honestly surprised by the solution. I also give Mr Armstrong kudos
for making the victims into real people, rather than pieces of a puzzle. This isn't a story for the squeamish, but it features real people and a satisfying mystery.

Review: REX, by Fred Yager

REX is the story of a boy, his dinosaur, and their efforts to outwit an evil paleontologist bent upon selling Rex (the dinosaur) to a collector of rare animals. In the middle of this action is the underlying mystery of what really happened to Davy's parents (also paleontologists) on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

REX is Fred Yager's first young adult novel, and is really more of an adventure than a mystery. It's fast-paced and enjoyable - I laughed out loud several times while reading it. Once the reader has accepted the premise of a dinosaur living in New York (this is not very difficult) and the theory that dinosaurs were smarter than I was raised to believe (a LOT smarter, in fact), this story will move you right along.

Mr. Yager is a screenwriter, and that is sometimes evident in his writing. There are a few passages, especially when Rex the dinosaur first appears, that don't so much create a mental picture for the reader as attempt to describe what's going on, in a way that doesn't really help you see it. However, other parts, like Davy's wrestling matches between WWF action figures and dinosaur figures, work extremely well. My favourite part involvs the villain, a rogue paleontologist known mostly as "the Professor," who interrupts his pursuit of Davy and Rex to correct factual errors in an exhibit of mechanical dinosaurs.

Underlying the adventurous fun of the story, which naturally escalates as Rex gets bigger and harder to hide (it's no picnic trying to keep your grandmother from finding out about the Tyrannosaurus in your bedroom), is Davy's conviction that his missing parents are alive somewhere and trying to get home. That longing is loosely tied to the story of another character, Gretchen, whose family life is also pretty lonely. Eventually, of course, the various threads of the story are drawn together in a compelling conclusion, in which All Is Revealed. Good triumphs and evil is punished in a satisfactory fashion.

REX would probably be best introduced as a read-aloud. A good dramatic reader could act as an intermediary in the places where the story reads like a screenplay instead of a novel. And young readers will certainly want to illustrate their favourite parts. The discussion of dinosaur family life alone should make for lively sessions in classrooms and living rooms. I am looking forward to the next novel by Mr.Yager.

I really did enjoy the little anecdotes in this book -- the ones about James Stewart and his dogs were especially sweet. It's worth browsing for some of those little gems, although frankly I don't think there's much here that hasn't been reported elsewhere. I can't answer for the structure of the "find your breed" quizzes, although I thought it weird that different breeds were recommended for men and women of the same personality "type." ...[I]t seems odd that no breed falls into two categories -- surely some are *both* "friendly" and "clever"?

Where Coren drops the ball and then trips over it is when he discusses people who dislike dogs, and people who like cats. ...I think it's worth taking a closer look at exactly what he does in these two chapters. Apparently, people who dislike dogs have no other redeeming features. It's interesting to see Harry Truman discussed solely in light of his failure to enjoy the company of dogs. Apparently, Napoleon grew up a dictator because he lacked the love of a good dog. This is superficially convincing, until you remember that Adolf Hitler was apparently capable of being fond of at least ONE dog in his misbegotten life. What Coren is doing here is playing to the prejudices of animal lovers, who sometimes believe we're superior to people who don't like animals. Specifically, though, it's to any inherent feelings of superiority experienced by dog lovers.

The chapter about cats and cat people is even worse -- and again, it's worse for an interesting reason. In his far superior book, *The Intelligence of Dogs,* Coren is at great pains to point out that "obedience intelligence" is only one kind of intelligence, that dogs bred for different purposes think in different ways, and just because a terrier is not as biddable as a goldenn retriever, it does not make the terrier "dumb."

Then he uses the word "dumb" to characterize cats -- repeatedly. It never occurs to Coren that an animal which is not a dog might legitimately behave in a way different from dogs. And it's obvious he doesn't know much about cats, because he mouths all the stereotypes (aloof, unfriendly, doesn't socialize with its humans) in a manner to make anyone who knows a well-socialized cat howl with laughter. ("You rarely see cats during the day." Sure, you rarely see mine, unless you happen to be near me and looking down -- they're almost always underfoot!)

Coren then quotes from a "study" he did of cat and dog owners. He doesn't reproduce his survey instrument, so there is no way of knowing whether it's reliable, but he uses it to characterize cat owners as cold, aloof, unloving people -- far inferior to the nice warm dog people! Then, just in case we haven't already lost all faith in his scientific impartiality, he proceeds to relate an anecdote from his past, in which a single, neurotic woman with obvious attachment issues is made to represent all cat people. (And yes, he says she is the quintessential cat person.) Now, if half of what he says about this poor woman is true, she was a mess -- but I know dog owners who treat their unfortunate pets in the very same ways. Turn them into picky eaters and then feed them an unbalanced diet of people food? Some dog owners do it all the time. Fail to socialize their pets and then make excuses when Fluffy bites someone? Again, plenty of dog owners do this. Let your pet run loose and then shrug when it comes to a tragic end, because "that's the natural way"? I've known several dog owners who did that, with a series of dogs. Coren's attempt to characterize these flaws as "typical" of cat people make it clear that he is unable to overcome his own dislike of cats, and either lacks the insight to realize it, or hopes to foist his agenda off on his readers.

Me, I like dogs. I like cats. And I enjoyed his earlier book. But after he's exposed his own unacknowledged prejudices to this extent, how am I supposed to believe his discussions of different breeds of dogs carry any less bias? If the only criteria he has for dismissing cats as pets is his own opinion (and he does, in fact, offer his unsupported opinion that owning a cat is just slightly better than coming home to an empty house), what if he doesn't care for a particular breed of dog? Will that influence the groupings he creates?

This is pop psychology of the most shallow, facile sort. Read this book for the anecdotess about Jimmy Stewart, but for heaven's sake don't hope for any insights into animals or people!

I have certain expectations for Gothic mysteries. First of all, the heroine must be beautiful, innocent, and plucky enough to get herself into danger from which the hero must rescue her. The setting must have a touch of the bizarre, as must the mystery the heroine solves. The hero must be a handsome, dashing man who immediately antagonizes the heroine, so that sparks fly between them throughout the novel. Also, the culmination of the novel must feature the kind of suspense that makes me wonder how on earth our heroine is ever going to get out of the mess she's in - while at the same time I am confident the writer will pull a thrilling escape from her sleeve.

CASTLE REINER, I am pleased to report, delivers on nearly all counts, and delivers big on several. The heroine, Lavinia "Vinney" Cathcart, a beautiful English orphan forced to make her own way in the world after the death of her father, takes a governess position in far-away California. Leaving behind all she knows and holds dear in the world, Vinney battles loneliness and seasickness, finally arriving at the home of Baron Reiner, whose son, Tom, is to be her pupil.

To her surprise, the Baron lives in a castle built by his eccentric father, an immigrant from some unspecified European principality. There are exotic animals on the grounds and nearly-feudal retainers on hand. When Vinney enters the castle itself, she is bewildered by how shocked the household staff apparently is at the sight of her. The reader realizes long before Vinney that our heroine bears a striking resemblance to the Baroness.

Vinney is a thoroughly likable narrator, and one of the great strengths of the novel. Her relationship with her charge, Tom, is believable - Tom is not a major character but Kinman makes him seem real while avoiding any temptation to turn him into a saccharine little angel. He is presented as a perfectly real, entirely agreeable, small boy. The hero, Paul, has complicated feelings toward Vinney - he was in love with the dead Baroness and he is both attracted by Vinney's resemblance, and resentful as the household encourages her to take the Baroness's place.

It soon becomes clear that Baron Reiner is not a sane man, and Kinman gradually reveals weird and inhuman experiments going on in the outbuildings of Castle Reiner. To add to the tension, Baron Reiner envisions Vinney as a second wife, and it's not clear whether he completely realizes she's not actually his first wife. Given what became of the first Baroness Reiner, this is not a comforting proposition.

Then the Baron decides to marry Vinney and move the entire ménage back to his homeland. Faced with marriage to a possible maniac, as well as another sea voyage (I'm not sure which she dreads more), Vinney has to do something to save herself and Tom, of whom she is very fond.

Overall, CASTLE REINER is highly enjoyable, and I did a great deal of damage to my fingernails as I read it. It is fast-paced but the principle characters struck me as largely interesting and sympathetic, and I even liked and was interested in some of the minor ones.

My biggest complaint with this book is the ending, which feels a bit abrupt. The climactic scene was upon me so fast that I had some trouble adjusting to it. There are some very interesting minor characters and situations that aren't resolved, and at least two murders we hear about at second hand but never get any resolution for. The Baron's fiendish plot is told to us second-hand and after the fact, and frankly it was interesting enough that I wish I'd been able to read about it as it unfolded. The romantic element is another area that could have used a little more time - I was perfectly confident that the male lead would fall for Vinney if given a chance, but there isn't a lot of indication that he's going to, at least not onstage. Paul is a decent man, and loyal to his lost love, and it would have been nice to see him coming to the realization that he could have a chance to love again.

However, this is still a very entertaining example of an entertaining subgenera of mysteries. I would certainly read more stories by Dr. Kinman!

Ray Gabriel, narrator of PRODIGAL LOGIC, has very firm opinions on the subject of what makes sense and what doesn't. Ray is certain about the things of which he is certain - so certain, in fact, that it doesn't take long for the reader to become suspicious. It's hard to miss the fact that Ray only becomes involved in a suspicious death because he'd happened to wander into a Catholic cathedral to do some thinking, and thus was on hand when the trouble started. It's also interesting that he was thinking about was a program for artificial intelligence, and that he'd just had the "eureka moment" of realizing that pure logic could never replicate human thought. What his program needs is a belief system. No sooner has he realized this than sudden death distracts him from his research.

PRODIGAL LOGIC is a charming mystery, and Ray Gabriel is an attractive sleuth. He protests entirely too much about his love of logic, all the while becoming involved with a mysterious woman who reminds him of his ex-wife, helping investigate a bizarre death at the cathedral, looking for traces of cult activity in Seattle, and trying to insert the logic of Sherlock Holmes into his artificial intelligence program (known as Sherlock-In-A-Box.) There are two major sleuths in this story: Ray doing the legwork, and Sherlock who is supposed to put all the pieces together. Although Ray claims that "a fact is a fact" and says he believes only in rational thought, when Sherlock reaches logical conclusions that Ray can't accept he is not above tinkering with the program. The fact that he doesn't seem to see a contradiction in this is characteristic of his personality. It certainly makes him a more interesting guy to read about than he thinks he is.

The supporting cast is good fun, too - Ray finds himself hanging around with an expert in church architecture, befriending a likable priest, and sharing Sherlock with a zealous old priest who wants to teach it to program appropriate penances. There is a flaky psychic, a weird poet, a really unusual support group, and assorted minor characters and hangers-on who, for the most part, act and talk like real people. Considering the complexity of the plot, which involves puzzles, church desecrations, and a very old crime, it's surprising how seldom Petrucci pushed my "Yeah-right" button. I was especially taken with the little moments, notably the interactions between characters. There is an art to writing clever dialogue that sounds like real people are uttering it, and Petrucci has that art. He is also extremely good at presenting a picture of a preoccupied character who is capable of forgetting all about his plans with his girlfriend when presented with an interesting problem, and who seems concerned about the feelings of the people around him even while he's being rather dense about his own.

For a novel that incorporates computer science, math, psychology, and religion, PRODIGAL LOGIC is surprisingly easy to follow, even though I have no deep knowledge about any of those subjects. This isn't a mystery for experts in esoteric matters, it's a mystery for ordinary readers who like their protagonists human and uncertain, their mysteries a little unusual.

This is, for most of the ride, a darned good thriller. The story begins with an account of an LA hostage negotiator in a situation that will haunt him forever, and it may haunt me for a while, too. Crais doesn't play up the gory aspect, what bothered me was the trip inside the negotiator's mind, figuring out what's going on about two steps behind the character. It was believable and horrifying.

When the story shifts to the here-and-now, we find ourselves in the company of Dennis Rooney..., his younger brother Kevin (probably described by most who know him as "a wimp, but not a bad kid") and Mars, who would be giving Dennis the creeps if Dennis was bright enough to pay attention.

The trio rob a convenience store for no particular reason -- it seems like a good idea to Dennis, Mars doesn't offer any objections, and poor Kevin is in the truck with them and can't talk his brother out of it. You get the distinct impression that this is par for the course for Dennis and Kevin, but Dennis really ought to be thinking harder about Mars's reaction.

Predictably, the crime goes awry. Not "predictably" as in an objection to Crais's writing, but predictably in the sense that you just know any plot with Dennis at the helm is going to go bad, and soon. The three attempt to steal a getaway car and end up holding a family hostage. Talley, the negotiator from the prologue, gets called in to deal with them. Since the events of the prologue, Talley has left the LAPD and his family life is in disarray. Portrait of the Negotiator In Crisis -- and I believed that.

So far, so good. But the family in the house has mob connections, and the mob has reasons to want to control the outcome of this situation -- and at that point I started to get impatient.

I liked Talley, who is a believable character with a believable problem. I liked the kids being held hostage, who can't believe what's happening to them and who react to each other as brothers and sisters might. I even liked poor hapless Kevin, who left the house that afternoon thinking he was going to the movies, and who, because he's a lot brighter than his brother, knows this is going to end badly. I believed Dennis, with his eternal self-justification and efforts to come up with a plan to save himself -- I just didn't believe he was going to succeed. And I was creeped out and interested in Mars. I just didn't have anything left for the mob subplot, in which Talley finds himself negotiating for his own family as well as the one in the house. I didn't care about the mobsters, and I wondered whether there could be another way for Talley to find redemption and put his life back together.

As the story spins itself out, more is learned about Mars, who is decidedly not someone with whom you'd enjoy being trapped in a house. Thomas, the young boy hostage, is seen to be brave and resourceful. Kevin finally gets up the nerve to do the right thing despite the fact he's more scared of his brother (and Mars -- because Kevin is brighter than Dennis) than he is of the cops.

And then Crais just dumps them! Okay, we know what happens to them, and it's spectacular and all, but hey! I was invested in those people! I'd just spent a couple of hundred pages with them, and I didn't want to walk away and forget about them. We eventually get back to the kids, Thomas and his sister Jennifer, but Mars, Dennis, and Kevin vanish from Crais's thoughts, and I wasn't interested enough in the people who replaced them to make up the lack. I wanted SOMEONE to spare them a backward glance. They weren't likable (okay, Kevin was, in a half-starved-pup kind of way) but Crais made me feel for them, even when what I felt was loathing, and I was angry at him for not giving me some sort of coda to acknowledge that they had existed.

The fact that I am still so worked up about this several days later obviously means something. I will certainly read more of Crais's novels, and if this one ends up a movie, as some have suggested, I'll go and see it. But I really would have preferred a story about a straight-up negotiation between Talley and the folks in the house, dealing with the complications inherent in that. Of course, I don't read books about mobsters anyway.

Ever wonder where the myth of the stalwart Mountie, righting wrongs and doing good, came from? After reading this book, I am pretty sure it started with the Mounties themselves. When the Canadian government created the North-West Mounted Police to maintain law and order in the largely unsettled West, the call went out for "men of good character." It's clear that James Morrow Walsh was that and more.

This book, written by a former Mountie, follows Walsh's career and Sitting Bull's in parallel tracks. It's a story of deceit and betrayal, and also of honour and decency. The bond between Walsh and Sitting Bull was never broken, and is shown under the most unlikely circumstances. At the same time, the behaviour of the much-maligned Sioux people demonstrates the full injustice of what was done to them by the governments of both the United States and Canada.

There are times when one person, or a very few people, can make a difference just by their own personal qualities. When the NWMP were the only law in the Canadian West, interpreting it as justly and fairly as they knew how, men like Walsh did just that. It's a shame the governments in Ottawa and Washington didn't make more of an effort to do so, too.

After having read -- and been annoyed by -- three previous entries in this series, I had sworn I'd never read another Death On Demand mystery. But I was intrigued enough by some of the reviews of this book to give it a whirl. And it is in many ways much, much better than some of the other Carolyn Hart books I've tried.

I have never felt like I was being given a chance to really KNOW the sleuths, Annie and Max. In previous books, the author kept stepping between me and them and insisting on how I should think -- "Annie is like THIS. Max is like THAT." In the end, I was told so much that I should have been shown, that I felt nothing for the sleuths at all. Hart still interferes, insisting on character traits she should be demonstrating, and there is far too much about what Max and Annie look like, as opposed to what they are like. But Annie's concern for a teenage girl comes through pretty well, and I found myself believing it. Likewise, her reluctant feelings for her estranged father eventually became believable when Hart stopped insisting.

I didn't buy the estranged father's excuses for why he'd been gone so long any more than some other reviewers have. If you really, really want to know where your child is, and only one person on earth can help you, you go to that person and make a nuisance of yourself. You don't phone and write a few times and then give up. This element of the plot was thin. Max's behaviour ("You think YOUR dad was bad? Let me tell you about MINE!") is insensitive, and I would have been more convinced if the lovebirds had had a knock-down fight over it, with a suitable reconciliation later. Hart, however, does not seem interested in delving very deeply into this relationship, and to that extent she leaves her sleuths as two pretty, but rather empty, shells.

Max's mother, on the other hand, is a hoot in this novel. And I usually agree with readers who find her irritating and unbelievable beyond words. I don't quite see why Annie, who knows Laurel is nuts, is suddenly so worried about her. And when a minor character frets that seances and such "aren't God's will," I wasn't convinced by Hart's pious disclaimer that this minor character represented "true goodness," and would be ignored at peril. I don't like people telling me what is and isn't "God's will." It too often leads to boycotts of libraries that carry books about little English wizards, and protesters explaining why God hates various sexual orientations. Hart's tendency to sermonize isn't pronounced in this novel, but that one jarred.

There are fewer extraneous references to every mystery ever written in this than in most of the "Death On Demand" novels, which is a relief. Annie's first scene features lists of other books and authors, but then Hart gets this urge under control for most of the story and mainly sticks to the point.

The real problem with this mystery is, unfortunately, the mystery itself. Hart introduces the potential victims and suspects in the first chapter, then ignores most of them in favour of Annie and her personal life for the next hundred or so pages. Which means that by the time someone is finally offed (about halfway through the book) I had forgotten who these people were -- and the explanation of their relationships was confusing. At one point, it sounds as if everyone is siblings. Then we see that some are one character's stepchildren. Then the stepmother's sister sounds as if she's actually a sibling of the stepchildren... It was confusing. And since she doesn't spend any time developing these characters, it was hard to care who did it or why. There is an obvious, overly-clever solution to the mystery, and that turns out to be it.

Hart also needs to learn a little more about what personal information is and isn't freely available on the Internet, because she has a public librarian performing feats of spying the CIA might envy. As a librarian, I am dubious. And doing things the easy way like this doesn't help the book -- the sleuths don't need to be clever or to interview the suspects, they only need a magical computer. At one point, Annie muses that conversation is a better way of gatherin information than clicking a mouse. If only Hart really believed that, it would have improved her subplot. (Hart has a habit in this book of writing in unexplained technical miracles -- at one point, someone "rigged the lights' so they'd go out at a crucial juncture. As far as I can find, we are never told HOW.)

Overall, better-written than most of this series, and with more humanity. A middling, but reasonably enjoyable, read.