I finished Be Buried in the Rain by Barbara Michaels, and I gave it the usual “Michaels B+.” It is the story of Julie Newcomb, a med student who goes to Virginia for the summer to take care of her elderly grandmother on their ancestral estate in Virginia. The skeletons of a young woman and a baby are found around the same time, and nobody knows who the bones belong to or how they got to where they were found, in the middle of the road, in a place called Dead Man’s Hollow, which runs through Julie’s family’s property. It becomes Julie’s mystery to solve. This book’s biggest flaws are only obvious in retrospect. Consequently, I enjoyed it quite a bit as I was reading it, but I am slightly disappointed by it now that it’s over. Getting to the end was pleasant, if a little unexciting, but then everything happened in a rush. The main character had a lot of repressed memories that she couldn’t recall until it was convenient for the plot, and that tarnished the resolution of the mystery. But, the last paragraph was eerie and so perfect that it made up for a lot of the problems elsewhere in the book. If only Michaels had managed to sustain an aura of suspense to match it! Add another fifty pages or a faster build to the climax, and it could have been a great book. Too late to fix it now, though. As published, Be Buried in the Rain is an enjoyable read but not a keeper.
I am close to finishing The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware’s work is often compared favorably with Agatha Christie’s, which is why I decided to read this book. Christie was a great mystery writer because she had a knack for inventing memorable detectives and interesting scenarios that play fair with the reader. It didn’t hurt that she often set her stories in a time period that has a high nostalgia factor now. Her writing style is simple and comfortable, which is probably why it’s so popular, but it’s not otherwise noteworthy. I make these judgments after decades of reading and rereading almost all of her major works. I don’t have nearly as much experience with Ware’s books, so I can’t fairly compare the two writers. Judging by what I’ve read so far, Ware seems to have some of same knacks that Christie did, and I think her writing has a little more flair. But what strikes me most about The Woman in Cabin 10 is how intensely real it feels. If Ware can keep up this level of tension all the way to the end, then I will have to say that she is a great mystery writer, too.
I saw on the Tor website that Judith Tarr was rereading Andre Norton’s work. That got me into a nostalgic mood, and I decided to reread Norton’s Witch World myself. The only copy my library had was an omnibus edition containing the first three books of the series and an introduction by C.J. Cherryh. Cherryh writes,
If you read the Witch World ages ago and have somehow strayed away from that marvelous sense of wonder–read them again. Some books of your youth may not be as good as you remember–but in this case, classic means what classic ought to mean. The Witch World just gets better and better with rereading. It’s so far ahead of the science of the age that it still works its magic.
I read Witch World and several of its sequels when I was a teenager. I liked them, but I didn’t love them. I didn’t read any of them more than once, and I didn’t finish the series. It will be interesting to see how I like the Witch World now. I plan to start reading it tonight.