A Magical Mailbox: Sunday Salon

 IN THE MAILBOX

Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney

Publication: January 28, 2025

Soho Press

Can you tell by the cover alone that this is a horror novel? 

It seemed to me that someone rolled themself in the snow and became an eerie snowman, but.... here's the book description.

Description: 

Chilling holiday horror about an unhappy couple, Holly and Brian, running from their problems and straight into the maw of a terrifying beast, perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay and Sara Gran.

Now Sheriff Kendra Book is getting calls about a couple in trouble—along with reports of a brutal and mysterious creature rampaging through town, leaving a trail of crushed cars, wrecked buildings, and mangled bodies in the snow.

Holly and Brian... are starting to see the past, the present, and themselves in a monstrous new light. 

This last line of the description has me curious about the monster and the couple. What do you think?

Thanks to publicist Johnny Nguyen of Soho Press for an ARC of this book

Riddle of Spirit and Bone by Carolyn Korsmeyer

Publication: February 4, 2025; Regal House Publishing

The cover made me think of another horror novel. But it seems to be a mystery with magical elements.

Here's the description:

In contemporary Buffalo, Dan's world is upended when he unearths a young woman's skeleton while replacing the gas main in a city neighborhood. He and his archaeologist friends embark on a quest to piece together the mystery of her death.

In 1851, newly widowed Madeleine Talmadge and her orphaned nieces, Jane and Lydia, seek the aid of a cunning spiritualist, Alexander Dodge Lewis. Lewis leads them on a perilous journey from one séance to the next. Layers of time peel back to reveal long-buried secrets of loss, love, and murder. Riddle of Spirit and Bone offers subtle rumination on what can be observed, what can be known, and what can be trusted.

Thanks to Wiley Saichek of Saichek Publicity for an ARC of this book

Watching Helene on TV

I've been glued  to the television watching the progress of Hurricane Helene from Mexico to Florida and up through Georgia and beyond. This was not just for entertainment, as I have relatives and friends up and down the Florida coast, and a few living near Atlanta as well. 

I was glad to find out though that damages were not serious or were near misses. One had a Jamaican ackee tree split in half and a few other trees also felled in the front yard. Others described the hurricane leaving only minor damages. What a relief!

I loved visiting Tampa, St. Peterburg and Clearwater, and thought it would be ideal to live there. But I changed my mind after seeing all three cities under water after Helene! 

Were you one of those who had to undergo Helene's wrath? 

They say that since this was such a gigantic storm, no other hurricanes will be given the same name. Helene will be unique in U.S. hurricane history.

What are you reading/watching this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves  

Sunday Salon: A Psychological Thriller and Novels of Vietnamese Women

 

Just finished

The Last Days of Kira Mullan, by Nicci French. March 2025, William Morrow, NetGalley

Chef and restaurant owner Nancy North had a psychotic breakdown that has her at the mercy of her boyfriend, Felix, who is determined to run all aspects of her life from then on. No one believes her when she insists that downstairs neighbor Kira was murdered and had not committed suicide as ruled by the police.

I liked all aspects of the personality and character of Nancy, who fights for her independence and for her mental health, at the same time determined to see that Kira's death is seen for what it is. Together with detective Maud, the female investigator who is overlooked in her department, the two women dominate the story as two people who become friends, both fighting for their rights to be heard and to be given their due in their respective lives.

The ending is realistic, especially for Maud, whose outcome was nevertheless a bit disappointing for me. Overall, another good psychological mystery by Nicci French.

Reading about Vietnamese families

The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh, April 1, 2025, Atria Books, NetGalle

Genre: family drama, Vietnamese

Description: "a family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father's Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries. These mysteries begin to unravel along the way as they learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme." 

I read the previous book by the author, The Fortunes of Jaded Women, about a group of Vietnamese women whose personalities it was hard to believe at the time. But since the author is from the Vietnamese community,  there must be  some truth to the portrayals, however humorous.

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh. September 6. 2022, Atria Books

Genre: multicultural interest, Vietnamese, women's fiction, humor

Description: "a family of estranged Vietnamese women who experiences mishaps and unexpected joy after a psychic makes a startling prediction about their lives.

It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave her marriage for true love—so a fearsome Vietnamese witch cursed Oanh and her descendants so that they would never find love or happiness, and the Duong women would give birth to daughters, never sons."

A humorous novel of family superstitions and family matters.

Forgot to mention, after reading books in French, I'm now reading books in Spanish - all on my Kindle of course, with its built in dictionary aids. I took only high school Spanish, but my first attempt at reading a long novel in Spanish is going pretty well. 

El Amante Japones (The Japanese Lover) by Isabel Allende, May 2015. 

Language: Castilian Spanish​

What are you reading/watching this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves  

Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino, and Shanghai by Joseph Kanon, Historical Novel set in the late 1930s.

 

The Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino, December 17, 2024; Minotaur Books/NetGalley

Genre: detective novel, Tokyo

The body of Ryota Uetsuji was found floating in Tokyo Bay, and a suspect is his girlfriend Sonoka, but Sonoka was away in Kyoto at the time of the death and has an alibi. 

The themes of adoption and finding one's family years later is prevalent. The themes found in Sonoka's story of adoption are also threaded into the story of a police consultant, the brilliant physicist Yukawa. Misguided and misinformed individuals also make mistaken assumptions in this compelling story of family connections. 

I enjoyed the storyline and the easy way of writing by Higashino that made this detective novel enjoyable and also suspenseful. Another excellent book by Higashino and the fifth in the Detective Galileo series.

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon, June 25, 2024; Scribner

Genre: historical fiction, thriller, China

I just started this historical novel of Shanghia before WWII in the late 1930s. Daniel Lohr has escaped Germany on a boat heading for China, where refugees from the Nazis in Europe can find safety if they find their own way there.

Daniel meets another Jewish refugee, Leah and her mother Clara, on the ship heading east. He also meets a member of the Japanese military police, Colonel Yamada, who is keeping a close watch on the ship's passengers, all heading to Shanghai's international settlement, a section not under the control of the Japanese who invaded Shanghai and parts of China in 1937. 

The history of refugees in Shanghai from all over Europe and even from Russia has been covered in historical fiction and memoirs, and nonfiction. Kanon's book is the latest and I am reading it with interest in that period in China.

Update: my review of Shanghai.

Some other books I've read on Shanghai in the 1930s include:

Bernardine's Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China by Susan Blumberg-Kasoff

The Jewish salon host in 1930s Shanghai who brought together Chinese and expats around the arts as civil war erupted and World War II loomed on the horizon. (publisher)

The Far Side of the Sky by Daniel Kalla

 In November 1938 after a night of terror for Jews across Germany, Dr. Franz Adler, a surgeon in Vienna, flees to Shanghai, China with his young daughter Hannah and his brother's widow, Esther. 

The Far Side of the Sky focuses on a short but extraordinary period of Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish history when cultures converged and heroic sacrifices were part of a quest for survival. (publisher)

White Shanghai by Elvira Baryakina. The title refers to the White Russians, those fleeing the "Reds," the Russian revolution. 

Among the refugees is Klim Rogov, a journalist whose life and marriage have been destroyed by the Russian revolution - all he has left are his quick wits and a keen worldliness that will serve him well in the lawless jungle of Shanghai.  (publisher)

China to Me by Emily Hahn, a memoir.

 The American journalist/traveler Emily Hahn wrote about her own experiences living in Shanghai, Chungking, and Hong Kong from 1935 to 1943. Her book about revolution and war in China and how it affected the local people and foreigners alike is titled China to Me: A Partial Autobiography, first printed in 1944. It's fascinating reading.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. October 30, 2001, Knopf Doubleday Publishing

My 2017 review: 

"A book I have wanted to look at again. Set in the 1930s, it's about a young English detective with a faulty memory who returns to wartime Shanghai in 1937 to find his parents who had disappeared there years ago when he was about nine years old. As he is an unreliable narrator, readers have to figure out the puzzle of his past and become detectives themselves to decide what is fact and what is fiction.  Christopher meets a Japanese soldier in Shanghai who may or may not be his playmate from years ago, before the war. How Christopher reacts or doesn't react to him and how he ignores his surroundings in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion is part of his strange, delusional persona. This book intrigued me so much, I want to try again to get the hard facts of Christopher's journey, which may not be possible, given his inaccurate memory. Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki, Japan and now a British citizen living in London, is also author of The Remains of the Day, a Booker Prize-winning novel made into the award winning film with Anthony Hopkins." I'll just add now that on reading it again the past two days, I found the narrator Christopher to be a kind of English/European version of the Ugly American, representing the tunnel vision that ignored the reality of what was going on in Shanghai before and during WWII. These are some of the books I read or featured on my blog about Shanghai pre and during WWII. I would suggest looking at some of them before reading Kanon's book, Shanghai , as Kanon seems to assume his readers of the novel will already know the history.  What books are you reading this week?  Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves

Sunday Salon: Love the Stranger, and Christmas Books

 

Love the Stranger (A Queens Mystery) by Michael Sears December 3, 2024, Soho Crime ARC

Description

Ted Molloy, a Queens attorney, investigates the murder of a corrupt immigration lawyer in the follow-up to the 2022 Nero Award winner Tower of Babel.

I'm half way through this mystery novel, a legal thriller, set in Queens, NY. I enjoy the setting, reading about the multicultural, multilingual residents in the diverse area of shops, restaurants, coffee houses, grocery stores, and more in this borough of NYC.

In the book, a teenager from Yemen is suspected by neighborhood activist Kenzie, of being the hooded figure she saw leaving the scene of a crime - the murder of an immigration lawyer known to fleece his clients. However, the lawyer's files show that there may be more to his dealings than simply a disgruntled immigrant. 

I'm reading on to see what's behind the crime and the motives. 

 Christmas cozy and romance

Dark Deeds on a White Christmas: A Retired Sleuth and His Dog Historical Cozy Mystery  by P.C. James

Published August 17, 2024; BooksGoSocial

Description: He tries to live and let live. But when a killer drops by for Xmas, can this retired copper keep an innocent from going down for the crime?

England, 1964. Ex-police inspector Tom Ramsay agrees to a shared vacation with his assistant, her parents, and his loyal dog. But soon after they arrive at the hotel, the good tidings take a deadly dive when his assistant’s mother is found crouched over a corpse holding a knife.

Christmas at the Little Paris Hotel by Rebecca Raisin, September 17, 2024; Boldwood Books

 

Description: Turn a tumbledown Paris hotel into a perfect boutique, bookish retreat, and have it open for Christmas? What could possibly go wrong?

When Anais receives a near-derelict Paris hotel in her divorce settlement, her first thought is to tidy it up and sell it immediately. All she wants is to move on and forget her disaster of a marriage ever happened.

What books are you reading this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves  

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