Book Beginning: Pekoe Most Poison by Laura Childs

The Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs are among my favorite entertaining and relaxing reads. I love the characters, the mystery plots in a Charleston setting, and the elaborate teas and sandwich recipes. Here is the latest, #18, in the series.

Pekoe Most Poison by Laura Childs, March 7, 2017, Berkley.
Indigo Tea Shop owner Theodosia Browning attends a Rat Tea, where servers dressed in rodent costumes and wearing white gloves offer elegant finger sandwiches and fine teas, a custom from early twentieth-century Charleston, where the cream of society would sponsor teas to promote city rodent control and better public health. (publisher)

Book beginning:

Palmettos swayed lazily in the soft breeze, daffodils bobbed their shaggy heads as Theodosia Browning stepped quickly along the brick pathway that wound through a bountiful front yard garden and up to the polished double doors of the Calhoun Mansion. Pausing, she pulled back the enormous brass boar's head door knocker...nothing wimpy about this place... and let it crash against the metal plate.

Page 56:

"If Reggie was desperate enough, yes. I think he could have killed my stepdad...."

What book are you reading this Friday?
Thanks to Berkley for a review/feature copy of this book.

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader. 

Sunday Salon: Reading for Rainy Winters

The author of How To Eat a Cupcake, Meg Donohue, has written a new romance/mystery titled Every Wild Heart, March 14, 2017, an uncorrected proof received thanks to William Morrow Books.

The novel is described as a "mystery, a love story, and a mother-daughter tale about two women on a precarious journey to uncover their true selves." These are themes I enjoy reading, so I'm looking forward to this read.

Even though I enjoy the first half of cozies and like the setting and characters and the murder mystery in each, I don't always finish to the very end. But I'll probably keep reading lots of cozies this way!

Here are some new ones coming up:

The Silence of the Flans

Gone With the Twins

Cold Pressed Murder

This one I have to read through and through, as I promised myself, having not picked up one of these in the Murder, She Wrote series for a while.

Design For Murder by Jessica Fletcher, 2017, NAL
Description: "Jessica Fletcher visits New York City during fashion week, only to discover someone has rather fatal designs..."

New books I crave but don't have....yet:

The Refugees, a collection of stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer for The Sympathizer.

Music of the Ghosts by Vaddey Ratner, April 11, 2017, Touchstone. Ratner is the author of the novel on a family's escape from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, In the Shadow of the Banyan.

What are you reading and what books do you wish for this week?
Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date Also visit Mailbox Monday

Book Beginning: Miranda Warning by Heather Day Gilbert

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

Miranda Warning by Heather Day Gilbert, June 14, 2014, e-book edition.
Book description: Child of the Appalachian mountains, Tess Spencer has experienced more than her share of heartache. But when an anonymous warning note shows up in her best friend Miranda’s mailbox—a note written in a dead woman’s handwriting—Tess quickly discovers that ghosts are alive and well in Buckneck, West Virginia. Tinged with the supernatural and overshadowed by the mountains' lush, protective presence, this twisting psychological mystery is the first in A Murder in the Mountains series.

Book beginning:
I chose the day I would die.
My husband's deep brown eyes glowed as he handed me the cocoa. "Maybe you'll sleep better tonight, Rosey."
I was tied of the charade between us. I never wanted to smile at his dinner parties again. Never wanted to beg him for the children he wouldn't give me. I'd never again clean up his clothes, covered in moonshine vomit.

Page 56:
I slide the gun out of the pocket and into his hand. "Live and Let Die, my dear."

What book are you reading that you want to share with us?

Sunday Salon: Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang

Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang, January 10, 2016, courtesy of William Morrow. In early 20th century Shanghai—the novel follows a young Eurasian orphan’s search for her long-lost mother.

Where and What: I finished this last night and was pretty satisfied with the ending after a long journey with the young orphan Jialing trying to find her place during upheavals in China - the end of the Qing dynasty, the presidency of Sun Yat-Sen in a new republic, the warlord era, and the rise of the Nationalists.  

Themes include the harsh treatment of Eurasian children during those times and the plight of orphans. Jialing is rescued by Miss Morris, the headmistress of a missionary school, who pays Jialing's patrons to educate her at the school.

Themes of Chinese beliefs include the fox spirit who acts as a guardian and protector of Jialing during her young years.

Recommendation: Combine an intriguing story with history and romance, a story with twists and turns that is never predictable or boring, excellent writing, and you have a winner in this atmospheric historical novel. I gave it five stars on goodreads.

A new book that I plan to read soon:

Windy City Blues by Renee Rosen, February 28, 2017, Berkley.

About: one woman's journey of self-discovery set against the backdrop of a musical and social revolution.

When:  the middle of the twentieth century, the music of the Mississippi Delta arrived in Chicago.

What: Chess Records helped shape that music into the Chicago Blues

Who: Leeba Groski comes into her own as a songwriter and befriends performers like Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Etta James. But she also finds love with a black blues guitarist named Red Dupree.

Conflict: segregated society, family conflicts, Civil Rights Movement

Two used books I bought yesterday:

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, September 1, 2004Themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.

Mean Streak by Sandra Brown, August 19, 2014.
Theme: Dr. Emory Charbonneau, a pediatrician and marathon runner, disappears on a mountain road in North Carolina, captured by a known violent man. Her husband Jeff reports her missing, as fog and ice encapsulate the mountainous wilderness.

Eager to read both books!

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date Also visit Mailbox Monday

Sunday Salon: Winter is Finally Here

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date.

The rain has stopped and the snow has started; flurries have left a thin layer of snow, but it seems real winter has arrived.

A novel with magic and fantasy by Laurent Gaude, Hell's Gate, in translation, arrived for review from public relations for Gallic Books. A Neapolitan taxi driver tries to bring his son back from the dead by searching for the entrance to the underground. This theme reminds me of the Italian poet Dante as well as Asian beliefs.

Great Books of China: From Ancient Times to the Present by Frances Wood, published December 13, 2017,  gives an account of the books, poetry, and important literature of China that describe the history and culture.

The title of this cozy, Twelve Angry Librarians, caught my eye. I can't imagine twelve angry librarians, at least not in the same space. The book is the eighth in the Cat in the Stacks series.

What's on your reading desk this week?  

Book Beginning: The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop

The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop, July 7, 2015 by Harper Paperbacks.
"...a saga of survival set during the 1974 coup d'etat in Cyprus that tells the intersecting stories of three families whose lives are decimated when ethnic tensions erupt into conflict." 

Book beginning:
Famagusta 15 August, 1972

Famagusta was golden. The beach the bodies of sunbathers and the lives of those who lived there were gilded by warmth and good fortune.

Fine, pale sand and a turquoise sea had together created the most perfect bay in the Mediterranean and pleasure-seekers came from all around the world to soak up its warmth and to enjoy the sensual pleasure of the calm waters that gently lapped around them. Here was a glimpse of paradise.

Page 56:
The (water polo) teams were mostly made up of Greek Cypriots, but some of the strongest players were Turkish Cypriot, and he often tried to persuade his youngest brother, Ali, to come down to the beach for a game.  

Victoria Hislop read English at Oxford, and worked in publishing, PR and as a journalist before becoming a novelist. She is married with two children.

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

First Chapter: The Oxford Inheritance by Ann A. McDonald

The Oxford Inheritance: a Novel by Ann A. McDonald, November 15, 2016.
Genre: suspense, mystery

First chapter:
Oxford in the summertime was a city under siege. They came from across the oceans, from Norway and Brazil, India and Japan: civilizations old and new alike, descending on the dreaming spires and neat, lush quads as a single invading army, sounding their battle cry in the chatters of foreign tongues, faces painted with warlike stripes of sunscreen zinc. Uniting to traipse the well-worn trail from the peaceful floral walkways of the Botanic Garden to the vast, soaring dining hall at Christ Church College, divisions of race and nationality blurred beneath the Union Jack baseball caps and souvenir sweatshirts....

Book description: "At prestigious Oxford University, an American student searches for the truth about her mother’s death in this eerie, suspenseful thriller that blends money, murder, and black magic."

MEME: Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph or two, from a book you are reading or will be reading soon.