Cream Puff Murder by Joanne Fluke

 Hannah is embarrassed that she can't fit into the regency gown her mother bought her for her mother's book launch party. With the help and encouragement of her size-six sister, Hannah starts a crash diet and exercise program to try to lose 10 lbs. in 2 weeks. At the gym she encounters a workout instructor from her worst nightmares, the young and sexy Ronni Ward who seems to have had dalliances with every eligible bachelor in Lake Eden.  When Hannah finds the blond bombshell dead in the gym's jacuzzi, all Lake Eden's top detectives are taken off the case because of their "personal" involvement with the victim.  It is up to Hannah and her cadre of female helpers to find out who killed Ronni, in order to exonerate their dubiously faithful partners. 

I haven't listened to a Joanna Fluke novel is quite some time, and I enjoyed this one.  Yes, they are formulaic.  Yes, the story is formulaic, and Hannah's relationships with the two men of interest in her life are moving forward at glacial speeds, but the mystery plot is well enough crafted, and the characters of Lake Eden are, by this book eleven in the series, pleasantly familiar. I am not ready to go on a Hannah Swenson binge or anything, but listening to this book was a nice diversion during a busy week. (2009, 310 p.)

Snoop by Gordon Korman

Carter's parents are always telling him that he spends too much time looking at his phone or computer.  His screen addition leads to an accident and Carter is stuck at home for weeks with two broken legs.  During recovery, his parents take away his phone, but allow him to use his computer to join his classes via Zoom. He thinks he will go crazy until he discovers there is a website where he can watch live footage from the city's security cameras. Soon he caught up in the day to day drama he sees on the camera: a park mom with a bratty toddler, a couple of cafe owners playing tricks on each other in an underhanded feud and his school crush flirting with his arch enemy (ugh).  Then one day he sees something he can't easily believe, an endangered animal from another country running free in his small town.  He calls the police, and tries to talk to adults but no-one believes him.  How can a boy with two broken legs hope to stop a despicable crime ring if nobody listens to him?

I haven't read a Gordon Korman book is some time.  I have generally liked Korman's books, and this one is OK, but probably not my favorite.  It was a little too far fetched for me. Would a kid really get two broken legs the way he did? (I won't spoil by explaining more). Would a smuggling ring really be so inept that their animals kept getting out of their enclosures?  Would no one really not notice the smell from the building and not go to check it out?  I guess it is a fun story if you are willing to suspend belief, and I think a lot of kids would enjoy it, but it is not one I would recommend to my brightest students. (208 p. 2025)

Doing Small Things with Great Love by Sharon Eubank

 Sharon Eubank worked for Latter-day Saints Charities from 1998 until this year.  During that time she served on the Relief Society General Board, and has served as the director of Latter-day Saints Charities since 2011. She has seen how humanitarian aid efforts both work and don't work in a variety of settings and cultures.  This short non-fiction book acts like an introduction to humanitarian aid principles and includes exercises and thought questions at the end of each chapter.  Some of her main points are: it it is better to meet needs locally than from outside of communities, real solutions must be locally sustainable, it is wrong to think that you know how to solve someone else's problems, and sometimes well intentioned efforts have bad outcomes. 

I have often wondered when I have been part of a "service project" whether we the project really served the intended recipients, or merely made the "servers" feel good about themselves.  A lot of what Ms Eubank said in this book confirmed that fear. Although she gave lots of good suggestions about how to make humanitarian aid better, I did not really leave the book feeling motivated or encouraged about improving my own contribution to the world. Her approach seems overwhelming to me because of my insecurities and reserve. Showing people great love is hard because I never know if my efforts come across as caring or annoying.  I do feel grateful that the Latter-day Saints Charities is doing so much good work in the world.  (240 p.  2025)

Until Leaves Fall in Paris by Sarah Sundin

 Lucie Girard, though American by birth, has studied as a ballet dancer in Paris since she was ten years old. When Nazi's descend on Paris, she makes the difficult decision to leave her position in the ballet and buy her Jewish friends' bookstore so they will have enough money to flee the country. She is initially charmed by a wealthy American industrialist who brings his daughter to the bookstore's weekly story time, especially when she finds out he is a widower. Then she discovers that his factory has agreed to make delivery trucks for the Germans. Lucie dislikes the invasion of the Germans so much she agrees to allow her bookstore to be a "mail drop" for the resistance movement.  After mourning his wife for two years, Paul Aubrey is surprised with the growing interest he feels in the petite American who owns the bookstore. She has made her feelings about his collaboration with the Germans abundantly clear, and he is unable to tell her that his cooperation with them is only a front to cover his own resistance activities. Can their mutual love for Paul's creative four-year-old daughter overcome the distrust they feel for each other?  As tensions between the French and the Germans rise, they can no longer deny that God has brought them together for a reason.

Here is a new Christian historical romance writer I decided to try out.  I am impressed, but I want to read one more book by her before I add her to my coveted "Clean Romance Writers" list. The story had good plotting and quite a bit of suspense near the end. The characters are charming and Sundin does a good job showing how the stress of working in secret for the resistance wears on them. The book wasn't based on any real story, and doesn't, I think, quite have the historical detail that other of the WWII novels I have read, but Sundin has a nice light touch with the religious elements. It is good enough that I am eager to try something else written by this author. (2022, 416 p)

Halloween Party Murder by Leighann Dobbs

 Juniper Holiday is know for throwing the best Halloween party around. As she and her goddaughter, Victoria, make the final preparations for the spook ally in the guest house, they check the casket they borrowed from the mortuary and discover it contains a real dead body.  Juniper resigns herself to calling the local inspector, Desmond Mallard, who is as handsome as a male model but as boring as dry toast. As he starts to investigate, Juniper, with the help of her ghost and werewolf friends, decides she wants to solve the mystery before Inspector Mallard does. Her motivations are twofold; bragging rights, and because she is one of Mallard's prime suspects. 

I picked this book while I was working on a long and tedious task and needed something new to listen to in a hurry.  I thought, how fun, a Halloween book. In the end, it was squarely in the B to B- range.  The dialog is awkward and there never is any explanation why, halfway through the book, we discover that Juniper speaks to ghosts and is friends with werewolves. It is labeled as the first in a series, but I wonder if there wasn't one before it that introduced these "little" details. The upside of the book is that it is really short.  It is self-published but somehow it is available in audio on Libby, so there is hope out there for you Amazon publishing writers.  It wasn't terrible and didn't have anything objectionable in it, so if you want a very fast, very shallow, Halloween themed book, go for it. (2022, 170 p) 

Legacy of Roses by Melanie Cellier

 Rosalie lives in a small village that is under a Legacy.  It was once the location of the story of Beauty and the Beast, and some power in the village wants to keep reenacting the story. When a minor royal moves into what was the Beast's castle, Rosalie, as the daughter of a merchant who had recently had a reversal of fortune, know that she is a prime candidate to play the female lead in the Legacy's reenactment. Her life is further complicated by an ex-boyfriend who suddenly shows us and sees a way to profit from the Legacy's attempts to get the prince, Dimitri, and Rosalie to fall in love. Rosalie doesn't want to get caught up in the story, and begs Dimitri to leave, but he has recently lost his other family members and has no where else to go.  Rosalie doesn't know what terrible thing will happen if she fights the power of the Legacy, but going along with is isn't a good option either, is it?

After I finished my last book I was at a total loss on what to read next. It occurred to me that I hadn't listened to a Melanie Cellier book for a while, so I searched to see what was available.  Cellier has an enviable challenge.  She writes fairytale retellings, but she has been so successful that she ran out of stories to retell.  This is a different approach to the genre, and it turned out well enough. This is the first in a series, but she just expects the reader to accept the concept of the Legacy. We don't know where it came from or why it wants to recreate stories. I wonder if she will explore that more in subsequent books in the series, or if we are just to accept it as an axiom, and read on from there. I am actually Ok with that. Not every author is as careful and tight with magic systems as Brandon Sanderson after all. :) It looks like the next one is a Cinderella retelling and the third is Sleeping Beauty.  I don't know if I will read either of them or not. (2024, 428 p.)

Great Courses: What Darwin Didn't Know by Professor Scott Solomon

Charles Darwin is famous as the father of the idea of genetic evolution, but there was a lot about evolution that Darwin didn't ever know.  In this 24 lecture series Dr. Solomon illuminates the discoveries made since Darwin's Origin of Species that have confirmed and expanded our understanding of how evolution really works in nature and in our lives. He starts by explaining the basic premises of evolution, and then explores how the field has expanded. He uses a lot of examples of how evolution has favored changes in plant, animal, and microorganisms. He ends the series by projecting how evolution will affect the future of both the biome and the human species. 

Dr. Solomon lectures at a level that I, as a college graduate, was able to follow without much problem.  He uses a lot of interesting examples from nature that are amazing and sometimes bizarre. That being said, it was a little more dry than some of the Great Courses lectures I have learned.  Or maybe, I am just not as interested in the hundreds of species of ants as a I am about, say, the history of Europe. I think the lectures would have been more engaging if I had been able to see the visuals.  Still, I made it though 12 hours of it without feeling tempted to stop. This would be a good series to listen to if you were about to take a college biology class and wanted a quick brush-up on your science facts. (12 hrs. 2020)