book report - march

helen simonson's major pettigrew's last stand : i really REALLY R-E-A-L-L-Y liked this book. a lot. A LOT a lot. so much that i just typed in ALOT alot, and you know me to be grammatically/syntactically correct in all things. i liked this book for the following...(not reasons, just following examples if you will)...
pg 175 roger to his father, major pettigrew and the major's response "if we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. then where would we all be?" "on a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?"
pg 200 "life does often get in the way of one's reading"
pg 230 "there is nothing more corrosive to character than money"
pg 321 the entire scene on this page as well as "passion is all very well, but it wouldn't do to spill the tea"
i only thought to mark the passages/quotes i like when i was 150+ pages in, darn it. you need to read this book. it will reaffirm to you that love truly does/can/will conquer all.

richard yancey's the highly effective detective : i liked this book. it wasn't any sort of literary genius, but it held my interest. after teddy ruzak's mother dies and leaves him a substantial inheritance, he drops his job as a nighttime security guard to live his dream : being a private investigator. his first case seems simple and silly at first; elderly parker hudson wants teddy to find the driver who ran over some baby ducks. through a series of events, teddy's baby duck case becomes a missing persons/murder investigation. i think you'll figure out who the killer is pretty early on, but there is an unexpected twist that i appreciated. (think eye-for-an-eye mentality. sometimes it's just the sort of justice deserved.) since this is the first in a series, i'm hopeful the sequential books are better than this one.

alan bradley's i am half-sick of shadows : i liked this installment more than the last one i read. (not that it wasn't any good, but this one was better.) because of financial difficulty (to put it gently), colonel de luce is forced to let the house to the filming of a new movie, starring the infamous phyllis wyvern. she, unfortunately but not surprisingly, ends up dead. the killer was a bit of a stretch for me, but i as always enjoyed flavia's involvement in solving the crime and her hair-brained scheme/science experiment to catch that slippery character known as st nick. this is a pretty quick and easy read, and i think you'll not be disappointed.