The Legacy by Katherine Webb

    This book had a slow start, but by the fourth chapter I was hooked.  I could not put it down, and even though I figured where the plot was going, I did not know how it would get there.

    Erica and Beth are sisters who must live at the house in Wiltshire, England they have inherited from their grandmother, Meredith, or the property will be sold and all proceeds donated to charity.  Though Merideth was not a pleasant or loving grandmother, the sisters spent much time at Storton Manor as children. Until that summer when their cousin Henry disappeared.  This event seems to be missing from Erica's memory. And her sister Beth? She has an eating disorder and an ex-husband who wants to take sole custody of their son. We also meet Dinny, the grown-up gypsy boy who was a big part of their lives during those visits.

    Interwoven by alternate chapters is the story of Caroline that takes place in 1902 New York and Oklahoma.  How her story leads to some answers for Erica and Beth now, keeps the reader impatiently pressing on.

    A very good book by a British author I will be watching.

Taken by Robert Crais

    I have always loved men with an 'edge'.  Bogie, Sean Connery, Steve McQueen, Bruce Willis, Daniel Craig . . . You get the picture.  I suppose that is why I like detective stories.  PI's tend to have that edge.

    Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are private investigators and do have an edginess. They are hired by a successful Latino woman to find her missing daughter.  The woman believes her daughter is faking her abduction to get money to marry her boyfriend. The girl is an honor student at Loyola Marymount and Cole doesn't think that adds up.  Soon it becomes apparent that this abduction is no fake. Both the girl and her boyfriend have become the prisoners of bajadores who steal immigrants bound for the US border and hold them for ransom. Something, it seems, that is a huge and profitable business.

    There are twists and turns, one being the true identity of the girl's boyfriend and another being the presence of Korean Mafia.  Some of the violence and graphic scenes are not for everyone. This book is tense, fast paced and filled with edgy agents, detectives and mercenaries. 

    I liked it . . .

    This is the fifth book of the series but can be read separate from the others with no problem. Each case in the five books can stand easily alone. Reads like an action movie, including the mayhem and chases.

The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi

    OMG! (As any of my grand-daughters would say.)  I can not believe I had this on my bookshelves for two years before I read it! I love this book! It is not for everyone.  The history is THICK.  But the writing is wonderful, the story complicated -  so I did not figure it out in the first half as I usually do - and the characters were unusual but believable. This book was originally written in Spanish but is about an Italian family. Yes, that is what I said.  And Dante's Divine Comedy is what holds the clues to the whereabouts of the artifacts for which they are searching.

    'They' are Dr. Octavia Salina, a nun, who is a paleographer for the Vatican, asked to decipher the tatoos and markings on the body of an Ethipian man recently killed in a plain crash, her helper (Keeper?) Kaspar Glauser-Roist, from the Pope's Swiss Guard and an Egyption Archeologist, Farog Boswell. Before long, the three find themselves tracking an acient order called the Staurofilakes, sworn to protect the True Cross of Christ. And this order is now stealing all the peices of the cross that have been kept in various religious sites around the globe. Soon Octavia, Kasper and Farog are jumping around the world, in and out of danger, tracking these Staurofilakes.

    I had to think while reading this book, but I enjoyed that.  You might also need to like, or appreciate, history to truly 'get-into' reading The Last Cato.  It has been compared to The Da Vinci Code, but I did not think it was much like it. Written before Dan Brown's novel, I think it is a much better book. For me, this is just the type of read I crave. 

    Asensi has one other book that has been translated into English and I am hot on its trail . . .

The Blue Hallelujah by Andy Straka

    I will start with saying that I fell in love with retired police detective Jerry Strickland. Though his heart could give out at any time, he has things to do.  He must redeem his wife, who died in prison after shooting a murder suspect in cold blood and he must help find his granddaughter, who has been abducted from her day camp. And this abduction is eerily similar to the abduction and murder committed by the man his wife killed years before. But no one, not even his old police buddies, wants to listen to what Jerry has to say about it. With his teenage grandson, Colin, Jerry begins his own search for the abductor and sets the record straight, in writing, about what really happened years before with his wife, Rebecca. Rebecca's story is revealed in excerpts from this written story as we follow Jerry and Colin through their own dangerous investigation.
   
    This was not a long book and I read it in five hours.  It was fun, heartwarming, exciting and original.

    Another very good quick read.