Nothing like a good book

Jacob went camping and fishing this weekend

In a tent, the fish they caught for supper

What a great experience for a twelve-year-old

            Today I treated myself to an occasional self-indulgence—a day devoted to a book. I dearly love to get lost in a good mystery, but lately I haven’t had time to read much—still proofing the Alamo book and have miles to go, plus I was reading some “serious” nonfiction. And there’s the problem that nothing I casually picked up really spoke to me.

So yesterday I started Hemlock Needle: A Maeve Malloy Mystery by Keenan Powell. And today I spent the day reading—oh, I went to church (with all three Burtons, what a treat!), and I made the stuffed lettuce from the “Gourmet on a Hot Plate” blog last week for supper tonight, and yes, I took my nap. But I read …a lot.

I chose Hemlock Needle because I know Keenan from Sisters in Crime, Guppies, and Facebook—and mostly because I know she had an Irish Wolfhound. That’s enough reason to like anyone in my book. I’ve owned those gentle giants, and I adore them, though I am saddened by their relatively short life span. Keenan ran into that too, when her Fitzhugh recently died.

But I kept reading this because it’s one of the new mystery series I’ve read in a long time. Not a cozy, which is what I usually read, but what I guess you could call a legal thriller. Set in Anchorage, where Keenan just happens to be a lawyer, so she knows whereof she writes. This is her second book in the Maeve Malloy Series.

Alaska and the Native culture are the backbone of this novel, and I find reading it is much like reading Tony Hillerman’s novels of the Navajo culture. It’s a different world for most of us, and the customs and mores dictate the direction the story will take. So does the climate. Hemlock Needle is set in Alaska’s deep winter, with plenty of snow, subzero temperatures. The plot revolves around a young woman who is found frozen to death in a snowbank—unfortunately not an unusual death for the alcoholic, homeless Native population. But Esther Fancyboy was none of those things—mother of a young son, she owned a condo and had a responsible position with a corporation that worked to bring water to remote communities.

It goes without saying that Maeve and her sidekick search for the truth behind Esther’s death and uncover corporate corruption, illicit affairs, and all manner of bad. It’s an absorbing story. And I look forward to finishing it tonight.

And now I’m back on a fiction kick, with several other titles on my TBR list. What a lovely way to spend a day. I read at my computer but today I had the patio doors open, so it was like bringing this glorious day inside. What happened to our storms?