The Inheritance

The Inheritance by Trisha Sakhlecha, 352 pages

When the wealthy Agarwal siblings gather at a remote island for their parents' anniversary, they expect their father to retire and announce the succession plan for his multimillion-dollar company. All three of the adult children are expecting to get the lion's share of the inheritance, with pricey renovations, business plans, and adventures already planned. But when he changes his mind, things get dicey, with all three assuming that the other two have caused the change. As the claws come out, so do some long-buried secrets that threaten to disrupt everything even more.

Told through alternating points of view of the sisters and sister-in-law, this book is certainly intriguing, though it's not always easy to tell who's narrating. So it's OK, nothing to write home about. But if you're looking for a good Succession-like book to read, go ahead and give this quick read a whirl.

99 Percent Mine

99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne (2019) 342 pages

Darcy's photography ambitions have been shelved indefinitely; now she spends her time working as a no-nonsense bartender. Her salary only pays for her health insurance, essential since she has had heart trouble for her whole life. She and her twin, Jamie, have inherited a cottage in poor condition from their grandmother, with the proviso that they have it renovated and sell it, splitting the proceeds. A quarrel has left them estranged. They've hired a longtime childhood friend, Tom, to renovate the house. The trouble is that Darcy has always had a crush on Tom, but snubbed him in order to travel the world, and when she came back, much later, he had a girlfriend. In order to assuage her unhappiness, Darcy has had some relationships, but never with anyone who merited permanence.

This novel serves as a dance between Darcy and Tom, as they spend time together handling the renovation, each figuring that the other is unavailable to them. There are a number of unrealistic details that just don't seem to fit properly, except to be more important later as the plot develops. How will all the connections between the characters work out? I had to suspend my disbelief, but in spite of that, mostly enjoyed the story.

How to Solve Your Own Murder

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin, 368 pages

In 1965, Frances sat for a reading with a fortune teller, and the doom-filled fortune ended up changing the course of her life — for the next several decades, she tried her best to figure out who would murder her as the fortune foretold, becoming the eccentric, paranoid old woman who lived in the sprawling estate outside the sleepy town of Castle Knoll. 

Nearly 60 years later, her great niece Annie is called to a meeting with Frances (who she has never met) at her grand home. But when Annie and the others called to the meeting arrive, they find Frances dead — and whoever solves the murder will inherit Frances' fortune. The trouble is, since Frances dedicated her life to investigating everyone she knew, there are more than a few suspects to focus on, and there's a ticking clock to get it figured out.

This book had a bit of a slow start (the sleuthing didn't start until more than 100 pages in), but it ended up being a fun puzzle mystery. It's supposed to be a series starter, and assuming that most of the background legwork was done in this book, I can only imagine how delightful subsequent books will be. Recommended for fans of Anthony Horowitz and Knives Out.

*This book will be published March 26, 2024.

The Nest

The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney  368 pp.

The four Plumb siblings have been somewhat patiently waiting for their inheritance, called the Nest, which their father delayed to be a nice mid-life supplement to each of them. However, Leo, the oldest brother has fouled things up in a big way by inebriated driving and a wreck. According to the terms of the will, the matriarch can use the money for emergency purposes and she does this to cover up Leo's scandalous actions, pay off the family of the teenage waitress with Leo in the accident, and to pay for Leo's treatment at a substance abuse facility. The remaining siblings have to band together to ensure that Leo finds a way to repay them at least in part for their lost inheritance. It's an okay story but parts were very predictable. I just didn't find it engaging enough.

The Last Anniversary

The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty (2005) 388 pages

Sophie is thirty-nine, starting to despair of finding a husband and having a baby, keenly aware that her biological clock is ticking. She broke up with her boyfriend Thomas three years ago and hasn't had luck finding anyone else. She learns that Connie, an old woman she had met through Thomas just a few times, has died, leaving Sophie her home on Scribbly Gum Island, a small island within commuting distance of Sophie's human resources job on the Australian mainland. It turns out that almost everyone in Thomas's family had really taken to her, especially Connie, who helped raise Thomas's grandmother.

Sophie is subsequently pulled in to life on the island which is notable for a mystery that had occurred 73 years prior: Connie and her sister Rose found a baby in their grandfather's old home which was rented out, who had apparently been abandoned by her parents. They raised the baby, naming her Enigma, and then capitalized on the mystery by keeping the home as it was and showing it to tour groups and selling related merchandise. Sophie's geniality helps her gather hints that indicate more is known about the disappearance of Enigma's parents than is being said openly.

This book, by the author of Big Little Lies, is like an upscale soap opera, with surprises galore. Tantalizing hints come regularly. When I thought all was said and done, even the last page knocked me for a loop. Great read!

Mother's Milk

Mother's Milk (Patrick Melrose bk. 4) by Edward St. Aubyn  288 pp.

This is the longest of the Patrick Melrose novels although it is also rather short. Patrick has finally embarked on a somewhat normal life. The beginning of this volume is told from the point of view of his older son who has inherited the habit of running internal dialogues. The arrival of a second son triggers a sort of abandonment of Patrick and young Robert from the attention of Mary who is terminally besotted with the outrageously precocious new arrival, Thomas. Patrick's own mother has bequeathed his birthright of the home in France to a New Age "Shaman" and is now slowly dying in a nursing home.Alcohol abuse, extramarital affairs, and the discussion of assisted suicide add further complications to the story. So far, this is the best one of the lot. One more book to go.

Fables 17

Fables: Inherit the Wind [vol. 17] by Bill Willingham, et al, 144 pages

The overarching plot for this volume is right there in the subtitle: Bigby and Snow's kids are put through a series of tasks that will determine which one of them will succeed their grandfather as the North Wind. Along the way, we meet the other three cardinal winds, all of whom have designs on picking a weak North Wind successor that they can manipulate. A secondary tale takes us back to Bufkin the flying monkey, who has found his way back to Oz and is leading the resistance against the evil Nome King. Finally, in a short tale tacked onto the end of this volume, Rose Red gets the Christmas Carol treatment, visiting aspects of hope ranging from a ghostly bride to Santa himself. Not a bad volume, all in all.

The nest

The nest / Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney 353 pgs.

What can you say about the Plumb family?  They are a group of extremely flawed individuals who don't make much of a family until one of them taps into a inheritance promised to all.  Each of the Plumb kids was counting on the money from "the nest" to make something right in their lives but now oldest brother Leo has been bailed out of a drunken driving wreck where his young passenger lost a foot.  This means the remaining money is about 10% of what was originally promised.  Everyone is a little peeved, to say the least. But then Leo steps up, tells them he will pay the back and charms everyone so they believe him.  He is rebooting his life and going to get it all together!  But what are the chances?  As much as you want to dislike many of these characters, you just can't.  They are all so very human and real.  First time author Sweeney does such a fabulous job here with so many of life's mysteries.  How many bad choices can one make?  Why does money mess with everything?  How does a bad childhood start you out on the wrong foot?  I can't say enough good about this book. One of my favorites of the year.

The Witch of Exmoor / Margaret Drabble 281 pp.

Recently stuck for a while in the Raleigh airport, I was thrilled to find a used bookstore. It was packed with a huge variety of titles, unlike a typical airport shop which offers ten different titles, eight of them by James Patterson. And so I serendipitously picked up this paperback by Drabble, an author of whom I was vaguely aware but had never read. (She is the sister of A.S. Byatt, but apparently they are estranged. At the moment I vote for Margaret.)

Frieda Haxby, a successful author and academic in her mid-sixties, is the Witch. She baffles and angers her three adult children by choosing to spend her later years alone in a mansion on an isolated and wild stretch of coastline. Frieda was at best a mediocre mother, and her children are primarily concerned with her sizable inheritance and whether she will fritter it away in her apparent madness. Much of the narrative concerns these three prosperous families in mid-nineties England, and their individual and collective musings about fate and the power of social class and environment on human development. Yet it's very entertaining, with loads of biting dialogue and very astute social observation, as well as plain good humor. There is mystery as well: who is living in son Daniel's attic? when Frieda disappears from her home, has she been murdered? and what happened to Frieda's sister, dead thirty years earlier? Drabble uses an omniscient narrator who talks directly to the reader in a way that could have been gimmicky but that I found delightful. A cynical and sharp tale with just a bit of sweetness at the center.

Sycamore Row

Sycamore Row by John Grisham, 446 pages.
The second Jake Brigance book, following A Time to Kill, returns to Clanton, Mississippi a couple of years later. Jake and his wife are still waiting on the insurance money from their house fire. Jake hasn't had any big cases since the Hailey trial featured in the last book, and money is tight. When the towns most reclusive citizen kills himself, renounces his will at the last minute with a hand written replacement, names Jake his estate's attorney from beyond the grave, and turns out to have a fortune beyond the imaginings of any of the town's citizens, things look as though they're going to get interesting. They never really do, though. Grisham struggles to makes sure we know how truly decent his flawed characters are, lets us know how much we should really admire them, when they're really neither admirable or interesting.  The author telegraphs his plot twists, making sure we know what's coming, seemingly to make the reader feel clever, but its sort of annoying. Everyone loves a good Grisham book, though. Am I right?

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Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger  406 pp.

This one had been on my "to read" list since it came out a few years ago. I was underwhelmed. The book is well written but loses it's way in the end. It is a ghost story of sorts but that is only a part of the story. Chicago twins Julia and Valentina inherit a flat in London and a considerable amount of money by the aunt they never met--their mother's twin sister Elspeth. The catch is they must live in it for a year and their parents must never visit the flat. In the flat below, is Robert, Elspeth's former lover. Above lives Martin, a crossword puzzle setter with an extreme case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder whose wife has left him. And then there is the ghost of Elspeth who is trapped in the apartment. None of the characters are particularly likable. The twins are dysfunctional without each other, Robert has made a career of researching death, and Martin is trapped in his flat by his mental illness. Late in the book the story takes some strange turns which. I probably could have left this off my "to read" list and never missed it.