Where the crawdads sing, by Delia Owens

Hard to put my finger on whether I liked this very popular recent novel or not.  The author’s past writings have been scientific – she is a zoologist with a PhD in Animal Behavior – and this is her first work of fiction.  Set on the coast of North Carolina during the middle of the last century (it effectively ends in 1970), the story revolves around Kya, or the Marsh Girl, as she is known to the townspeople in the tiny fishing village of Barkley Cove.  When she is seven, her abused mother leaves the shack in the marshy countryside that her alcoholic and violent husband has brought her to after running through his money and chances in New Orleans where they met.  Soon her older brothers and sisters also wander off, and finally Jodie, the brother who, at 12, is closest to her in age, also leaves.  For a time, her father treats his remaining child kindly, but eventually he also succumbs to his demons and leaves.  At ten, she is left to her own devices with no money, no education, and no family.  Kept alive by her knowledge of the marsh, a kindly black owner of a boating supply store, and luck, Kya grows up a mystery to her neighbors.  When Tate, a boy a few years older, offers to teach her to read, she proves to be an able student – eventually she is devouring scholarly tomes and is studying, painting, and describing the life of the marsh around her.  But there is trouble in paradise when the innocent teenager is seduced and abandoned by the town’s bright star and quarterback, Chase, who will turn up dead years later with Kya the prime suspect.  There is a bit of a YA sensibility about the book, and the premise of Kya’s survival alone and her becoming a self-taught scholar and noted author at twenty are hard to believe.  But the author  shines in her loving descriptions of the flora and fauna of the marsh, estuary, and ocean.  Hmmmm…..maybe stick to science writing?  368 pp.

Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear

The first in a series of mystery novels featuring Maisie Dobbs.   As the book opens, Maisie is setting up her first office as “M. Dobbs.  Trade and Personal Investigations.”  The year is 1929 but soon flashes back to 1910.  As Maisie begins her solo career as an investigator, we learn her backstory as the daughter of a poor working class man who is overcome, as is 13 year-old Maisie, by the death of his wife.  But Maisie's fortunes improve when she is taken in as a maid by Lady Rowan.  Her love of reading – sneaking down at night to haunt the library – and her unusual ability for self-education attract the attention of Lady Rowan’s friend, Maurice Blanche, a private investigator, who becomes her mentor.  Her formal education, when she earns a place at Girton College in Cambridge, is interrupted by the outbreak of The Great War and she serves as a nurse behind the front lines.  These varied life experiences will form her acute psychological sensitivities which will serve her well in her new job.  As she investigates a possible case of infidelity, it leads her The Retreat, a home for battle-disfigured and mentally affected soldiers.  But behind its compassionate mission, there is something very odd about it.  Interesting blend of the suffragette era, the aftermath of WWI with its devastating effects on the youth of Britain, and a mystery novel.  294 pp.

Magpie murders, by Anthony Horowitz

A clever, entertaining, but too-long novel within a novel.  The centerpiece of the book is an almost complete mystery novel by Allan Conway, the eighth in his best-selling series featuring detective Atticus Pünd.  This very Agatha Christie-like tale is set, of course, in a quiet, cozy village.  But, as always, things are not what they seem.  Like the best of Christie, the reader is left guessing which of the many characters “done it,” the vicar, the son of a deceased housekeeper, the possibly autistic groundskeeper, the daughter of the lord of the manor, who was passed over completely when her twin brother inherits, etc.?  But maybe we’ll never know as the last chapter is missing.  At which point the book returns to the frame tale of Conway’s editor, Susan Ryeland and her world.  When Conway himself is dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances – was it suicide or was he pushed – the fictional mystery becomes a part of real life and the reader has two cases to solve – what happened to and in the last chapter of Magpie murders, and what happened to its author. 496 pp.