Death of a Perfect Wife

Title: Death of a Perfect Wife
Author: M.C. Beaton
Published: 1989
Genre: Murder mystery
Pages: 175


This is one of the earliest Hamish Macbeth -books, and I am reading the list the right way this time! I wanted something completely different after Fool's Quest, and these books always deliver.

Peace of little Lochdubh is broken again, this time by newcomers Trixie and Paul Thomas, who have bought a house and decided to turn it into a bed & breakfast. It's not easy or cheap, though, and Trixie is soon circling the houses of the village, looking for spare furniture, enchanting the ladies with her wifely skills. She manages to make a few enemies along the way, not in the least in the husbands whose wives are suddenly transformed, and as you can guess by the name, death comes knocking. Hamish has to solve the mystery, once again without attracting too much attention and dodging promotions.

The TV-series based on these books -which I love- is pretty independent from the books, but this has quite obviously inspired one of the episodes! Come to think of it, there's a lot less death in the series...

I haven't had a lot of time to read lately: I have two new colleagues at work, third starting tomorrow, and quiet lunch-breaks are pretty much a thing of the past. No reading, socialising! Ugh. And then I relapsed into Dragon Age: Inquisition. And started three new knitting projects. At once. Well, one is almost done, another halfway through.


   Mrs. Maclean was down on her knees, scrubbing her stone-flagged kitchen floor with ammonia. Not for her the easy road with mop and up-to-date cleanser.
   The radio was blaring out Scottish country dance music. He called to her, but she didn't hear him so he switched off the radio and she looked up.
   "What do you want, you glaiket loon?" she said, wringing the floor cloth savagely and throwing it into the bucket.
   Hamish sighed. The trouble with being a policeman in a small, normally law-abiding village was that you did not strike fear or terror into the heart of anyone.

Fool's Quest

Title: Fool's Quest
Author: Robin Hobb
Published: 2015
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 766




Only 766 pages? (744 according to some sources) It seemed a lot longer! There were no page numbers on the Kindle version, so I only now found out the actual page count.


Fool's Quest is the second book in Hobb's Fitz and the Fool -trilogy. As much as I loved the first one, it also annoyed me severely. Mostly Fitz's blindness when it came to certain, fairly obvious things. I seriously considered not reading the rest of the new books: The Tawny Man -books ended in a good place, and I could pretend that was the end. But once August rolled in and I remembered that the new book is coming out, I stopped pretending and preordered it. And reading the Rain Wild Chronicles beforehand. And, yes, I'm glad I did. Fool's Quest was wonderful.


The story picks up from where the Fool's Ass ended, moves up a few gears, and just doesn't stop. We get a few calmer moments here and there, but Buckkeep is a busy place, dragons are back, and storylines and characters from the previous books are coming together into a fine mess of intrigue and adventure. As nice as it was to see Fitz at peace at the beginning of the previous book, Fool's Quest with its larger cast feels like the older books. It feels like coming home.

Once again, I'm finding it a little hard to say much without spoilers, and without repeating what I feel I've written again and again for the earlier books: that it's just so damn good to revisit so many old favourite characters. And some of them are literally old now. It's like watching family age! And if some of the events of the book weren't emotional enough by themselves, when I started the book last Sunday, it had been fourteen years almost to date since my granny died. A voracious reader, she liked a bit of fantasy now and again, and loved these books almost as much as I did. I remember how both of us would eagerly await for the Assassin's Quest to be translated to Finnish. She was a bit like Chade to my Fitz, except with books instead of poisons. No I'm not crying you're crying!




   'How do you open the door from my old room?' I'd lost count of how many hours I'd spent searching for that trigger when I was a boy.
   He sighed and then smiled. 'One after another, my secrets have fallen to you. I'll confess, I've always been amused by your inability to find that one. I thought that surely you would stumble on it by accident if nothing else. It's in the drapery pull. Close the curtains completely, and then give a final tug. You won't see or hear a thing, but then you can push the door open. And now you know.'
   'And now I know,' I agreed. 'After half a century of wondering.'
   'Surely not half a century.'
   'I'm sixty,' I reminded him. 'And you started me in the trade when I was less than ten. So, yes, half a century and more.'




So... when's the next book coming?