Memorial Day

We're watching The Longest Day about D-Day and WWII.  After that is Midway.  These are two of the best feel-good war movies ever made, but I would welcome a movie about another war, but there aren't that many.  Although there were many other war movies shown this weekend and I don't know what all of them were.  We've spent more time watching auto racing.

The Orange Curtain by John Shannon

John Shannon's fourth Jack Liffey novel.  Liffy, a former aerospace engineer, who looks for lost kids.  He is called into Orange County (CA) to search for a young Asian woman who has disappeared.  The girls parents, who are Vietnamese, are concerned.  Liffey encounters the local gangs, is taught the politics of the area by a remarkable woman, uncovers fraud in development of an airport as he follows Phoang Minh's tracks.

There is also Billy Gudger, a loser who lives with his mother, a palm reader, and believes he has a toadstone in his head.  Sometimes people laugh at him, and something happens.

This hard-boiled detective novel takes place in the L.A. metroplex.  If you like Elvis Cole in Robert Crais' books, you'll like Jack Liffey.

And now for something completely different . . .

Aunt Dimity & the Family Tree by Nancy Atherton

I usually think of Atherton's Aunt Dimity novels and M.C. Beaton's Hamish MacBeth series as very similar.  However, they are different in certain ways.

Lori Shepherd is assisting her father-in-law in setting up his new quarters, a local manor house that had been abandoned.  Since he is a widower, all of the local widows are very interested in him.  As Willis Sr. becomes embroiled in a scheme to cover a woman's holiday indiscretion, and a young couple are hired as live-in household staff, valuable objects are suddenly found rearranged in the house, and a valuable painting is stolen.  Lori, of course, begins sleuthing around, suspecting the unknown housekeeper & chauffeur.

Unlike Beaton's Hamish MacBeth, there is no real villain, and everything turns out happily in the end.  A gentle and entertaining read.