Hello, and welcome to the one year anniversary of Crime Pays. I think I've done pretty well reporting out on my reading for 2012, and I look forward to adding on in 2013. If you're new to Crime Pays, you can start at the bottom of the list to your right, last January, and read forward for all the gory details. This time of year, all the other crime fiction blogs seem to report endless lists of a) the best crime/mystery/thriller fiction of 2012 (almost none of which I have read) and b) what's coming in 2013 (more to add to the list of books I will probably never get to). Not I! And no New Year's Resolutions, either. But I may see if I can figure out a way to post some of my travel journals here, since you may find them mildly interesting. And by all means, if you have suggestions for good books, please do send them my way.
At any rate, the turn of the year sees me enjoying the start of another promising series from Soho Crime, with Martin Límon's so-far-terrific Jade Lady Burning. The tough pair of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are CID detectives with the 8th Army in Seoul in the early 1970s, and while they've seen it all, Límon's strong sense of place keeps the story grounded and compelling. I'll report out on this one as soon as I finish it, which will be soon because I am really inhaling it. There have been series from Soho Crime that I've not cottoned to, but man when they hit it, they really hit it. Maybe this will be the year I write and tell them that, and they will hire me on the strength of that letter as a senior editor who works from her home in Cambridge just twenty hours a week, choosing the next great crime fiction series while being a devoted and loving wife and mother and getting to yoga regularly.
I'm also taking a little break from the dark stuff with Miranda Hart's Britishly sweet and funny Is It Just Me? (she's a kind of nerdier English Tina Fey- can you imagine), Jennifer Worth's Call The Midwife (yes, Miranda Hart is game Chummy in telly version of same), and the so-far rather melancholy My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss. Crime, England, humor, and food are an odd literary mashup, but it works for me, in fact now that I put it together it is rather the perfecta of my interests (minus musical theater of course, but that's for another day).
On deck are Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (xmas gift), Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody (ditto), Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (more in the immensely entertaining genre of look-what-a-dorkus-I-was-and-how-I-turned-that-into-being-a-super-smart-and-wildly-successful-comedienne), Benjamin Lorr's Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga (that's me, competitive yogi), and Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale (because one should just keep up with Kerr). Possibly not in that order. I'm also pretty excited that the latest Charles Todd and Andrea Camilleri books are coming out in January and February respectively. Well, that may be another New Year's Resolution: I will not buy any more books for the next week.
I note that in my introductory entry on this blog, I thought I might also note what was for dinner. That seems to have fallen by the wayside, probably because if you really want to know what we're eating you can just friend me on Facebook, and there you'll find it pretty much every day that I cook. For what it is worth, frascatelli with mustard greens tonight.
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