Murder Past Due ; and, Classified as Murder

Murder Past Due by Miranda James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Very nicely-done mystery set in a library, with well-limned characters, including an enormous, empathetic Maine Coon cat with more empathy than many humans. I'm looking forward to reading the whole series.

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Classified as Murder by Miranda James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Another solid, funny, engaging mystery from Miranda James about a Charlie, a retired cataloger, and his enormous Maine Coon cat, Diesel. Not quite cozy, not quite non-cozy - beautifully-plotted, with an expanding cast of characters and the kind of continuity that only an author who allows her characters to evolve can provide.

In this outing, the body in the library is an old rare-book collector.  The suspects are family members whose lack of affection for each other is topped only by the old man's disdain for them, displayed in a spot-on, poison-pen will that few people would be gutsy enough to write. My only complaint about this book (and its predecessor) is that Charlie's friend Helen continues to supply him with chocolate cake that sounds so delicious that I want a piece...

Highly recommended!

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The end of innocence

The End of Innocence by Allegra Jordan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Startling and powerful, this novel examines opposing forces during and after the first World War, with conflicts that are deeply personal as well as political. Harvard sets the stage for Helen, the Americn daughter of a conservative scholar and an activist mother, to meet Wils and Riley,  German poets and cousins, whose German and British ancestries land them on opposing sides in the European trenches. Campus politics echo the intense jingoism and violence of the time as the war intensifies overseas, with students acting on these deep prejudices and going to fight even before the United States is officially in the war.

Helen and Wils are soulmates in poetry and temperament, but poetry can not keep the war from ripping their lives apart.  Each character, major or minor, fights a war against modernism, or prejudice, or the status of women. Each conflict has consequences that are defined and defied during the war, and after.

I was shocked by an afterword: the author was inspired to write the book by a very real plaque in Harvard's Memorial Church, one that exemplifies the incoherence of society's response to war heroes, alive or dead.

Highly, highly recommended.

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley. This is a fair review.

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