Sunday, July 04, 2010

Ministry is Murder by Emilie Richards

Blessed is the Busybody by Emilie Richards Let There Be Suspects by Emilie Richards Beware False Profits by Emilie Richards A Lie for a Lie by Emilie Richards

A couple of months ago I stumbled across a book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble which looked familiar. Picking it up, I saw that it was part of a series—Ministry is Murder by Emilie Richards. I knew that I had read the first book in the series several years ago, and looking back through my notes, I see that I read Blessed is the Busybody in 2006. I'm pretty sure that at the time I didn't know that it was the first in a series. So, standing there in the store I snatched up all the other books in the series and set them into my massive TBR stack.

In June, I needed to find a Cozy Mystery to use in a swap at BookObsessed, and I figured that if I offered 3 books and only won one, then I'd slowly be reducing the number of books in this house. Turns out that the 3-for was popular and I'll be mailing them to Shaunesay in a couple of weeks. Of course, once the swap was over, I needed to quickly read these books or resign myself to mailing them unread. It's rare that I'll part with a book that I haven't read, so I settled down to read books 2-4 in Richard's Ministry is Murder series. And, now that I've finished reading these three, I have three other books that I also owe her and I'll save on postage (and aggravation) by shipping them all at the same time.

Oh my! What a pleasure! I definitely like Aggie Sloan-Wilcox, Ed, her Unitarian-Universalist husband-pastor, her two daughters, Teddy and Deena, and her unconventional mother, Junie Bluebird. When a dead body is found on the porch of the parsonage in Blessed is the BusyBody, Aggie discovers that her tenacity in researching and searching out the truth means that she's also a good amateur detective. Although she tries to settle back into as much obscurity as a minister's wife can have in a small town, she keeps finding herself at the heart of every murder and its subsequent investigation.

I'm very pleased to discover that a fifth book is scheduled to be published in October. I'm definitely intending on purchasing it.

Friday, July 02, 2010

June Recap

Books read in May: 11
Pages read in May: 3549
Books read in June: 8
Pages read in June: 2034
When you look at the statistics for June, it appears that I didn't do as much reading during the month as in other months. And, in some respects that is true. I only record a book—and the page count—when I finish the book. So, since I finished fewer books in June, the page count is lower.

But consider that I finished reading Beware False Profits by Emilie Richards (Book 3 in her Ministry is Murder series) at lunchtime on 1 July, and I had read more than 250 pages in that book before I went to bed on 30 June. And, I'm about 1/2 way through Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh, having set it aside at page 304 so I could quickly read the three Ministry is Murder books and get them into the mail to Shaunesay. Two other books that I'm still reading and haven't completed: I'm 1/4 of the way into the 9th and final disk of The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith, which has to be equivalent to something more than 300 pages of the 368 in the paperback version; and I'm at location 1561 of 4390 in the Kindle edition of Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters, and I figure that's roughly equivalent to page 95 of 272 in the paperback edition

So, if you add the pages from the unfinished books—949—to the 2034 pages from completed books, then it doesn't look like I was that much of a slacker in June.

Challenge Progress

For the 12x12 challenge, I had intended to read 10 novels in June, but I only completed 7. And, although I downloaded The Warden by Anthony Trollope and staged it on my Kindle and on the hubby's iPhone, I haven't started reading it. So, I haven't made any progress toward the Trollope mini-challenge in the first half of the year.

I am going to sign up for 10 novels for July's 12x12. Heck, all I have to do is finish a couple of these in-progress books and that will give me a kick-start toward the goal.

Books mentioned in this post:

Beware False Profits by Emilie Richards Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters