Bookshelf Traveling For Insane Times No. 17

I am participating in the Bookshelf Traveling For Insane Times meme, hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness. This week I am featuring books on one of my husband's shelves in the glass front bookcase we share. 

If you click on the image of the shelf, you will be able to read more of the titles.

Topping the stack are the three books in The Last Policeman Trilogy. This series follows the activities of policeman Hank Palace in a pre-apocalyptic world. An asteroid is headed for earth, and from the beginning of the series the reader knows that it will be devastating. In the first book, The Last Policeman, Hank was still a detective with the police force, new to the job, and motivated to continue investigating cases. Three months later, in Countdown City, like almost everyone else on earth, he had no job and no prospects, but he took a case for an old friend.  In the final book, World of Trouble, Hank goes on an odyssey to try to locate his sister before the asteroid hits.

Next is Malice by Keigo Higashino. Higashino is the author of the Detective Galileo Series, featuring Manabu Yukawa (“Detective Galileo”), a brilliant physics professor, and police detective Kusanagi, set in Tokyo, Japan. I have read two in that series.

However, I have not read Malice, a book in Higashino's Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga series. But now my husband's review at Goodreads reminds that I need to get to reading it very soon.


Here is the text of his review:

Malice is another meticulously plotted mystery/procedural from Keigo Higashino, author of incredibly clever The Devotion of Suspect X. This relatively brief book doesn’t waste time in getting the plot going (the murder on which everything hinges happens almost immediately) and also efficiently introduces the characters (of which there are really only five: police detective Kaga, writer friends Hidaka and Nonoguchi, and Hidaka’s two wives (one is deceased). Each first person section is an interview or account or interrogation or confession and at times it can be a bit confusing. The book has virtually no action with clever detective Kaga assembling and reassembling motives and alibis in an effort to ascertain the why of the crime. Well done.

The four books at the bottom of the stack are all from the Sweeney St. George series by Sarah Stewart Taylor

• O' Artful Death (2003) [set in Vermont]
• Mansions of the Dead (2004) [set in Boston, Massachusetts and Rhode Island]
• Judgment of the Grave (2005) [set in Concord, Massachusetts]
• Still As Death (2006) [set in Cambridge, Massachusetts]

I read the first three books in 2006, so my husband must have read them around the same time. Per the author's website: "The series features a young art historian who specializes in gravestone and funerary art -- the art of death." The entire series is summarized at the website. This was the perfect series for my husband, who is very interested in gravestones and cemeteries.

For those of you who like mysteries set at Christmas, the first in that series is set around Christmas. I had forgotten that and honestly don't remember how much that enters into the plot. See a review of O' Artful Death at Carstairs Considers.

Sarah Stewart Taylor has come out with a new book, The Mountains Wild. Maggie D'arcy is a homicide detective on Long Island, divorced with a teenage daughter. She travels to Ireland to follow up on the disappearance of a friend that happened over tweny years ago. My husband has purchased a copy. Reviewed at Lesa's Book Critiques.