How to Handle a Cowboy by Joanne Kennedy (2014)

Picked this up in Wall Drug, South Dakota on the way home from Wyoming. Was just looking for some light reading with a Wyoming/Western theme and this fit the bill with hunk on the cover. Yes it was a typical romance, but I did like Sierra Dunn and her devotion to the boys in the group home she was setting up in a small town in Wyoming. Another lost friend, Riley, lands on her doorstep. Ridge is a rodeo cowboy, whose career is over due to a major injury. He is looking for ways to fill the rest of his life. Training horses is one part of it, but he wants to do more and offers to volunteer working with the group home boys, to pay back a bit of what was given to him. Here he meets Sierra and we have the attraction, but reasons on both sides not to engage. I did like the small town Wyoming details, the way they watch out for each other, the things that are important to them in this wide open country. I also liked the fact that the two main characters weren't isolated, but part of a past with connections to other people; Ridge has his brothers and the townspeople.

Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd by Alan Bradley (2016)

I hadn't listened to a Flavia de Luce novel for a while, so I thought I would try one again. She does grate on my nerves, but is one spunky and brilliant twelve year old. I have skipped a few of the books in the series and a part of me wants to go back and see why she was sent to Canada and how she fared there, and I'd like to see how she continues growing up, so maybe I will go for some more. Maybe it is the voice of the reader, though it is perfect for Miss know-it-all Flavia, that makes it even more annoying.

For half this book, Flavia is gallivanting about on her bike Gladys - in the winter, often not sufficiently dressed, or taking trains into London. She is asked to deliver a message to Roger Sambridge, a carver, but she find him hanging dead from the back of his bedroom door. She records the details of the scene before she reports it and then goes about following up on all those that may be connected in some way. She finds first editions of Oliver Inchbald's famous children's books, and one inscribed to a girl Flavia knows named Carla - who has a terrible singing voice, but mentions an adventurous deceased aunt Louise Congreve. Of course she figures it all out and passes her deductions to Inspector Hewitt. I never was sure how much he had figured out himself.

In her personal life, Flavia has just returned from Canada, but doesn't like her sisters, so she avoids them. Her father is ill in the hospital with pneumonia, which concerns her greatly, but she somehow never gets around to visiting him over the course of the book. I understand being so concerned that you want to avoid an unpleasant situation, but to be told he shouldn't have visitors would have never stopped anyone like Flavia. Her best friend seems to be the butler Dogger. With her mother gone, at least there is Mrs. M. looking out for her - to the extent she allows herself to be looked after.

The Unquiet Dead (2015) by Ausma Zehanat Khan

Suggested by my audio book store owner, this was a combination mystery and historical novel, a bit like Daniel Silva does with Israeli history. I was not prepared for the intensity of it, and it was about a part of the world - Europe even, where I was unaware of another atrocity, though I lived through it. This time it was about the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990's.

The story is in current day Toronto - for a while it sounded like the places in Canada were further north, but then I realized that Etobicoke and Scarborough were just suburbs of TO - I have friends living in both. What I did not know was that there are bluffs along Lake Ontario. In my youth I walked along Scarborough beaches, but never came across the bluffs. Will have to remember to check them out when I next visit TO.

Back to the story - Christopher Drayton fell off the bluffs and it appears that this was just an accident, so police are not investigating. But Esa Khattak is asked to look into it, as he works with cases involving ethnic minorities, and he asks Rachel Getty to help him. There is an interesting dynamic between the two of them, and she seems like a few other women investigators I have read about, who have an unhappy family life, not much of a social life, so work becomes very important to them. She has a brother that left home seven years ago that she has been trying to locate. Rachel is definitely my favorite character in the book.

There are quite a few colorful characters in this story - Nate, an old friend of Esa's who lives in Drayton's neighborhood, but something seems to be off between Nate and Esa. Then there is Drayton's fiance Mel - a big bosomed money grubber, who doesn't much care for her two girls, except when their loving dad wants to spend time with them. There is a museum opening in the neighborhood commemorating Andalusia, a hisotrically rich part of southern Spain, which is being developed by a librarian named Mink. The girls like to help out there, and Drayton and other neighbors have been interested in supporting the museum with donations. A couple of gardeners keep the gardens blooming. There is some question about Drayton's identity and pulls us into flashback of the horrors of the literal slaughter of the Muslims by Serbs in Srebrenica and other Bosnian towns.

I have to say I was intrigued by the author's first name Ausma. I was wondering if she was a Latvian who married a Muslim. Most biographies of her were very brief, but then in an interview I realized that she definitely did not have a Latvian background. Just a coincidence with names. I will have to check out her other books.