Polar Magpies

#NatureTwinning Part 35

Lounging Polar Bear--Thursday, 2/15/18

I was going to wear this with the infamous Skyrim cardigan but when I tried it on, I realized that the "cardigan knit from the fur of 2 dozen full-grown yetis" was ready to move on to the big snow pile in the sky Goodwill from whence it came.  So this cream cardigan vest was a last minute substitution that worked out just fine.

Outfit cost per wear (OCPW): $16.14

I think this polar bear would rather be in Coldville in the endless cold of winter than hanging out in the 80 F of late summer in Ohio, but he seemed to be handling the warmth OK, all things considered.

Cincinnati Zoo

Black and White Butterfly With Blue Bits--Friday, 2/16/18

The small collection of cashmere sweaters I have from Macy's are a kind of perfect winter garment for me at work (warm-ish but very breathable), but they have the annoying characteristic of being a little bit too short.  So unless I want to be executing the Picard Maneuver all day long to stop people from seeing my belly button etc., I am well-served by wearing these sweaters with a vest and a scarf.  (Yes, I could zip the vest and skip the scarf but a: the vest isn't always long enough and b: most of these puffy/quilted vests look dumb zipped up indoors to my eye and c: skip the scarf, are you insane?)  Luckily that's in my wheelhouse.  (I recognize that layering all over the sweater sorta mitigates the whole "breathable" thing but I'm usually layered all over something this time of year, so it might as well be a comfy bottom layer, and um, at least my arms aren't feeling stuffy??)

OCPW: $9.05

Google Image thinks this is a moth, but nope, it's a butterfly.  In my attempts to identify it, I figured out that a similarly-colored butterfly I posted in November is a crimson-patched longwing aka red postman aka Heliconius erato.  But I couldn't identify this one.  The closest I could get is the white admiral, but that one has a different pattern of white that continues all the way across the bottom of the wings to the body.

St Louis Zoo

In other news...A Half-Assed Book Review for...

The Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I came across this book using a technique that has worked pretty well for me when looking for Kindle books to check out of the library: going to an Amazon page for a book I like, then looking at the the "customers who bought this item also bought" list at the bottom of the screen.  Yeah, I know, this isn't exactly Advanced Book-Finding Tactics in action, but it seems to help me flesh out my reading list.  One of the issues with doing e-books from the library is that there is generally only a single copy available (though crazy popular books from crazy popular authors will have more), so you're often in a wait list situation.  Thus you need to be able to identify books that are recent enough to be out in Kindle format but not so recent/popular as to have a mile long wait list.

Well, this one had a wait list, but I went ahead and ordered a hold on it.  (Our system allows us to put holds on up to 25 items.)  After a few weeks, I got the email just like they said I would (a veritable miracle! I almost never got the promised emails alerting me when a physical book was on hold for me), and if I recall correctly, the book had been automatically checked out to my account.

All of this is to say, just reading the basic premise of the book (and having liked the author for his Sherlock Holmes books House of Silk and Moriarty) was enough to push me to immediately get on the wait list for the first time.  Expectations were running high!

Here's the blurb:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Moriarty and Trigger Mortis, this fiendishly brilliant, riveting thriller weaves a classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie into a chilling, ingeniously original modern-day mystery.

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway’s latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the bestselling crime writer for years, she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan’s traditional formula has proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job.

Conway’s latest tale has Atticus Pünd investigating a murder at Pye Hall, a local manor house. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but the more Susan reads, the more she’s convinced that there is another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript: one of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition, and murder.

I mean, that's a seriously great sounding book, right?  An Agatha Christie-esque English village murder mystery with a whole other modern literary mystery on top of it is like a perfect combination.

So what I wasn't expecting was that the entire first half of the book is the manuscript for the latest Atticus Pund novel, The Magpie Murders (a title that the publisher didn't like because he thought it sounded too much like Midsomer Murders)!  I definitely enjoyed reading it, but some under-utilized part of my brain was in a state of low-level confusion ("wait, when is the whole modern thriller thing going to start happening? Am I missing something here?") the entire time.  I would have been able to sit back and enjoy my 3 hour flight to Houston the first 50% of the book restfully had I known the story was going to be structured this way.  So be warned.

The second half of the book describes the (mis)adventures of the editor as she attempts to figure out WTF is going on...which she does more or less as incompetently as you might expect a person not trained as an investigator to do but with a good deal of verve.  I liked this part of the book less than the old-school mystery at the beginning, but it was still OK.  The best part was finally getting resolution on the novel within the novel...which despite various characters calling it drivel while denigrating the entire genre of mystery stories (which had to amuse the author to write) was really quite good.  I think I would have been happier of the ratio of the Atticus Pund story to the editor story was more like 70/30 rather than 50/50, which could have been accomplished easily by speeding up the editor-takes-a-long-time-to-figure-it-out period.  In some ways, I thought the subplot around the editor's relationship with her Greek boyfriend was a bright spot in the second half, and perhaps more could have been done with that instead of quite so much plodding investigation.  (We know she's not Sherlock Holmes, but come on!)

Overall, the book was definitely satisfactory, though I was kind of appalled by at least one really dumb rookie mistake on the part of the editor-investigator, and of course the book couldn't quite live up to my high expectations.  But if the premise is attractive to you, lower your expectations one notch, get the book, and enjoy.

I am still liking this author well enough that I have queued Raven's Gate in my Kindle.