Oops! My Readers and I Disagree. . .

Peaceful landscape

Sometimes you just need to stare at a peaceful landscape for a while. . . If that’s where you’re at, this picture’s for you. This has been a good week for me, writing wise, but a difficult one personally. My son had very major cancer surgery, so we’ve all been a bit on edge. I’ll pull myself together to talk about writing next week, but for now, I’m just going to say I’m so relieved my son’s surgery went well, and look forward to spending time with him during his recovery (and after!).

I’m grateful for the huge advances in oncology and surgery over the past twenty years!

Hope you all are healthy and happy.

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What I’m Reading

Agony in Amethyst by AM Stuart

I was delighted when Alison Stuart invited me to preview an ARC (advance reader copy) of this book, the fifth in her Harriet Gordon historical mystery series.

I wrote about the previous book, Terror in Topaz, here, as well as a summary of the series.

Agony in Amethyst picks up a few months after the events of Terror in Topaz. Harriet Gordon is back home in Singapore with her brother, Julian, and Julian’s new love interest Esme. Detective Robert Curran is finally coming back from wrapping up the capture of the criminal mastermind and related events.

Finally, Curran and Harriet seem to be getting together romantically! Until Curran’s career is threatened by the death of a young girl and some information Harriet blurts out in the heat of anger.

Will they catch the murderer, and will their budding relationship survive?

It’s available for preorder now, for a release date of October 28.

The Charity Shop Detective Agency by Peter Boland

This is an absolutely charming first-in-series, and I’m delighted I stumbled across it.

Three retired ladies work in a charity shop — what we in the US would probably called a second-hand store — in a small English village. They support dogs who need homes. Across the street is their nemesis, the Cats Alliance charity shop.

Aside from the occasional cat-and-dog fight, everything is peaceful until a serial killer begins going after the elderly and our trio decides they need to unmask the killer before he (or she!) kills one of them. And that’s the start of The Charity Shop Detective Agency.

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Wise Words

This was an interesting puzzle, especially since my readers and I disagree over it!

Here was your sentence:

He had swapped his usual burgundy jacket for an _______ grey calico one.

- Murder on the Nile by Verity Bright

Your word choices were inauspicious and innocuous. And perhaps my choice of sentence and words was inauspicious, because I believe the better word choice there is innocuous — “He had swapped his usual burgundy jacket for an innocuous grey calico one.”

But readers disagreed, selecting inauspicious.

My reasons for preferring innocuous are that the author pointed out that his usual jacket was burgundy, an eye-catching color, and contrasted it with a “grey calico.” Given the difference between burgundy and gray calico, I chose innocuous, meaning “not likely to give offense or to arouse strong feelings. . .” Merriam-Webster lists synonyms as “inoffensive, insipid.”

Inauspicious, though, means unlucky, “showing or suggesting that future success is unlikely.” There’s nothing in the sentence that suggests anything about luck, or lack thereof.

If any of the readers who chose inauspicious want to comment on their reasons for that selection, I’d love to hear them. This kind of interpretation is one of the things that makes the English language so much fun!