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Full Bodied Murder
Full Bodied Murder
Christine M. Blum | 2017 | Mystery
5
7.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Uneven Debut
Annie “Halsey” Hall has moved from New York City to Southern California, buying a house on Rose Avenue just a couple miles south of Santa Monica. She’s excited about her new neighborhood, except for her snooping next-door neighbor, and pleased to have been invited to join the Rose Avenue Wine Club. On her way to her first meeting, Halsey and her puppy, Bardot, stumble into the wrong house and find a dead body in the backyard. Even though Halsey has never met the victim, the police consider her their prime suspect. With the help of her new friends, Halsey begins to investigate. But with everything happening in the neighborhood, will they be able to figure out what really happened in time to clear Halsey?

Even though I don’t drink wine, I decided to give this book a try after meeting the author. I wanted to like it since it is set in Southern California, and I got a kick out of seeing the characters going to places I’m familiar with. However, I found the book was just a bit too unfocused to really work well. I thought there were timeline issues early on until I began to realize that the book takes place over several months. This wasn’t obvious early on, so maybe it helped explain some of the timeline issues I thought I saw. While Halsey is developed as a main character, many of the rest are still fairly flat. They can certainly develop as the series progresses, so I’m not too concerned about that yet. The book has a couple of interesting sub-plots, but they take over at times, and too much happens in them over the course of the book. It would have been better to stretch them out over the course of several books. The mystery plot has a lot going on, but it worked to keep me guessing until the very end. However, one key piece of evidence made me shake my head. It would have made more sense if the book took place over a week instead of many months. There is quite a bit of foul language for a cozy, even compared to some of the cozies and traditional books I read that are pushing the boundaries. Overall, this reads more like an early draft that needed some polish to find the gem inside, because there is certainly a gem here. Since I already have the second book, I might find some time to read it to see if the issues resolve themselves as the series progresses.
  
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Natasha Khan recommended Blue by Joni Mitchell in Music (curated)

 
Blue by Joni Mitchell
Blue by Joni Mitchell
1971 | Folk, Rock, Singer-Songwriter
9.2 (6 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I was only about 13 when I heard it and it was another one that I played a lot in my bedroom. There was a trilogy of females, which was Joni Mitchell's Blue, Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love and Bjork's Debut that I discovered when I was 12 and obviously had a huge impact on me. But Joni Mitchell, for me, her voice is like an instrument, the same as Bjork's - I just loved hearing a woman's voice that sounded so free and was doing weird things to my brain, pulling it around. How do you even talk about something like this? You just end up saying a load of cliches! There's songs like 'River' and 'Blue' and I didn't know anything really as a 13-year-old about California and Laurel Canyon and the psychedelic 60s and what had happened to everybody, the disenchantment they maybe felt later on. I didn't really understand the background of that, yet there was this woman coming out of my speaker, her feminine energy and her freedom, her expression, her unapologetic rawness, again, and the beauty and competence, and weird tunings, it all completely made sense to me. It all sounded like this amazing place that smelt like pine trees and had golden, yellow sunshine and long hair and tapestries and curtains and cats and guitars. I thought: "What is this place that this woman is talking about?" Actually it's just this universe inside of her, she's like this amazing building full of beautiful things, so complex and so deep and intellectual. I just think she's fully competent on so many levels! I was listening to Carole King, Tapestry, at the time, and that's another beautiful record, but Joni Mitchell's is just emotionally more complex. It was meandering and had movements and parts to it and her voice would soar. There's that bit where she's saying, "hell's the hippest way to go, I don't think so but I'm going to take a look around it": there's that onset of disenchantment, where she's sick of this bullshit, and Joni Mitchell's so good at seeing through the bullshit - it's not this throwaway, idealistic, hippy kind of thing, she's always burrowing a little bit under the surface. As a young girl, hearing women talk about travelling, going on an aeroplane, missing California, being in Paris, seeing some guy playing guitar and writing a love note on a napkin to her. It's like good life experience, listening to that through someone else."

Source
  
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Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated My Scientology Movie (2015) in Movies

Nov 5, 2017 (Updated Nov 5, 2017)  
My Scientology Movie (2015)
My Scientology Movie (2015)
2015 | Documentary
Hilarious and mostly frightening
Louis Theroux returns in this feature documentary film about probably one of the most controversial subjects out there - Scientology - mostly because of its secretive and yet obtrusive nature in to those who try and question it. It's about 25 per cent hysterically funny and 75 per cent just plain terrifying.

After the Church of Scientology refuses to cooperate in making a documentary, Theroux teams up with former senior church official Mark Rathbun to create dramatic reconstructions of incidents within the church witnessed by Rathbun and other ex-Scientologists. They focus in particular on alleged violent behaviour by the church's leader David Miscavige at its secretive Gold Base facility in California, which Theroux visits.

From being followed almost immediately at the start of filming, to being issued letters from lawyers of the Church of Scientology - their reputation precedes them. There is a sense of unease throughout, and even paranoia / claustrophobia. Theroux also raises questions about Rathbun's own former complicity in the church's "terroristic" activities, leading to tensions between the two. While it doesn't reveal as much as some documentaries, it's entertaining and reiterates everything Scientology seeks to distance itself from - being seen as a cult. Great watch.
  
A is for .... Alibi
A is for .... Alibi
Sue Grafton | 2017 | Crime, Mystery
7
8.2 (17 Ratings)
Book Rating
Strong female P.I. lead (0 more)
Tiresome descriptions of unnecessary things (0 more)
Good time-killing mystery
This is the first book in the Kinsey Millhone "Alphabet" mystery series by Sue Grafton. I listened to the audio-book narrated by Mary Peiffer.

Kinsey Millhone is a Private Investigator based in the fictional city of Santa Teresa in California in the 1980s. In this outing she is hired by Nikki who is out on parole for her husband's murder and despite doing the time is still wanting to establish her innocence and find out the real killers identity.

The tough headed Kinsey goes head long into picking up the cold case digging up old secrets and ruffling a few feathers. I liked her as a strong female lead who, despite this being written and based in the 80s, is a lot more independent than many recent female leads I’ve read.

The main story isn’t the most exciting and the book suffers from a lot of unnecessary waffly descriptions and talk of her jogging (it’s a taboo word to me.)

I’ll be carrying on with this series as the audio-book was a pleasant distraction and I think Kinsey has a lot of potential to be a great character.
  
Designed for Haunting
Designed for Haunting
Sybil Johnson | 2018 | Mystery
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Designed for Your Halloween Reading Pleasure
It's a couple of weeks before Halloween, and Aurora “Rory” Anderson and the rest of her painting friends are working on the annual benefit they put on where they sell their work for charity. That changes when Rory gets an e-mail from Zelena, a friend in her painting group that says the e-mail is being sent to Rory because Zelena is missing. As Rory begins to investigate, she learns that no one has seen Zelena for several days. A dead body just increases the stakes. Can Rory figure out what is really happening?

This is a great mystery with several other mysterious happenings that help cloud the issue. Yet as Rory sorts through what applies to the main mystery, she leads us to a clear picture of what happened. It all comes together in a page turning climax. The characters are strong; the new characters do their job of keeping us wondering what is really happening while Rory and the other series regulars were a delight to be around. This book evoked a Southern California Halloween for me perfectly, complete with a potentially spooky sub-plot or two to add to the seasonal fun.