The Devil’s Feast by M. J. Carter Out of the Frying Pan…
The third installment of Blake & Avery has arrived (with another gorgeous cover!). I really enjoyed The Strangler Vine, the first book of this very early Victorian amateur sleuth series. The Strangler Vine is set in India at the dawn of the Victorian era and is a true adventure wrapped around a mystery. The following book, The Infidel Stain, took our British duo to London a few years later but didn’t quite enthrall me in the same way. For Feast, we remain in London, in the lanes and squares but also into the finest kitchens and private clubs of the age, where gentlemen are being poisoned. French celebrity chef and inventor Alexis Soyer, known perhaps only to food historians today, but quite real, plays a starring role in this newest book.
It comes as no surprise the history and details come across so richly from the pen of author M. J. Carter. Carter has previously written and published non-fiction history as Miranda Carter and her work is well regarded. Her research is thorough and it shows, but I know that’s not every novel reader’s favorite part of a good mystery.
… and into the fire.
I was very glad to see a new installment of the Blake & Avery series and hope for more. The second book didn’t quite capture me the way the first did, but this third book was better than the previous, but still not quite as captivating as Vine. One distinct criticism I have in this adventure is that we see far too little of Jeremiah Blake in this book. He has a couple very brief cameos before finally coming forward for the final third. It was in this final third as a reader I sat up and paid attention.
…
RECOMMEND
If you love food history, the early Victorians, or just a good British mystery, get The Devil’s Feast and the earlier Blake & Avery books. I received an advanced reader copy of this ebook via NetGalley in exchange for my review.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
Thinking of migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?
Are you crazy?
I’m the age that we learned typing on electric typewriters. We certainly had computer classes as well, just not so many computers in the building we could just learn to type on them willy-nilly.
Number Munchers on an Apple IIE.
They were for serious stuff like Number Munchers and, be still my heart, Oregon Trail. I went on from my public school education to not become an IT whiz, though I’m sometimes mistaken for one, being a big white nerd who wears glasses. And knowing “things.” I, however, am not good with technology. So, when I wanted a new site for myself and my writing, I found a good free solution: WordPress.com. It was basically free. But then I found out it had a lot of limitations, like not being able to do Google Analytics, and mailing list integration and other boring stuff I’m learning about and wanting to do.
How I migrated from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
So, I found out I’d need to buy new hosting. I went to BlueHost and with a coupon or two managed to get 3 years of hosting for not much money. They’re one of the good ones specifically for the WordPress.org platform. I followed their tutorial and at least one other on youtube to get things going and got stuck. Big time stuck. Everything seemed to be in limbo except my homepage image. I tried a couple things to get my content back and … nothing. I could tell I was making it worse. So, I got some help. Lucky for me, my city has a public tech lab where there are volunteer mentors. The thing is, they’re busy, so to schedule time with a mentor, I’d need to wait a couple weeks.
I followed their tutorial and at least one other on youtube to get things going and got stuck. Big time stuck. Everything seemed to be in limbo except my homepage image. I tried a couple things to get my content back and … nothing. I could tell I was making it worse. So, I got some help. Lucky for me, my city has a public tech lab where there are volunteer mentors. The thing is, they’re busy, so to schedule time with a mentor, I’d need to wait a couple weeks.
A couple weeks of toe-tapping and VOILA, my mentor from Do Space in Omaha gets me back on the straight and narrow in about 5 minutes and shows me where I strayed and fixed me up. Then he showed me a few more cool things I can now do with my improved platform. “This looks way more professional,” he said.
…
DIY Website Migration: Not So Bad
Thank you to the couple people who noticed things went wrong and missed me (it was very encouraging), and thank you to anyone who comes back. Remember: ASK FOR HELP when you’ve no idea what you’re doing. But don’t be afraid to dive in and try. I got 97% there with only the confidence to give it a shot and knowing the University of Youtube could be all the education I needed. It was close.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
I subscribe to more than my share of email newsletters. I read many of them every week, but one I genuinely look forward to getting is Austin Kleon‘s. Austin is a writer/artist/creative who cheers for us all in our creative efforts (you’ve probably seen his Steal Like An Artist), and he puts out a great weekly newsletter.
So, who is George Brown Goode?
In this week’s newsletter, Austin talks about starting his new notebooks by selecting a “guardian spirit” for it. I love this idea. I always have two notebooks. I keep a notebook for personal stuff, fiction, whatever — *my* stuff. I also keep one for work, officially my Curator’s Log. Now, in personal notebooks I’ll add a “guardian spirit”, but it requires a bit of thought.
For my Curator’s Log, there’s only one choice: George Brown Goode. Wikipedia has a good, though brief, article on him. I found him during my studies in Museum Science back when I was a curator larva. Goode was way ahead of his time on museum theory and understanding, believing that museums were really a place for everyone and not only that museums have a duty to the public. It will likely shock some, but these can be revolutionary ideas even today in many institutions. GBG also basically worked himself to death by the age of 45 — basically by ignoring what we now call ‘self-care,’ something that people who are deeply passionate about their work also need to remember.
So, I made this and pasted it into my Curator’s Log this morning, featuring GBG with one of my favorite quotes from him:
“The Future of Museums” by George Brown Goode, 1901.
…
With you while you curate…
So, thank you Austin Kleon for the great idea and George Brown Goode for the inspiration. Do you keep a notebook? Do you have a Spirit Guardians for your passions? I’d love to learn about them! Leave a comment!
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
I haven’t read all the nominated books this year, not even close, and I’ve reviewed even fewer — However, there are two especially I’d like to draw your attention to.
Come Twilight by Tyler Dilts is up for best paperback original (I read it as an ebook without harm). You can read my full review of Come Twilight by Tyler Dilts, the latest installment in his contemporary mystery-thriller series featuring Long Beach, California police detective Danny Beckett. Sorry for the dark cover, but it’s a screenshot on my darkened phone while reading in bed. Yes, it’s that good.
Earlier this year, I also read, loved, and reviewed Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye. If you haven’t already heard of this book, it’s a wonderful, edgy exploration of Jane Eyer’s story. You won’t be sorry you picked up this one, or frankly any other book by Lyndsay Faye. It also happens to have one of the most beautiful and interesting covers of the year as well.
Congrats to all the wonderful mystery writers on this list, and congratulations to us fans of mystery novels — we’re spoiled for choice!
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
I love a good series of mysteries and I fall absolutely in the “Read Series Books In Order” camp. I’ll even research an order to a series if the author says there is no order. When left without an authorial order, or a fan derived one, I default to publishing chronology. Yes, I’m a big ol’ nerd. Then, I at least get a similar experience as original fans of the series.
A great place to figure out series order is on LibraryThing. Just type in the title of the book and under it will appear the name of the series and a number. Click that link and it will take you to a series page (here’s the page for Laurie R. King‘s Mary Russell – Sherlock Holmes Series). I love that the orders for series are largely sorted out, but also include things that maybe you’ve missed — like short story appearances in out of the way anthologies.
Mary Russell – Sherlock Holmes series by Laurie R. King
I hate spoilers and in the past when I’ve jumped to a later book and it’s like: “Why was she here? What business did she have, placing flowers on the grave of my beloved side-kick…” NOOOOOO!!! What happened!?? GAHHH!! SIDEKICK IS DEAD!!?? Yep. They were killed as punishment for my skipping around, that’s why.
That said, I’ve been doing it again, and haven’t been stung too bad so far. Since I’ve started writing myself, I have discovered another layer of enjoyment reading a good story that takes the sting out of my misdeeds. I’m coming to see the mechanics of the story a little more. Sort of like my experience as a museum curator and visiting museums on vacation and admiring mounts, signage, and good interpretive tools.
What about you? Do you skip around within a book series, or are you a ‘no exceptions’ order reader? Leave a comment and let me know, or request to join my new Facebook Group and we can all share!
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
I’ve never been one of those ‘New Year, New Me’ people. You want to make a change? Do it. Do it now. Do it later, if you must, but don’t wait on the calendar to change. Calendars go, changing with a precision I understand about as clearly as my earliest ancestors watching the fiery sky ball go up and down.
Calendar for Success
2016 was a toughy.
Some good, some bad, some tough. Some really bad. It was also the first year I’ve tracked my writing. I’ve been writing off and on for years, but I’ve set a goal to be able to support my family with my writing in the future, and step one was to see just how much I can do. My daily schedule has more demands than ever since I became a father half-way through 2015, my partner and I moved in together, and she was unemployed, then unevenly employed, and now full-time employed, but on a different schedule than I am. So, when I’m home, I’m home alone with our son. It’s impossible to write with a computer on one knee and a toddler on the other. These aren’t complaints, just acknowledging what I have to plan around to be better this coming year.
2016’s goals? A review.
So many writing podcasts….
Going into 2016, I knew I wanted to write novels and non-fiction too, like so many others, (I have for years). But from what I learned I wasn’t sure …. how. So this year, I listened to *all* the writing podcasts (seriously, there are so many and many of them are great!), lurked and read lots on kboards and lots of different facebook groups as well. I think I’ve got down what I need to do, but there’s still the doing. At least I have encouragement from my partner (check her out!)
I wrote quite a bit last year at the holidays, and I could hit 1000 words each day without too much trouble. It felt doable that first week, so I set 1000 words per day as my initial goal. It didn’t last long. I cut it back to 500 words per day, net on projects. No adding in journal writing, or blogging, etc. 500 words on fiction and/or nonfiction projects. That’s been more doable with the very little time I have available. But consistency has been a long way off, but I tally that up to how inconsistent my home-life “schedule” has been.
From my word tracker.
I did a little better hitting that 500 words/day goal, achieving just over 85,000 words in 2016. Yes, that’s not even half of my annual goal, but you know hitting it nearly every other day (statistically) is a big win for me. I’ve never measured my words before, I wasn’t sure what to go by, so this feels really good.
So, where did those words go? Well, another big win for me was publishing my first piece of fiction in the flash fiction series Mondays are Murder with Akashic Books. So, only 1000 words, but still — I’m proud of it. The other 85,000 words? Another small portion went into a non-fiction book I’ll be publishing soon. It’s the journal of a young teacher in western New York in 1887. It was a fun project, and I’ll have more about it soon in my facebook group.
A cover idea for my upcoming nonfiction book. What do you think? Leave a comment!
I also worked on two different historical series — one is a mystery series set in 1930s Denver with a private investigator who is a veteran of the WWI air corps. The other is more of a thriller series set in the 1910s, featuring a female magazine writer who becomes the guardian of her young nephew and goes on adventures. These have been tons of fun to write and once I’m ready to launch you’ll be the first to know.
I was also short of my reading goals this year as well, but I tracked them better than before, but I definitely missed a few books somewhere in the late summer/ early fall and forward.
I read 28 of 30 books I was hoping to read this year. I remember setting the goal of 30 books last year and thinking that was doable. I was close! There were a few (maybe a lot) of DNF books too — too long-winded usually, or narrators/ protagonists I couldn’t spend the amount of time with I’d need to to get through the book. So these are just the *finished* books, not every one I cracked open.
What about 2017?
Well, I think I’ll try to read the same number of books and shoot for 30 again. But, I need to write more. A lot more, but instead of trying for a higher daily word count, I’m going to aim for consistency. I also need to hit *publish* on a few things. It looks more and more likely that I’ll be doing just that on my first non-fiction book very soon. Details to follow, of course. Until then, why not be my friend on Goodreads?
Remember the post IN THE MUSEUM: A JFK AUTOGRAPH MYSTERY? Well, the video produced out of that work is now live, and apparently has been for a while, but I missed it.
Anyway, the gist of the video: A very young, not yet famous John F. Kennedy signed a copy of his book Why England Slept to Father Edward J. Flanagan, founder of Boys Town. We’re not sure when/ how/ where that happened, but it did. I do have a photo of a very young JFK signing a copy of this book to Spencer Tracy dressed as a priest on a movie shoot. Given the timing, Tracy could have been in the middle of shooting the sequel to the movie Boys Town, Men of Boys Town. Maybe, Spencer had JFK sign a copy to Fr. Flanagan. No word from the Tracy estate that he had a signed copy too. Fr. Flanagan was out to California for some shooting at different times, but we don’t know for sure when, so he may be just out of shot on this too. Who knows.
So, this video was a lot of fun to work on with our in-house writers, videographers, and editing people. Our organization is pretty big and focused on child care, so getting to use these amazing resources toward history and the museum, in particular, was a real treat.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Tyler Dilts’ latest installment in his current Long Beach Homicide series is fantastic.
Long Beach homicide detective Danny Beckett has had it rough, but things are starting to look up. That is until someone tries to kill him by blowing up his elderly Toyota Camry. The people around him, his fellow officers, his partner, and even his girlfriend do what they can to keep him safe from the mysterious people who have targeted him. And he hates it.
RECOMMENDED
I’m new to the series, which usually means I don’t get the ‘inside jokes’ and things, but it felt more like spending time with a group of great people, old friends, after hitting it off with a member of the group who is nice enough to include and accept you. I felt comfortable jumping in so late in the series and look forward to future books from Tyler Dilts.
I received a free ebook copy for review.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
A very hectic week in the #museumtrenches with construction underway on a new exhibit, and lots of IT upgrades. But, I still managed to squeeze in some research. Turns out J. Edgar Hoover gave a high school commencement address in 1941. Curious if we had a copy of this speech I was delighted to find this card in the folder with the text of the speech.
So very official-looking. Usually, you get a letter or maybe a boring sheet of paper. I’ve seen similar cards before, but this one struck me as kinda cool. It makes me think I need one for my museum and archive. Maybe not with borders and Federal typography, but something reflective of the institution. I may need to think about this a little.
FBI Research Unit
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
No, you did not. UNLESS your name is Linda F. and your AOL email address starts with JDC. Thank you, Linda and everyone else that entered to win A Front Page Affair.
Linda, please get in touch! I’ve tried emailing you and it appears you’re not seeing those emails (probably because I have words like “You’ve Won!” in there.)
No, you did not. UNLESS your name is Linda F. and your AOL email address starts with JDC. Thank you, Linda and everyone else that entered to win A Front Page Affair.