Drag Baseball

 Bit behind on updating, been a very long couple of weeks. But I did finish Baton Rouge Bingo, the next Scott Bradley mystery by Greg Herren. With Colin out of town, it's Frank's turn to get sucked into Scott's oddball personal life, as one of Scott's mother's friends is implicated in helping to steal Mike, LSU's tiger mascot. Of course, when Mom suggests checking out the swamp hideout her friend might be hiding out at, the find the friend shot in the back. Mind you, this leads to Scott's Dad being kidnapped, and a plot involving Huey Long's long lost box of cash/state bonds that everyone seems to think Mom knows the whereabouts of. 

Ultimately, it's a fun novel, wrapped up in Louisiana history.  

When the Saints beat the Colts

 Greg Herren's Who Dat Whodunnit takes place during the period between the Saints beating the Vikings for the Conference Championship and the Super Bowl where they kicked the crap out of the Colts. surprising everyone. In order to get us into this mindset of all of Louisiana running around yelling "Who Dat!" and "Geaux Saints!" like Cajun Cincinnati-ans... (As someone who grew up listening to crazy Southern Ohioans scream "Who Dey!" for the inferior Ohio team...)

Anyway, to tie us into the absolute insanity that happens when a city's much maligned team suddenly does well, we meet Scotty's cousin Jared, who warms the bench for the Saints, and is therefor the apple of Papa Bradley's eye. Jared just happens to be sort of dating Tara Bourgeoisie, who happens to be a more modern and plastic surgeried Anita Bryant, rallying Louisiana to kill the gays.  

Well, Tara winds up dead, shot with Scotty's mom's gun. (It seems pacifism ends when the levees break and one has to defend what's left of one's property.) And the Marina Werner, daughter of the pastor hosting the anti gay rally Tara was supposed to speak at ends up dead, also killed with Mom's gun. Jared ends up hiring Scotty and Colin (Frank is wrestling for a World Title in the  regional even team he's part of) to clear everyone in the family, since he found Tara's body and really doesn't have much of an alibi.

 Which of course leads into turning over several rocks from everyone's past, including the Bradley family, as a bunch of stinky laundry gets aired out. 

While it's a good yarn, and very engaging, I can't help but notice most of the series is set up like Murder, She Wrote, where we get introduced to a family member or family friend who either gets murdered or becomes the prime suspect.  

Sadly, the goddess in here isn't Oshun or Erzulie

 Again, running behind with updates, but I did get my hands on book 4 of Greg Herren's Scott Bradly series, Vieux Carré Voodoo. 

Now, as I mentioned previously, I started this series with book 3, then ran back and reread the first two. Given it looks like Mr Herren switched publishers between books, this one picks up a few years after the event in Mardi Gras Mambo, and deals with life maybe a year after Katrina. While Franks is now retired, he's off in SW Ohiop attending Pro-wresting school, leaving Scotty alone in the Big Easy. Sory of. We're around Easter here, as Scotty is headed to the Gay Easter Parade. We meet an old family friend, who gives Scotty back a stuffed bunny he barely remembers. Said friend takes a header off the balcony a chapter later, and we find out Colin, who we last saw as a wanted fugitive, is back in town. 

So, we essentially get treated to the redemption arc of Colin/Abram, who now didn't murder Scotty's uncles. We also get a mystery involving an artifact from a small theocracy on the India/Bangladesh border where Kali the destroyer is worshiped. (Despite the book title, when the goddess appears in Scotty's vision, she first appears with several arms holding skulls and a bunch of blood. Given the missing artifact is Her Eye...)

Any rate, most of the book becomes a race between Colin and Scotty trying to solve riddles left by the dead guy leading them to the eye while dodging a few other factions trying to recover the eye for their own reasons.  

While I enjoyed this one, I was expecting something closer to Louisiana Voodoo/Conjure than Indian dual goddess lore. Also trying very hard to figure oiut why the hell Colin is such a yo-yo character, coming in and out of the larger narrative. 

Last train to Clarksville

 Once again, summer has arrived and the pseudonymous Riley Sager has released another thriller. 

With a Vengeance has a simple enough set up. Anna Matheson and her compatriot Seamus have invited 6 people she has evidence caused the downfall of her father and the deaths of her family. The trian leaves Philadelphia at 7PM and arrives in Chicago at 7AM, giving Anna 13 hours to confront those who did her wrong until they can be arrested by the FBI when the train arrives. 

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. First up, the son of one of the invitees shows up instead of his dad, who was behind the conspiracy in the first place. That Anna and Dante dated before the fall only complicates things further. Then, during Anna's initial confrontation with the 6 conspirators, one dies of poisoning. And it turns out that, despite the train being otherwise empty, there is one other guest on board with a story of his own. Plus an engineer locked in the locomotive. 

So, we essentially have two Agatha Christie novels going on here as conspirators start dropping like flies. And the There Were None and of course, Murder of the Orient Express are both obvious inspirations in here. On the positive side, Sager's pacing continues to improve, and the twists and surprises are so much better spaced than they have been in previous volumes. On the other hand, I called one of the major twists fairly early, but at least this time ALL the twists make much more logical sense than they have in previous volumes. 

While once again not exactly undying literature, it remains good popcorn fodder, sucking you in for a while.  

MAsquerades, plagues, and kidnapped by pirates!

 I bought Penric's Labors by Lois McMaster Bujold a while back, but it's taken me a while to get to that section of my TBR pile. (Honestly, the last book left on that part of the Pile is Frank Herbert's Dune, and I'm kind of saving that for winter when my annual reading challenge is done, since I know that it's going to be a slog.)

 Anyway, we have three collected Penric novellas here, which, while in series timeline chronological order, kind of fit between other novellas in the series. Indeed, her note at the end discusses how she tends to write out of order, and then kind of affix it to the story timeline later. Which is why our initial offering, Masquerade in Lodi, has Penric unmarried. By the time we hit the last story, The Physicians of Vilnoc, he's married with a daughter. (The middle story, The Orphans of Raspay, he's married with no kids yet.) 

 So, the initial story is set in an analogue of Medievalish Venice. (Maybe a bit closer to the Renaissance?) Penric and Desdemona (his demon) get called out to a hospice to check a rescued drowning man for signs of possession. Turns out, the man is possessed, but how he got there winds up being a whole other mystery, one which Penric and the local Saint of the Bastard have to solve while running around canals at night during a festival not unlike Carnivale.

In the middle story, Penric is sailing back to his home with  an obscure manuscript, gets purloined by pirates and winds up getting held captive with two Quadrene orphans. Which of course leads to nautical fun times.

 And finally, we wind up with a bloodborne plague infecting the local fort, and it falls on Pen and Des to figure out the pathogen and how to stop it.

 As usual, these are entertaining and well written.  

Oops

 So, in Installment Immortality, Mary Dunleavy, formerly a Crossroads ghost, now a Caretaker ghost,. and always the babysitter to the entire Price-Healy clan and also now in service to the Anima Mundi...

Well, let's just say the world soul is a bit annoyed at the Covenant of St. George, who are busy locking up ghosts in bottles with things that hurt spirits, thereby effectively making ghost grenades. MAry gets suckered in to going East to stop them. Mary winds up taking Elsie and Arthur with her (the latter, who is falling apart after being reconstructed mentally from other people's memories, the former just pissed off at losing her mom and her brother). 

This leads the to Worcester, Massachusetts, where they find the Covenant, and a large society of ghosts who's roles are out of whack. 

Thankfully, none of our mains die by the end, but we do get some rather hard looks at ghost society and what's happened to the Covenant since the family blew up the training hall. 

And as a personal TW, there's an entire section on ghost dogs that really broke my heart. 

 I love this series very much.  

Down South

 Mules and Men was the actual Zora Neale Hurston recommendation I got from a friend of mine, I just started with Every Tongue Got to Confess for reasons. And frankly, the first half of this volume is pretty much like the stories in the latter, the difference being instead of just reading the story, we're instead sitting with Ms, Hurston as she collects the stories from old men drinking beer, men on their way to the swamps to cut lumber, people going to a different neighborhood around Orlando for a toe dance...

Which adds a new layer on to the stories, since it's a but easy to slip into a head space where you're sitting next to the teller, listening to them tell their tales. 

The second half involves Ms. Hurston's time in New Orleans, collecting and writing down the knowledge of the two headed doctors, the conjure men, the root workers, the Hoodoo priests. Much like what I've read about Haitian Voudon, it looks like most of this was syncretic with either Catholic or Baptist/Methodist theology, to the point where the Bible is the biggest tome of Conjure, and Moses was the GOAT conjureman. Most of this is fascinating, filled with lots of coring vegetables and stuffing people's names in them to curse them, finding out goofer dust is basically cemetery dirt, and one or two rituals that may have been practiced in era, but these days would likely be written off as either sensationalism or satanic. (At least two cats get killed during her various apprenticeships.) 

It is all fascinating reading, and a picture of an era that has passed, even if the legacy of that era and the preceding ones still linger on in contemporary society. Really happy I found these. 

The Trousers of Time

 Been rereading Pratchett again, particularly titles I only read once. In this case, I actually finished Lords and Ladies a few days ago, but my work schedule has made it hard for me to sit down and type a review. 

This is one of the "Witch" novels, set after Witches Abroad and right before Maskerade , in which the old witches run afoul of the new witches, who are also accidentally about to release the Elves. (The elves are right rotten bastards, more in line with tales of the Unseeleigh Court than with say, Mercedes Lackey.) The ruckus gets going, as Margrat is finally going to marry Verance, which means the king, as he does again in Carpe Jugulum, has invited a bunch of dignitaries. (In this case, Ridcully, the Bursar, The Librarian, and Ponder Stibbons come to Lancre from Unseen University. Which leads to a rather funny B plot in which we find out Ridcully and Granny Weatherwax nearly had a thing in their blossoms of youth.)

So, the new coven (of which Agnes/Perdita is part of) has been dancing naked by the "Dancers", iron stones protecting a portal to Elfland. For better or worse, the elves do break through, leading to things like Margrat becoming a sword bearing armor wearing queen, Nanny Ogg and Casanuda going to visit the Horned Lord, and Granny figuring out how to Borrow bees. 

It's quite a bit of fun, actually.  

The Holy Spirit can WALK!

 So, a friend of mine I will hopefully get to see however briefly in November posted a bit about Zora Neale Hurston, and her books on pre depression era African-Americans along the Gulf Coast. (There's a lot more to it than that, but that definition at least narrows down the scope.) At any rate, this lead to me finding her Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro folk-tales from the Gulf States, which prints a manuscript she had assembled but never gotten published. (She had several published, this one seems to have gotten blocked/mislaid/filed incorrectly.) 

There are several categories of tales in here, and one of the appendixes lists which state and a bit about the narrators of the tales. Which is helpful, since the dialect changes by region of narrator. (One Alabama narrator talks about  "Br'er [animal]" quite a bit, while ones from Florida and Louisiana use the full "Brother [Animal]".) And, not all of the tales are funny, although quite a few of them had me laughing. (Indeed, the title of this post comes from one early on where the Preacher is getting the "Hallelujah Corner" all riled up, causing one parishioner to constantly yell "The Holy Spirit can RIDE!". When the preacher puts out the offering plate at the end of his sermon, the same lady yells, "The Holy Spirit can WALK!" In the mean time, the book title comes from the same section of Preacher tales, in which the preacher says "Every Tongue Got to Confess!", which leads to a skinny parishioner yelling, "I confess I wish I had a bigger butt!") 

More than a few tales in here involve someone outsmarting the Devil, and more often than not stealing the Devil's Daughter away from him and his wife. (This must be a southern thing, since I've heard a few idioms from my southern friends and husband about the Devil and his wife.) There's a section of Tall Tales that read like proto-"YO MAMA!" jokes. More than a few tellers use the "N-word" quite a bit, which kind of shook me. And occasionally, a teller has a device they use that clues you in to who is telling it. (The most noticeable one is the gent who ends his tales with "And that when I put on my hat and left.") 

While I enjoyed this collection, and indeed will likely be telling a few of these as occasions arise, the forward by John Edgar Wideman has me wanting to do more reading into the era this came out of.  Seems Ms Hurston came out of the Harlem Renaissance, with a white sponsor who wanted to edit the tales as she saw fit (make the black folks look like noble savages or some such) and an African-American mentor who wanted to edit them to make the the tellers come off as good as white. Indeed, his talk of the Harlem Renaissance reminded me quite a bit of David Carter's book on Stonewall wherein the poor folks got the ball rolling, and the middle class stepped in to try to shape it to better benefit them. (That's a gross oversimplification, but close enough.)

Any rate, a good read filled with good stories.  

Drop a house

 So, been in a Pratchett mood of late, and decided to reread Witches Abroad, which follows Esme Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, and Margrat Garlick to Genua after Margrat inherits a Fairy Godmother wand. 

Essentially, we get two themes here, the magic of mirrors, and the magic of stories. Seems the current Genua fairy godmother likes trapping everyone in stories and using mirrors to amplify her powers. This kind of irks the Voodoo priestess in the swamp who has resurrected the former leader of Genua. That she can read the future in jambalaya is just a neat trick. 

Any rate, before the trio reaches Genua, we get a few interludes where they deal with local superstitions, including a vampire who winds up gettinmg beaten by Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo. Not long after we get to Genua, a house drops on Nanny Ogg. 

In the end, we find out the bad grandmother is Esme's sister(!), who's been turning animals into humans to feed the stories. 

While this is not my favorite of the Witch stories, it's really funny and has a few things to say worth pondering.