The Mystery Book Club meets at the store on the second Thursday of every month with Barb as the fearless leader. A small group, discussion books range from historical mysteries to contemporary thrillers. Books are usually picked a couple months in advance, but sometimes the group goes crazy and lines up books for several months. As with all of our groups, the Mystery Book Club is open to anyone interested and can be a great place to meet fellow readers. We’ve seen wonderful
friendships form and grow while discussing murder and mayhem –as it should be!

JULY
SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE by Alan Bradley
Thursday, July 8, 7 p.m.

“I loved this mystery and can’t wait to hear the group’s verdict on the tale. I thought Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine, was freshly original. She’s brazen and brilliant and I think that about covers it!”

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story—of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school’s tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself

AUGUST
CURSE OF THE SPELLMANS by Lisa Lutz
Thursday, August 12, 7 p.m.

“After perusing the various mystery award winners, Barb came across this title. This series has been gaining in popularity with every book – there are now four available featuring the dysfunctional Spellman family. Happy reading!”

Isabel "Izzy" Spellman—everyone's favorite female P.I. —is back and she's just been sprung from jail for the fourth time in three months. When she finds herself homeless and simultaneously barred from the Spellman offices-cum-residence by a very inconvenient temporary restraining order, Izzy meets with Mort Schilling, her octogenarian lawyer, to hammer out a defense and save her now endangered P. I. license. Over San Francisco's best New York-style deli fare, Izzy recaps the highlights of her recent past and her encounters with the man whose villainy she's determined to unveil-even if she must break the law to do it.
When Izzy first met John Brown, she couldn't have been more pleased with Spellman Investigations' new neighbor. Handsome in a way reminiscent of her favorite Hitchcock actor*, a great cook, and interested in her, John was too good to be true so Izzy did what any sensible Spellman would do—she began to investigate him. But between his "so common, too common, conveniently common" name, his curious reluctance to let her rifle through his wallet, and the permanently locked room in his apartment, Izzy can't get the information she needs for a background check. "His kiss made me forget everything," she admits but-forced to rely solely on her gut instincts-Izzy concludes that he is up to no good.

SEPTEMBER
BAMBOO AND BLOOD by James Church
Thursday, September 9, 7 p.m

“This is another series that has been popping up on “best” lists and it’s time the Mystery Book Club gives it a try. Regardless of the storyline, it should be fascinating to read about a North Korean Inspector.”

In the winter of 1997, trying to stay alive during a famine that has devastated much of North Korea, Inspector O is ordered to play host to an Israeli agent who appears in Pyongyang. When the wife of a North Korean diplomat in Pakistan dies under suspicious circumstances, O is told to investigate, with a curious proviso: Don’t look too closely at the details, and stay away from the question of missiles. O knows he can’t avoid finding out what he is supposed to ignore on a trail that leads him from the dark, chilly rooms of Pyongyang to an abandoned secret facility deep in the countryside, guarded by a lonely general; and from the streets of New York to a bench beneath a horse chestnut tree on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the Inspector discovers he is up to his ears in missiles---and worse. Stalked by the past and wary of the future, O is convinced there is no one he can trust, and no one he can’t suspect. Swiss intelligence wants him out of the country; someone else wants him dead.

Once again, James Church’s spare, lyrical prose guides readers through an unfamiliar landscape of whispered words and shadows, a world wrapped in a level of mystery and complexity that few outsiders have experienced. With Inspector O, noir has a new home in North Korea, and James Church holds the keys.