Somehow managed to miss September entirely. It was a very fast month as months go; by the end of the first week I was having the sensation that it was already over. Hopefully October will be a longer month, dragging on before we get plunged into winter.<\/p>\n
Carrot Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen #10)<\/b> “Here you go,” she said, setting the [almond] cake and the milk on the coffee table. “Try the cake and see how you like it.”<\/p>\n Mike took a bite and nodded. “I like it a lot, unless you’ve been watching Arsenic and Old Lace.”<\/p>\n “I haven’t seen it for years, and my almonds aren’t bitter,” Hannah said, referring to the fact that arsenic tasted like bitter almonds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you’re going to make cultural allusions, you’re far wiser to assume your readership is familiar with them (or at least capable of looking them up) than to assume they’re morons who won’t get it unless you point it out. A good editor ought to be able to keep these tendencies in check, but it seems Fluke’s editor was completely absent in this volume: an embarrassing extended sequence about how Minnesota is two hours behind New Jersey is ample testament to this fact. These insane lapses make me rather glad that Fluke continues to have Hannah steer clear of technology, even though these books appear to be set ‘now’ and her complete ignorance of computers and the internet is starting to verge on ridiculous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somehow managed to miss September entirely. It was a very fast month as months go; by the end of the first week I was having the sensation that it was already over. Hopefully October will be a longer month, dragging on before we get plunged into winter. Carrot Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen #10) I quite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1046,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI quite enjoyed the first couple of Hannah Swensen mysteries. They had a logical flavor to them which appealed to me — the murder would occur, a list of suspects was made, and the the rest of the book consisted of suspects being systematically eliminated until in the end we found the culprit. As the series has continued, the author has had a tendency to wander from this formula to the great detriment of the books. One book didn’t even have the crime occur until after page 200! #10 is in some ways a return to earlier form, with the crime occurring nice and early on with plenty of time for investigation. On the other hand, the murderer was patently obvious from the beginning, so all of the investigating falls pretty flat. The writing is also starting to get annoying; Fluke has a habit of having Hannah reflect for whole paragraphs on something incredibly obvious, or ‘inform’ the reader of something that would have been better picked up through dialogue or just implied.<\/p>\n