Alexander McCall Smith is one prolific writer. This gentleman must surely write with a dictaphone strapped to his wrist. He’s enthralled us with the Botswana mysteries,the Portuguese Irregular Verbs, the Isabel Dalhousie series, and the Edinburgh-set 44 Scotland Street series.

Now from somewhere up his left sleeve, the magical Scotsman has managed to produce yet another start of what promises to be a series filled with a collection of the kind of quirky characters that make his writing so endearing.

Set in London, Corduroy Mansions is the affectionate nickname of a crumbling mansion block in Pimlico, a vibrant, just-slightly seedy neighborhood. We meet William, a wine merchant determined to have his 24 yr-old son leave the nest and find his own digs and a decent job; Marcia is the boutique caterer who yearns to be more than William’s friend.

MP Oedipus Snark, aptly named, frustrates most people who come within his circle, including his girlfriend Barbara, a literary agent who really should know better; his mother, analyst Berthea, is writing Snark’s biography, even though she hates her son. Berthea also has her brother to look after. There are art students and, lest I forget, the delightful Freddie de la Hay, a Pimlico terrier of exceptional intellect who insists on wearing a seat belt and is a vegetarian.

This very readable book goes down smoothly like a glass of exceptional cabernet. End your summer with a great read like this little jewel.

Bradley won the Debut Dagger Award  of the Crimewriter’s Association for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, featuring the precocious and resourceful eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce.

Set in 1950 in rural England, Flavia is as unusual a protagonist as one could find. Brilliant at chemistry, her passion being poisons, Flavia develops a genius for solving crimes, especially murders. The youngest sister of three, older sisters Ophelia and Daphne thrive on pranks (and worse) to hurt Flavia’s feelings. Her widowed father spends his days involved with his precious stamp collection, leaving Flavia plenty of time to pursue her chemistry studies and to solve mysteries.

The family cook, Mrs. Mullet, and a butler/handyman/gardener named Dogger complete the family cast. There are the villagers of Bishop’s Lacey, too, the small town nearest to Buckshaw, the de Luce mansion.

In book one, Flavia is intrigued when a dead bird with a stamp through its beak is found on Buckshaw’s doorstep. Only hours later, Flavia stumbles across a man lying in the kitchen cucumber patch, and catches his dying words. The girl is appalled and delighted at once. “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.”

Bradley  is spot on with the period notes and social strata he describes. Flavia’s voice remains youthful and intelligent but oddly endearing, as she rattles around the huge house amusing herself. When she meets Inspector Hewitt and his two sergeant’s, he is acutely aware he is in the company of someone unusual.

I gobbled this book up quickly because I knew the second installment was waiting for me in my suitcase (yes, I know, buy a Kindle or Nook for travel). Would Bradley capture me again? Would Flavia’s voice continue to hook me? The answer is a resounding yes to both questions.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag finds Flavia having to untangle a new and a years-old murder. Riding her trusty bicycle,Gladys, around the area, Flavia introduces us to a madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood, a catatonic mother in a dovecote, and a German soldier obsessed with the Bronte sisters. Introduce a puppeteer, a brush with electricity, and a long-dead boy, and you’ve got the makings of another book I couldn’t put down.

Flavia has an added asset that Inspector Hewitt lacks: a quiet child is often overlooked as adults gossip and talk. In this vein Flavia is able to obtain needed information to help solve the murders.

Each of these books are reads that will have you wanting more of the irrepressible Flavia de Luce. Auntie M can’t wait for the next one!

The second offering for your summer reading pleasure is Curse of the Spellmans. Izzy, the Get Smart-obsessed narrator, returns to explain just how she has managed to be arrested for the fourth time in three months.

This time Izzy is enduring court-ordered therapy and works her way through two therapists. By now, if you’ve read the other two books, this will come as no real surprise to you.

Izzy is being blackmailed, too, and has sworn off her PI work. As the book opens, she doing a stint as a bartender at her favorite watering hole, the Philosopher’s Club, which Rae frequents for her shots of ginger ale. Izzy is out of a place to live, out of solid work, and has to decide whether she wants to go back into the family business or not.  Henry Stone has acquired a girlfriend, which has led Izzy to see just where her fickle heart has been diverted. And Rae continues to be Rae, a most precocious teen who is learning to drive and helps herself to various vehicles by very imaginative means.

The same format, the same humor, but with increasing imagination, if that’s at all possible, make this one mandatory reading for laugh-out-loud summer fun.

Heads up: There’s a fourth installment, The Spellmans Strike Again, which will be read before August is gone.

I expect more of the same and am truly looking forward to it.

Prolific Nora Roberts Bride Quartet was mentioned here once before when I reviewed the first book, Vision in White. The books revolve around the story of four childhood friends, Parker, Emma, Laurel and Mac, the founders of Vows, one of Connecticut’s most popular and successful wedding planning companies. In the first book, photographer Mac finds her true love.

Book 2 in the series continues the story of the ups and downs of running weddings, showers and rehearsal dinners for everyone from Bridezilla to The Perfect Couple in Bed of Roses. This time the focus is on Emma, the florist of the pack and the true romantic. She yearns for a lifelong love affair with her man, if such a thing is possible.

Book 3 in the series is Savor the Moment, another delectable piece of romantic candy. This time baker Lauren is up for the spotlight.

For those of you looking for a mega-dose of romance to cool your days, try one of these sparklers.  All are quick to read, maybe while you sit on the beach and let the sand sift through your toes.  Roberts Book 4 will premiere in November, when Parker gets her man. But trust me, if you read the others, you’ll already know who her Mr. Right will be.

As a proud Gen X’er I get a lot of my news and info from Internet news sources.  With the massive amount of information available to me, content organization tools make my online time more efficient and pleasant.  Two of those tools that help streamline my online experience are Readability and Instapaper.

Instapaper

While online, I frequently find and receive links to pages that I would love to look at, just not at that particular time.  A number of quick, dirty, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions are available for this problem, including: leaving the links open in separate tabs until an opportunity to read presents itself; emailing the links to yourself; or bookmarking the pages.  But each of these fixes presents problems of confusion, disorganization, and clutter.  Enter Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/).  Instapaper is a free application that provides subscribers with the means to save webpages in a neat and organized fashion for later viewing. A  quick, easy, and painless installation places a link, “Read Later”, in the bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Read Later” link saves a page to your Instapaper account.   Accessing your Instapaper account page reveals a record (list) of your saved content as well as a link to read those pages at your convenience.  Instapaper offers a number of ways to manage your saved pages, but some highlights include: an option to load a text-only version of your saved page, the ability to archive your content or export it to a folder, as well as to edit and delete an entry. Oh yeah, Instapaper is also available for your iPhone as well.

Readability

Unfortunately reading all those saved pages is often a less-than-pleasant experience.  Filled with links that open pop-ups when moused-over, distracting side columns, and annoying adds and animation, the online article format can usually be described as, and  I’m being charitable here, the dogs breakfast.  But there is a fix available to deal with this issue.  Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) is a free and powerful online tool that strips the extraneous info from your articles and renders them in a simple text format for easy reading.  Similar to Instapaper, installation is a breeze and place a “Readability” link in your bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Readability” link reloads your page in a clear and easy-to-read format.  Readability offers a fair degree of customization as well, including the option to change font type and size, article format, and margin size, as well as the ability to print content in Readability’s new, neat format.

Used in tandem, Instapaper and Readability are a powerful combination of tools that may improve your online information retrieval and consumption experience.  If you spend time online and run into problems of the sort listed above, give these programs a shot.

As a proud Gen X’er I get a lot of my news and info from Internet news sources.  With the massive amount of information available to me, content organization tools make my online time more efficient and pleasant.  Two of those tools that help streamline my online experience are Readability and Instapaper.

Instapaper

While online, I frequently find and receive links to pages that I would love to look at, just not at that particular time.  A number of quick, dirty, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions are available for this problem, including: leaving the links open in separate tabs until an opportunity to read presents itself; emailing the links to yourself; or bookmarking the pages.  But each of these fixes presents problems of confusion, disorganization, and clutter.  Enter Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/).  Instapaper is a free application that provides subscribers with the means to save webpages in a neat and organized fashion for later viewing. A  quick, easy, and painless installation places a link, “Read Later”, in the bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Read Later” link saves a page to your Instapaper account.   Accessing your Instapaper account page reveals a record (list) of your saved content as well as a link to read those pages at your convenience.  Instapaper offers a number of ways to manage your saved pages, but some highlights include: an option to load a text-only version of your saved page, the ability to archive your content or export it to a folder, as well as to edit and delete an entry. Oh yeah, Instapaper is also available for your iPhone as well.

Readability

Unfortunately reading all those saved pages is often a less-than-pleasant experience.  Filled with links that open pop-ups when moused-over, distracting side columns, and annoying adds and animation, the online article format can usually be described as, and  I’m being charitable here, the dogs breakfast.  But there is a fix available to deal with this issue.  Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) is a free and powerful online tool that strips the extraneous info from your articles and renders them in a simple text format for easy reading.  Similar to Instapaper, installation is a breeze and place a “Readability” link in your bookmark toolbar.  Clicking on that “Readability” link reloads your page in a clear and easy-to-read format.  Readability offers a fair degree of customization as well, including the option to change font type and size, article format, and margin size, as well as the ability to print content in Readability’s new, neat format.

Used in tandem, Instapaper and Readability are a powerful combination of tools that may improve your online information retrieval and consumption experience.  If you spend time online and run into problems of the sort listed above, give these programs a shot.

Stephanie Plum’s major assignment this time around is trying to raise over $700,000 to secure the release of her kidnapped cousin Vinnie. Yes, the same Vinnie who is the owner of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds and her boss, although she personally loathes the man. His gambling debt to a mobster has set this whole caper in motion.

Helping Stephanie, as only she can, is file clerk Lula, she of the spandex outfits she squeezes her zaftig body into; and Connie, office manager, who decides to lend a hand getting Vinnie back. All three are more anxious to save their jobs than to save Vinnie, but since it boils down to the same thing, off they go.

Stephanie’s on-again, off-again romance with cop Joe Morelli is in an ‘off’ stage in this one, so sexy security expert Ranger ramps up the heat.  Of course, Stephanie still needs to find her usual collars to keep the business going, as the trio search for Vinnie.  There are encounters with a Jersey Turnpike toilet paper bandit and a drug dealer with a pet alligator named Mr. Jingles. Really.

And no Plum novel would be complete without a turn from Grandma Mazur, one of the funniest characters ever put on the page.

You can’t get better summer reading than putting on the sunblock and settling down with the fast read.  I’m waiting for Stephanie and company to be put on the big screen.  Perfect for a quick read of laugh-filled brain candy.

The Shadow of Your Smile is her29th suspense novel, excluding the five holiday novels she’s written with her daughter Carol. That doesn’t include her short story collections (three), a children’s book, an historical novel and a memoir.

In the interests of summer reading, the predictability turns out to be a good thing. This one goes down like an icy pina colada, quick and easy.   The plot revolves around a long-standing family secret that threatens the life of an heiress, who, in true MHC fashion,  doesn’t know she IS one.  Pediatrician Dr. Monica Farrell fills this bill nicely.

A greedy foundation, battling family members, and even the beatification of a saint all come into play. Really. Of course, there’s the little question of murder here and there, but it all gets sorted out at the end of the day.

I’ll have another pina colada, thank you.

What makes a good summer read? For me, it’s a book that’s quickly paced with enough plot to keep me reading. These are ‘brain candy’ books, the ones we look forward to, dependable reads from long-standing authors. I know I will not be hit over the head figuring out long-winded philosophical treatises. I will be treated to a satisfying, if somewhat predictable, read. After all, most stories have already been told; it’s how they’re told that captures a reader. Give me a romance, which I don’t read most of the year, or a good thriller.  Over the next few weeks I’ll share some of my current reads with you.

Let’s start your summer reading with John Sandford’s long-running ‘Prey’ series, the largest of his three, which  continues to be a roller-coaster of a satisfying read. You get to be in everyone’s mind in his novels,  including the bad guys, as Sandford shows that their motivations combined with their general stupidity in some area will lead to their downfall.  Although there is some fancy detecting and policing going on, the actions of the criminals say it all. In Storm Prey, this thesis holds true.

Protagonist Lucas Davenport’s wife, plastic surgeon Weather Karkinnen, has the misfortune to see one of three robbers who storm her hospital’s pharmacy for the drugs. One of the pharmacy workers dies, starting a spiraling out of control of the robbery team, and the murders start to mount up.

Protecting Weather is not as simple as it seems: she’s part of a team mounting an intricate separation of conjoined twins. The surgery has to be performed in stages, over several days, due to the cardiac problems of the baby girls.  A second set of siblings, the Mack brothers, form the basis of the criminal side of things. Petty thieves and drug dealers, motorcycle gang members and bar owners, the brothers get themselves in way too deep before seeing a way out.

One of Sandford’s strengths is his realistic telling of the story, gritty and raw, the pace getting faster and faster. Members of his team talk to each other as though they’ve worked together for years. This is Sandford’s 20th Prey novel and each one is filled with his trademark suspense and multi-layered characters.