Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved ht Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Navigation is so easy today (well, except for the directionally challenged, like me, who have an unfailing ability to make the wrong turn). 400 years ago, as commercial fleets began their exploratory voyages, sailors had to depend on the stars and luck, and the further south you were, the more a miscalculation in latitude would send you from your destination.  Dava Sobol's slim but engrossing book tells how a clockmaker (his previous major project - still working four centuries later - was a wooden clock) not only developed a way to determine longitude but also a clock that neither gained nor lost time and was not disturbed by harsh weather or the swells of the sea.  His invention was a success, but full recognition (and the full cash prize from the Longitude Committee) eluded him, thanks to one of the pettier scientific disputes of history.

Look Alive Twenty-Five

Stephanie Plum is perpetually 32, one missed FTA away from not paying rent on her outdated apartment, and has dinner with her entire family on the calendar. If that weren't enough, her cousin/boss Vinnie Plum has made her the manager of the deli his father-in-law and bankroller, Harry the Hammer, now owns.  Normally, "deli manager" is a safer job than "bounty hunter," but as we learn in the first chapter of Look Alive Twenty-Five, the last three manager mysteriously disappeared, leaving only a shoe by the dumpster.

That's really all you need to know.  Janet Evanovich hasn't been concerned with her plots since the early double-digit installments of the series.  The last dozen or so have just been an excuse to string together comic destruction of cars and/or buildings, slapstick incompetence by Steph and her sidekick Lula, the cupcake-or-babe question of whether she should be with Joe or Ranger, and general weirdness.  The books have become routine, but they're still funny enough that reading them in public  puts you on the receiving end of serious side-eye, and Twenty-Five's plot is a bit tighter than the last few. It's a good beach read or antidote to crappy winter weather.

Henrietta Marie: Charles I's Indomitable Queen

Maybe it's time for me to admit that the Stuarts and the English Civil War don't interest me as much as the periods which precede and follow them.  I've enjoyed Alison Plowmen's biography of Queen Victoria and (so far) 3/4 of her quartet on Elizabeth I, but Women All on Fire wasn't particularly memorable, and neither were Antonia Fraser's books on the era. Perhaps I should free up some shelf space for Plantagenets or Hanoverians.

Henrietta Marie should have been interesting.  Her political match with Charles I started badly due to her advisors, but it soon blossomed into a love match in which she was a trusted advisor. Unfortunately, Charles I was politically tone deaf and Henrietta's advisors wanted her to return Catholicism to a country which thought that Elizabeth's Anglican compromise wasn't pure enough. I admire Henrietta's will and wiles during her exile, but I just wasn't compelled by her story.  It's not Plowden's fault - I'd rather read about the artistic and social changes of the era than the political lives of the 17th Century royal family.

Dreaming of the Bones

Warning - minor character spoiler

Deborah Crombie didn't tell us much about Duncan Kincaid's ex-wife in the first few installments of the series he shares with Gemma James, so we are as surprised as he is when Victoria calls him.  She's a Cambridge professor, working on a biography of local poet Lydia Brooke who died by suicide in the mid-80s. Victoria's research has led her to believe that Brooke was murdered, buy by whom and why? She's interviewed Brooke's friends but they fall into two categories - intentionally unhelpful (a local headmistress, Victoria's pretentious colleague) and honestly uninformed (Brooke's angry artist ex-husband, Victoria's neighbor). Duncan agrees to meet her, but thinks it's pointless to open a decades old suicide case.

Until Victoria's tween son finds her dead. Her death appears natural, except she was a healthy woman in her late 30s with no pre-existing conditions and no sign of trauma.  Was she killed because she was about to discover that Lydia Brook was murdered - and the reason why? Crombie, like Tasha Alexander, uses an interleaved parallel narrative to solve the mystery of Lydia Brook, and from there I found Victoria's murderer at about the same time as Duncan and Gemma.  Fleshed out with the growth of the police partners' personal relationship and a few complications regarding the familiar air around Victoria's son Kit, Dreaming of the Bones succeeds as both a novel and a puzzle.