Death Notes

 In Murder by Death Lionel Twain accuses the characters (based on Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, and Sam Spade) of cheating. I'm not familiar with the last three, but I can't think of a book where Christie cheated. She may have made it look like she did, but trace back through the clues and she supported her conclusions.

Death Notes, however, shows that even the masters like Ruth Rendell can cheat. Sir Michael Camargue was murdered shortly before marrying a woman younger than his estranged daughter (and a casual friend of Reg Wexford's actress daughter Sheila, whose banns are read at the same service). Did his daughter kill him for the inheritance? Or was someone impersonating her? Wexford travels to California ostensibly on vacation to solve the mystery...and then it turns out everything he learned there was irrelevant. I enjoyed parts of the book (Mike Burden has remarried since the last book and he's more relaxed than in the early books as well as becoming more well-rounded through his wife's interests, and it was entertaining to watch Wexford deal with jealousy when he and his wife met up with her old flame and his wife in California), but the ending was unsatisfying enough to affect the entire book.

Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past

"We're a republic, not a democracy." I've lost track of how often I hear a caller say that on CSPAN. The second essay in Myth America proves them wrong. The Founding Fathers created a democratic republic - one that valued democracy. They also valued a central government, putting to rest any claims that they highly valued states' rights. And the idea of American exceptionalism would have been foreign to them. 

Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled 20 historians to take on popular myths of American history. It's weighted towards the 20th Century and toward social rather than "event" history and since those are among my interests, some of the material was familiar. I knew the Regan Revolution had roots 30 years earlier, that the party realignment took place not because conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans switched parties but because the old guard died off and was replaced with a new generation with different party ties, and that the lionization of MLK and the idea of 'good protest' glosses over the fact that he was hated in his day and much more radical than the modern view. Other essays discussed topics with which I only have a passing knowledge, and others put the pieces together for me. Feminism has been portrayed as anti-family, but it's been pro-family since its inception, sometimes to the point of disadvantaging the movement. I learned in high school that while the New Deal helped, the Depression didn't end until WWII - here, Eric Rauchway points out that the New Deal did pull the economy out of a tailspin and the problem was that it wasn't large enough (which echoed during the 2008 recession where more expansive programs could have brought the unemployment rate down faster). Myth America is enlightening, and as essentially a survey course left me wanting to know more.