What I Read -- By a Spider's Thread

A dear friend, L, with whom I always seem to have hours-long chats often including books, shares my same love for British television and murder mystery shows.  She also reads some murder mystery books, and recommended Laura Lippmann to me for two reasons -- as they go, she said, the writing was decent; and, the main character is a rower.

L happened to have two copies of By a Spider's Thread on her bookshelf, so she gave me one to get me started.  It is the eighth book in the series about this particular detective, but as these things go, there is enough background provided in each book that it really doesn't matter whether you've read the others or not.  They stand on their own just fine.

In case you're interested in the details of this particular mystery, it involves a wife who runs away from her husband, taking their two kids.  The husband hires our main character, Tess, who is working as a private detective, to track down his missing family.

It's not literature.  But it is a book, and sometimes it's nice just to keep turning the pages. And - for what it's worth - much of what she says about working through problems while spending quiet mornings on the water is quite true.