Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #301976 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

WARM AND REWARDING

If you like comfortable, home spun mysteries (No, that's not a contradiction in terms), Susan Wittig Albert is the author for you. She laces her China Bayles series with little known facts about plants and herbs as well as recipes. One has such a warm feeling when reading this book that it's easy to forget China has stumbled across a very dead body and a killer is on the loose.

Ms. Albert's fans will remember China leads a busy life - she has an herb shop, a catering business and oversees a weekend paper-making class. What do you need to make paper? Yucca, of course, and it's among those plants that she finds the body.

While this would stun most, China has been around. As she says, "I was a criminal attorney in Houston before I moved to Pecan Springs, single, on the scary cliff of forty and desperately soulweary......" Now that she's married to a retired private investigator and has so many irons in the fire her body is the part of her that's weary.

As Albert's readers know, China will find out who dun it and why. Subplots include her half-brother wanting to revisit the circumstances of their father's death, and best pal Ruby dealing with a difficult, albeit ill, mother.

Descriptions of local vistas and small town goings-on add to the Southwestern flavor of "Spanish Dagger" (which, I've learned, is a folk name for a rather large yucca plant. Actually, I've learned quite a bit more about said plant, but that's Ms. Albert for you!)

Enjoy!

- Gail Cooke

A recommended read from the Texas Hill Country
The China Bayles series is alive and well, to the delight of this fan. Susan Wittig Albert always offers the reader a beautifully crafted story along with a wealth of information about plants. The little world of Pecan Springs is a home away from home.

Ms. Albert sets herself a challenge, which she acknowledges in the Note to the Reader at the beginning of SPANISH DAGGER, by interweaving and overlapping the stories in the series. This challenge is compounded by the first person narrative, but nothing could be more effective than the way in which China Bayles fills the reader in on the backstory. This is often a weak area in a series, but beautifully done in SPANISH DAGGER, as in all the China Bayles mysteries. A first-time reader will be effortlessly acquainted with the main characters and the continuing plots.

China's investigative pursuits are woven into the story quite plausibly, another challenge with amateur sleuths. While it's true that the reader has to suspend incredulity at so many murder victims falling at China's feet, Ms. Albert somehow makes it easy. The everyday doings of Pecan Springs form a backdrop to the complex and sometimes hidden relationships that reach from the shop owner next door (Ruby Wilcox) outward to the police chief (Sheila Dawson) and beyond to big-city police and agency corruption. The social issues threaded into the story are clearly there to further the story -- from drug running to a parent's dementia to gossiping townspeople. All part of the package in Pecan Springs!

China Bayles and the other main characters are well-rounded and continue to evolve, with the secondary players also springing to life. Characterization is one of the strong suits of this series. It's hard to go wrong with a few pets, too, and the Rotti Rambo is a worthy companion to the squirrel-chasing basset hound Howard Cosell, and the seventeen-pound Khat on whose clock "it's always five minutes past time to eat."

Anyone familiar with Susan Wittig Albert's work knows that she treats her craft and the reader with great respect. I recommend SPANISH DAGGER as another example of a great read from this versatile author.