I am very sorry to hear about it.
I should let you know, though, that the first Cabal book, while in parts very funny, does ultimately deal with themes of personal tragedy and loss, in a surprisingly sympathetic manner. This may make it either very appropriate or very inappropriate.
Too true. After my first husband died, I found great solace reading historical mysteries about a newly widowed woman. If you had told me ahead of time that I would find that comforting, I would have laughed at you!
Misnomer and DZedNConfused, I’m so sorry to hear of your losses.
I guess we shall see what happens, might be cathartic in the end. Thanks for the heads up!
Thank you Dung Beetle & jsgoddess!
Oh, no!! I can’t imagine being in my house without my dog. 
She has been my “shoulder” all week, and also for the last nine months while I mourned the loss of my mom. (Yeah, the past year has been kinda shitty.)
Thank you!
Last night I finished An Innocent Client. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was entertaining enough that I downloaded the second book in the Joe Dillard series. It helped that the next book was pretty cheap ($3.99 on Kindle). 
I won’t start reading it right away, though, because on Tuesday the fourth book in the Long Beach Homicide series was released: Come Twilight, by Tyler Dilts. I’m looking forward to starting that tonight!
Slightly rushed ending to Lament for the Fallen by Gavin Chait, I thought, but still very enjoyable.
And now I’ve begun To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey. It’s a big novel based loosely on a real 1885 expedition sent to explore part of the vast areas of the Territory still almost completely unknown at the time. Half the novel is based on the letters and reports of the expedition, and the other half follows the wife of the expedition commander, as she languishes in Sitka, hundreds of miles south but still barely developed beyond a trading post. It feels very realistic so far, but, as I understand from a snippet of an interview with the author I heard, the expedition eventually starts encountering animals, etc. only found previously in the indigenous peoples’ folklore… I’ll find out, I guess!
Oh, I forgot this book was out now! I completely fell in love with Eowyn Ivey’s first book, The Snow Child (though I hated the ending), so I have very high hopes for this book.
I finished Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard last night at 10 pm… a full hour after I need to be in bed :o
I like Howard’s dry sense of humour and somewhat sarcastic look at the world, it fits me quite well. The plotting was leisurely but not so much that I lost interest, though I’m not certain about the ending… cliche much? And as par with most things
my favorite character died… or not… it’s hard to actually accuse a vampire of dying AFTER they have become undead, but anyway…
I will hurry and get to the fourth book, the second one is ordered, hopefully it will be here soon… but I need to finish Devil Said Bang now and a couple others I’ve started.
My fiancé and I bought 20 acres in northern Minnesota and have been thinking of building a B&B on part of the lot. It’s going to be just off a bike trail that goes from St Paul all the way up to Canada. Neither of us know much about running a B&B or hotel, or campground or anything of the sort, so I started looking around for books.
That lead me to Guide to Hotel Housekeeping by Mary E Palmer, originally published in 1908. This is part of the Guttenberg Project and can be read here for free as it’s out of copyright protection.
I’m about 1/3 of the way in and have vacillated between intrigued and horrified. Intrigued by the rules of the day which are set to create an exact order of things like who may talk to whom about what. Horrified by the assumed roles of women and their “gossipy nature” in a pre-suffrage society as well as the overt racist overtones when discussing the Irish.
A soft example from the book:
[QUOTE=Inspection and Cleaning of Rooms]
…She may find a ragged sheet or pillow slip; if so, she should make a note of it. Some room may be short of a towel, soap, or matches; she should make a note of this also. Around the gas-jets and in the corners, she may find “Irish curtains” (cobwebs); in the commode, she may find a vessel that was forgotten…
[/QUOTE]
Well, it’s not all bad, she did say:
[QUOTE=Religion a factor]
It is an undisputed fact that the Irish-American Catholic girls make the best chambermaids. The comfort found in the Catholic religion compensates for the loss of home ties. She is without any danger signal save her own conscience, yet there does not exist on the face of the earth a more moral class of girls than the Irish-American Catholic chambermaids in the hotels of the United States.
[/QUOTE]
Dung Beetle! Grrlbrarian! Have you seen this???
A short Lockwood and Co story! Free on Kindle 
Yes; here’s our SDMB thread on it, with some spoilers: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell on BBC America - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board. I enjoyed it, all in all, but the book is better.
I finally joined the 21rst century and figured out the Kindle app on my tablet. Now I can read in places I couldn’t before ie low light. I read **Dagger in the Dark ** by Jonathan Stroud, a short Lockwood and Co story, last night and I have added Devil in the Dollhouse Sandman Slim 3.5 to read in the morning…
When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi. A book about life and dying, told by someone who was experiencing both.
It was a quick two-day read. Now on to Curse of the Narrows, by Laura MacDonald. It’s the true account of a disastrous ship explosion that took place in Nova Scotia in 1917.
Yep, I put it on my Kindle awhile back, and I was keeping it to read the next time we travel. Unfortunately it seems we have no travel plans in the near future. I’ll break down and read it sometime…I’m currently stuck in the middle of my giant sci-fi storybook! It’s good, but the library is getting impatient with me now and so are all the books in the TBR pile.
Okay, I know there is at least one other Sandman Slim fan here somewhere, I started reading the series because of these threads. Anyway I purchased The Devil in the Dollhouse and the last page ends in the middle of a sentence… Has anyone else read this? Is that the actual ending? I tried looking at it on both tablet and PC and same thing.