Review: Indigo Dying - Susan Wittig Albert

# 38: Indigo Dying by Susan Wittig Albert:

Ruby had managed to light the kerosene lamp, and it cast a golden glow around the cabin. She'd alread y taken a shower and was sitting cross-legged on her bed, a henna-haired buddha in a floral-print caftan. There was a book on her lap, the latest Cat Who adventure; a bottle of blue nail polish and shiny nail implements on one side of her; and a box of chocolates on the other. Delicately, so as not to mar her freshly painted blue nails, she screwed the cap back on the polish bottle.

'You know,' she said, 'I could get to like this pioneer life.'

'Some pioneer,' I replied with a laugh. 'I'll bet you wouldn't be wearing that caftan if you had to spin every inch of threat that went into it.

'Oh, absolutely,' Ruby said. 'I'd go naked.' She reached for a chocolate.

Synopsis: Small-town Texas politics and the cosy murder mystery collide.

So there's a big bad bad guy up to environmental badness, and a small town standing up to him, and a fiber-dying workshop, phony legal papers, Harleys, car chases, shotgun booby traps, child abuse, llamas, eavesdropping and kerosene lanterns. Good times.

A seriously above-average cosy mystery set in Texas and written in the first-person present. I adored the protagonist and her crazy best friend, and there was quite a serious amount of placeporn going on, which y'all know floats my wee readerly kayak. I will definitely be reading another in the series.

Review: Bloodroot - Susan Wittig Albert

# 39: Bloodroot by Susan Wittig Albert:

When I was a little girl, Aunt Tullie used to bring me with her when she came to put fresh flowers on the graves. She'd point out the headstones to me, one by one, and we'd say the carved names until I knew them, and the relationships, by heart. She would encourage me to connect the characters in our family stories, to see them, not as individuals, but as part of our clan. It was like reading the Family Record page in the Bible. It was a family history lesson.

But now our family history had a much more ominous significance now that I had learned about Aunt Tullie's illness, and as I thought of this, another shadow seemed to wheel across the evening sky. I shoved my hands into my pockets and stood still, realizing that the secret of her frightful genetic inheritance--and Leatha's and mine, as well--was buried somewhere in this cemetary. Somewhere among these graves was the Coldwell who had sentenced those who came after to a dreadful end. Who was it? Where did Aunt Tullie's dying begin?

Synopsis: When herbalist China Bayles is summoned by her absent, flawed mother to come help cope with her great-aunt's decline in the family's Mississippi plantation house, a ton of dark family secrets come to light and need burying all over again.

If anything, this book was even better than Indigo Dying, seeing how I just sat down and read it cover to cover today instead of getting anything done like I was supposed to. Also, apparently I am just going to read this series entirely backwards. Go me.

Actually, that's not bothering me overmuch so far, because while Albert sprinkled both these novels with references to past events, no spoilers are included (Diane Mott Davidson I am looking right at you), and it just makes the stories more layered and interesting.

So. China Bayles' wayward alcoholic mother demands she drive from Texas to Mississippi right this red hot instant to help with "complications" that have arisen from her great-aunt's slow death from Huntington's Disease. When China arrives, her past basically roundhouse-kicks her in the head, and bodies start popping up, and ugly old secrets start being uncovered, and things get all mystical, and it's a great big party, with the Old South as the guest of honor.

Good book. I continue to enjoy China's voice (hush, you) but I am mesmerized by her control of pacing and the way she makes places live and breathe and crawl off the page and up your arm. It's stunning. I also liked that the book doesn't shy away from dealing with race at all, and everyone gets called on their bullshit. Strong female characters of various colors, who are not all in the mystical Negro role.

It's and interesting picture of a South where there are flaws and family and things that go bump in the night.

You know what they say about this country. Folks die, but they never leave.