Thanks again! Sweetcicely - I painted that picture for a friend last Christmas. The character you are talking about is 'spring' :) The poem was written by Ming Xue Wang during the Tang dynasty (I think). It is translated as (roughly - my Chinese really stinks): I love the graceful fragrant orchid It's modest colors flirt with the spring sunshine. In the deep forest, amongst the west wind and winter chill It is fragrant in solitude [the last line is written with the mood that despite the absence of any onlooker / admirer to appreciate it's fragrance, it is still fragrant - ie a romantic perspective on the entire 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound' kind of idea] How ironic that mine isn't fragrant at all! But maybe it's still early to detect anything!

Thanks for all your hard work Karen! Can't wait to read it in its entirety. Jodi-

Pat, did you notice anything odd or odd-of-whack about your Kindle Edition of The Case of Jennie Brice? My friend first read it on her Kindle and was quite disgruntled with me for recommending it, saying that the mystery was never solved and it didn't make any sense! I was mystified because I didn't remember any such thing. I then read it on Project Gutenberg and right at the end there seemed to be some pages that had been omitted, leaving everything confusing and seemingly abruptly tied up. I dug out my old paperback copy and verified that someone had done a poor job of transferring the printed book to computer and both Project Gutenberg and the Kindle Edition had picked up the BAD JOB! I hope it was eventually corrected, because it's a shame enough to turn a reader off with a false impression of a very good book and author. I loved Norah Lofts as well. The ones I remember best, though, seem to have been just straight historical novels, not much mystery or suspense; e.g., Jassy, The Lute Player, and others. Carolyn, I know what you mean about P. Whitney and Victoria Holt getting formulaic. I eventually gave up on them, too; but in their early days, they were something! I especially liked Whitney's The Trembling Hills (the one set in San Francisco) and Window on the Square. I read Helen MacInnes and there was another similar female writer of thrillers...can't think of her name or the titles of any of her books. Did you like M. M. Kaye's Death in (insert exotic locale) books? Yep, they were enough to make me want to see Zanzibar and the Andaman Islands, giving me a real travel bug. When my niece was about fifteen, I turned her onto Mary Stewart by giving her The Moon-Spinners, Wildfire at Midnight, and The Ivy Tree. She thought the vociferous debates her mother, grandmother, other aunt and I had were 'better than a tennis match'. (It's an old family tradition to team up and argue about books; I listened in the same way to my female relatives when I was my niece's age.) My niece thought we were hyping Mary Stewart when we said that the new arrival of a Stewart book was enough to nearly cause a riot with readers wanting to grab immediately the one or two copies the library got. A reader was given a week to read it and there was no renewal (until the excitement faded about six months later), and the list of next-in-line readers would run for several pages. It was tantalizing and frustrating that SOME readers couldn't read faster. The only similar experience my niece had was with the Harry Potter books. Btw, my niece liked the Stewart books except for, she says, their blandness! Uh-oh, I feel a gothic suspense/romance mood coming on. My niece also asked me one time: "Why is it called Gothic romance when there's hardly any romance in it?"

Yes, Ginny, I've read all five of the Brittany mysteries by Bannalec published so far in English. They were recommended to me when I mentioned I had reached the end of Simenon's Maigret series and I was undergoing withdrawal pangs. I can see that Bannalec was probably inspired by the Maigret stories -- he even tells how Maigret visited Concarneau (pronounced Konk-kern by the Bretons) during one of Maigret's own cases. The settings and plots are a bit different, I think, and I enjoyed learning about Gauguin and his contemporaries in Pont-Aven (the first book), the tourism industry of the Glenan archipelago (second book), salt 'farming ' in the Fleur de Sel Murders, and oyster farming in The Missing Corpse. The fifth book, The Killing Tide, gets deeper into Celtic lore as Monsieur le Commissaire Dupin increases his knowledge of the Finistere (The End of the World which the Bretons also call 'The Beginning of Land' of the Eurasian continent). Ginny, I really enjoy Nolwenn, Dupin's indispensable assistant and his tutor in all things Breton. She will make Dupin a 'true' Breton yet. She's already convinced him to follow his doctor's orders to eat a few oysters every day. The stories do get a bit convoluted, but I've found this forgivable. I second your recommendation.