These three are library reads I picked up recently.  The Question of the Missing Head is a book club read for the Booktrader of Hamilton book club.  The protagonist Samuel has Asperger’s Syndrome and it is is his quirky behavior and reactions that drive much of the action.  His sidekick, Ms. Washburn, is an interesting character in her own right.  Finding herself unemployed and with a “question” she contacts Samuel and they fall into a partnership of sorts at Samuel’s business – answering questions.  The main question for the novel is “what happened to the head”, the head being stored at a Cryonics Institute for reanimation at some later date.  The mystery and the cast of characters is well crafted with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing.  Samuel strikes me as being very like Sean Stone from Chasing Shadows, a TV show I really like and can’t wait to see another season on Acorn TV soon.

Scam Chowder is the second book in Maya Corrigan’s A Five Ingredient Mystery  Series.  When I read the first in this series, the theme didn’t really “grab” me, but the story line and the characters were so good that it didn’t matter.  In this book, Val is still living with her Granddad and dealing with his little deception about his cooking column.  Granddad becomes the prime suspect in a murder after a con artist who specialized on scamming the elderly dies after eating his food.  Val puts her investigative talents to work to clear his name and look into the elder fraud.  There is a romantic side plot that stops and starts throughout the book giving Val something else to think about it.  There are also hints at perhaps another romantic interest.  Overall, a good cozy mystery read with fun characters and an engaging plot line.

Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave was a book I picked up after seeing it mentioned on another book blog.  I liked the story and the characters and loved the Wine Country setting.  I actually found the secondary characters’ storylines more interesting  than the main character’s.   There were lots of intertwining storylines here and a past and present storytelling that worked really well.  The storylines were very  neatly tied up in the end with the message being that “you shouldn’t live your life based on doing what you think you should do.”  I liked the book and think I probably would have liked it even more when I was younger (probably more the target demographic).