WWW.WEDNESDAY

WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here. 

1. What are you currently reading? The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy. A group of pregnant women, all due in May, initially meet through an online support group called The May Mothers. The begin getting together in person in the park, eventually bringing their babies. Come summer, they decide they deserve a night out, sans infants. It goes badly. In fact, it couldn't go worse. When they're out partying, one of their babies is kidnapped.

 

The author is creating a tingly sense of paranoia here. Each of The May Mothers wants the others to think her life is perfect, but each one has a secret. As the authorities and media focus on the missing baby, their personal lives are about to be exposed.

2. What did you recently finish reading? Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by MC Beaton. A successful London PR exec retires to a sleepy village, and it doesn't start out well. She's bored and simply doesn't know how to behave in a bucolic setting. She decides to remedy this by entering the local baking competition. Now Agatha does not lose, and to make sure she won't, she enters a professionally-baked, store-bought quiche. She's disgusted when she still doesn't win, presumably because the contest was rigged. Things get even more complicated when the judge dies and an amateur sleuth is born ... out of a mix of pique and boredom. 

Agatha is a funny heroine for a cozy mystery series because there is nothing cozy about her. She's really very prickly, grumpy, and more than a little entitled. But she's also smart and, as the story unfolds, a well-concealed sweetness begins to emerge. I like her, and I think I'll like this series.

3. What will read next? I don't know.