Exceedingly Mundane

I finished a really good book last night, that I had bought at Borders. It’s the first in a series of books about a group of friends and family in the fictitious town of Cedar Cove Washington. I had to buy the paperback at the bookstore because my county library system had lost their copy of the first book in the series, but they do have all the others. I’m a bit OCD though, and I always like to read the first book first.

“16 Lighthouse Road” was a really good book, if you like this type of women’s fiction, which I do. The first book set up the town and we are introduced to a group of family and friends as main characters. I believe the series will build on these, as well as probably add new characters along the way. The first book covers Olivia Lockhart, mother of 3, who is a local judge and lives at 16 Lighthouse Road. It also encompasses her mother Charlotte, and her daughter Justine and son James. There’s her best friend Grace, whose husband Dan mysteriously disappears in this book, and Grace’s two grown daughters Kelly and Mary Ellen. Grace lives at 204 Rosewood Lane, which happens to be the next book in this series, so maybe we’ll learn what happened to Dan in the next book. Then, there’s the young couple we meet at the beginning of the book. Cecelia and Ian Randall appear before the judge (Olivia) and want a divorce, but she does not grant it and wants the young couple to work things out. They had recently suffered the loss of their infant daughter and were having trouble communicating. All in all, several different plots going with some really good characters, and I look forward to reading more about them, and meeting more of the members of Cedar Cove in the next several books in the series.

For the record, that makes #54 so far this year, with a total of 19,158 pages read. Up next is my first book by Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith. He has several series of books as well. I bought “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” to start with, as it begins a series as well. I was thinking since he was Scottish, this series was set in Scotland. Apparently, I neglected to read the jacket cover (which I did just now), and I see that this book revolves around Precious Ramotswe, the only lady private detective in the country of Botswana. Apparently, the author lived for a while in Botswana and was a professor at the University there. So, this will be a bit different type of book for me. I’m looking forward to it! 🙂