Adamson Books

Alice, the amateur sleuth, spends most of her time in the book struggling to prove to everyone that her friend Barbara did not commit suicide, but was instead murdered. The plot was clever, but I found myself not very interested in most of the other characters. Barbara's husband Tim was a pretty intriguing guy, but some of the secrets that came out about him didn't get very far in the story. I'm also a little puzzled as to why most of the characters, whom all had very different personalities and backgrounds, all had the same reaction to Alice's declaration that Barbara was murdered. Hmmm. I'll probably try to read a few other books in the series to see if perhaps I just happened to pick up one of Adamson's weaker ones.

This incredibly confusing and ultimately idiotic offering left me with this thought. HUH? What was that all about? And who published it?

To begin with, Alice (our protagonist)gets involved because she wants justice for her friend (who she actually barely knows) and can't figure out why he denied his identity to her moments before he was murdered. Since everyone involved only knew him by his real name, it makes no sense. Each time she decides to give up the investigation, she is drawn back because she wants this piece of information. But at the end of the book, we still don't know why he said he wasn't John. And the author doesn't even acknowledge that the information will not be found, maybe by having someone say "I guess we will never know". The issue is just ignored.
I also thought the book was full of too many coincidences. Our heroine is sent to a restaurant by a police officer and it just happens to be owned by her old friend. A bartender that her friend often hires just happens to be neck deep in the the bootlegging of Broadway tapes. The son of an dying playwright is on the board of directors of a cat saving group even though we have no reason to think he particularly cares for cats. And we never really find out why the murder was committed in front of our detective or what the murderer was trying to accomplish. And why would the conspirators bother taking all the illegal tapes and leaving the oddly labeled boxes behind. It must have been time consuming. The only reason I can think of is that the author couldn't think of a sensible way to get the detective on the right track. And remind me why the second murder took place.
Since the murderer seems to have gone mute or possibly insane at the end of the book I guess the author thought that tied up all loose ends.
All in all I thought this book must have been written for possible ten year olds who wouldn't notice the incongruities. I think the author and publisher are just cashing in on the proliferation of cats in the mystery genre right now by writing this ill-conceived tripe. It's no where near as good as the Quilleran series which is pretty light fare anyway.

Make no mistake, this Cat series has been fairly reliable in the past for a quick, fun read, but this one's a real clunker!

After hiring someone from the Village Cat People (yech) to come to her apartment and tranquilize her cat Bushy to get him to the vet, Alice Nestleton's usually tumultuous life is once again turned upside-down as murder drops in (literally)...

The mystery itself is not great and gets more and more unbelievable with each page. Stolen anarchist treasure and Edna St Vincent Millay memories collide in an altogether forgettable story. Trust me, the series itself is not prize-winning by any means, but was always good for a beach or airplane read. For some reason, all the recurring characters in this 'episode' seem more bitter and cranky than usual. The only reason I didn't give this book 1 star is because the history of Old New York as well as the West Village and the author's references are interesting and memorable.

Of course, I'll read the next one in the series 'Cat on a Winning Streak' and hopefully it'll be a bit better!

While this volume is lengthier and contains more information than "A Basic Baha'i Dictionary" (1989), it is less adequate in terms of ease of use. Preparation of a historical dictionary of the Bahá'í Faith is a daunting task. Librarians, researchers and publishers have significant knowledge of the optimal organization of such works, and ways to improve their usefulness. The prefatory remarks and appendices in this volume help to set a standard for what to include in future such dictionaries. This dictionary has the potential to be useful as a quick reference for basic historical events, people, and concepts. Scarecrow Press's incomplete editing of this work is immediately apparent, resulting in readers' frustration as they attempt to find the information they are seeking. Notable problems are machine alphabetizing which takes into account diacriticals, thus widely separating articles that should follow one another letter for letter, e.g GHUSN comes after GUNG; lack of criteria for inclusion and exclusion of topics; biographies often lacking in significant enough factual information; erroneous cross-references; double entries under different forms of an individual Iranian name; misspellings of names; and several factual errors. While this may be useful for the amount of content in comparison with other dictionaries, some readers may wish to supplement this with Oneworld's "Concise Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith", due in October 1998, and "A Short Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith" from the Baha'i Encyclopedia Project (projected date unknown at this time).

I agree with the other reviewers and endorse their specific gripes. In a book which is 211 pages long, the villians actually do not exist as characters in the book until pages 192 and 205. No hints, no clues, no foreshadowing: they simply appear, and it's certainly not magic.

Neither Nightingale's behavior as a vet, nor the behavior of the police (particularly her mandatory cop boyfriend) is professionally credible. Furthermore, her behavior as a girlfriend is obnoxious, and as a regular friend, truly foul: she excoriates a grieving woman who has just had a lover murdered because, how dare she! the woman had not previously told Nightingale about the details of her sex life.

Finally, we are expected to believe that after retrieving papers from the mouth of a corpse, Nightingale planned to toss them out the window of her car unread. ENOUGH already! If you want a decent sleuth who happens to be female and a veterinarian, try the three-book "Andi Pauling" series written by Lillian Roberts in the late 1990's.

This was one of 3 books by Lydia Adamson I have read. This is one from the "vet" mystery series. The other 2 were from a "birdwatcher" mystery series and a "out of work actress/catsitter" mystery series I did not find any reason to recommend any of them.

The plots are haphazardly constructed. Many of the situations are tortuously contrived. Characters are 2-dimensional and banal. The writing itself is clumsy. The vocabulary and structure seem to be "dumbed down". Perhaps these books are intended for younger readers?

The reason I award 2 stars rather than 1 is that there is nothing truly offensive here. It is a predictable "spunky female protagonist solves mystery that baffles bumbling males" kind of story. It is simply more sloppily executed than most.

If you enjoy trying to "figure out whodunnit" as you read, these books will disappoint. Most of the pertinent information is only revealed in the last few pages - in a kind of rush to tidy up the loose ends.

This was the first Dr Nightingale mystery I have read, and I suspect it will be the last. I found Lydia Adamson's prose style rather wooden, but my real difficulty was with the inexplicable behaviour of her vet character.

When Dr Nightingale nearly hits a loose horse on the road, she recognizes it as a Thoroughbred colt -- and yet tells herself that she must have imagined it, because "there are no wild horses in Dutchess County." Dear Reader, there are no wild horses where I live, either. But loose horses do occur, and the normal response by you or me or any reasonable horse person (not to mention our vets!) would be to try and find out who owns the horse and help it get home --- not to shrug it off as Nightingale does. Later in the story, the vet encounters the colt again. This time she tells herself triumphantly, "Nobody thought there were wild horses in this area, but there are!" -- and then proceeds to speculate on whether this colt was bred for the race course or the show ring. If somebody bred him, he isn't "wild," and it is beyond understanding why Dr Nightingale isn't more interested in locating his owner. (As nearly as I can tell, neither is the person who ends up finding the colt last -- and keeps him. If I ever move to a place like Hillsbrook, remind me to check my fences regularly, because lost horses apparently stay lost!)

The incident with the two-month-old filly is equally beyond understanding, and does not speak well of the author's knowledge of horses. Faced with an extremely early weanling who has an eye injury and is so wild she is apparently a danger to her own dam, Dr Nightingale and the foal's owner do not even discuss what might be causing the filly's bizarre behaviour. When it transpires that the filly is cribbing in her stall and creating flying wood chips that are irritating her eye, nobody mentions that her bad habit might be born of the stress of such an early separation from her dam (though Adamson includes a lecture on cribbing that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a veterinary manual). (The fact that foals of this age possess only 4 to 6 front teeth that can barely scrape a carrot into bits, let alone wood, I will leave for the present...) At any rate, instead of attempting to get the foal under control, the vet stands in the stall and baits her with sugar. I would agree with this procedure if a) the horse in question had any training at all and therefore might be controllable when finally caught, and b) there was any reason to expect the horse knew what sugar was. (How did this unhandled filly learn that -- or notice it while she was charging about?) Under the circumstances it is not likely that a little sugar and a smack in the eye with a sponge wielded by a fast-moving hand would cause the filly to suddenly love the vet. That swipe at her head would be likelier to scare her to death.

Add to this the fact that the whole murder plot hinges on the twin presumptions that people who buy registered horses never attempt to transfer ownership to themselves, and that there are no export laws in the United States (or else the plot is a lot bigger than the author lets on) and you have a mystery that features a vet, but is best left alone by horse people. I really hate it when a cover blurb build up my hopes for a good story about animals and people, only to let me down in such spectacular fashion.

I think overall the plot in this book is very disaapointing. The description of places that are in the book is very good and really puts a picture in your imagination. The book is not really that good because as the previous reviewer said there is no ending at all and there is hardly a denemous at the end and you have to really be attentive in the story to get the point in the end which i wasnt. The book also is not so thrilling and does not keep you hooked it makes you want to find out maybe if it gets better but it doesnt. Im sorry Lesley-Grant Adamson but this book is a dissapointment.

Poor character development, limited storyline, countless abandoned opportunities to enrichen the plot or offer a "why" or two, and no ending. NONE. The book simply ends. What a major disappointment! Had I thrown out the book halfway through, I'd have been no worse off.

This book has amazed me with it's confusing, poorly executed plot with bee keepers, poets and others. These characters, whose average age seems about 5th grade with poor impulse control, are very flat and get angry at each other in exactly the same way. One name could really fit all. In the course of events, Dr. Nightingale, the HEROINE, SHOOTS a man in the back because she THINKS he might have committed a crime. She gets off, of course, since she is the heroine.

One star only because there can be no less...

Wow, was this bad. I can't believe I actually finished it. It felt like chapters were missing even though I clearly had a complete book. It was hard to care about the characters and there was almost no development working up to discovering who "done it". Each chapter seemed almost independent of the rest of the chapters. A big disappointment.

I bought this book hoping for some supplementary material for a sophomore taking a Law class using Adamson's Law for Business textbook. This turned out to be the exact same book that the teacher uses to photocopy "study guides" for the chapters. There are no "activities" in this book - just study guide pages. So we never used it.

Printed privately no doubt because no publisher worthy of the name would touch such an amateurishly written document. This is just a 34 page booklet that had NO proofreading before printing. Zip, Zero as in None!

It may have been written by an adolescent, or an adult whose education hadn't been proofed either. And those comments are the nicer things to be said about this so called 'book.'

It is no more then a badly put together series of notes, and even the notes aren't well written.

There are muddy photos throughout, the kind of poor quality we used to get trying to Xerox color prints to black and white. They never produced well and here they fail as well. The newer technology of photo reproduction is totally missing. So too are clear, easy to understand IDs for many of the subjects of these photos. People should be paid to read The Adamson Bro's Conspiracy, but no one should pay to read it.

It's an embarrassing read and no, I couldn't finish it. From the very first page, first sentence, the author quotes the bible and tells us that "Cain Slew Abraham." Pardon me but, didn't Cain slay Abel?

This effort at book writing ( if any real effort was made), is rife with clumsy phrases and sentences. We find for example on page two that one of the Adamson family was...."Nominated five times for an Academy Award five times." Or how about this quote, "Let us take a look at the process of what which took." Huh? Here's another, "One may suppose that the court system in the 1930s was much more laxed." This one is a favorite. Ready? " Throughtout history, man's fame and power will be wiped out at the end of their immortal lives." And finally, although there's more in the booklet, this gem. "In this story is 'a' ungodly lesson of Karma."

From the unevenly trimmed tape used to cover the thickish staples that hold this embarrassment together, to the sometimes unreadable reprinted letters - this booklet is a crashing failure.

It does have a very interesting cover. But even that isn't worth the price or your time. Pass this one by.

peiper1

Having just thoroughly enjoyed one of the books in Lydia Adamson's Alice Nestleton series, I looked forward to reading Beware the Tufted Duck. Unfortunately, this first book in Adamson's Lucy Wales series is so very disappointing that by the time I finished reading it, I was frustrated and depressed by the characters and angry at myself for spending the time to finish it.

As was mentioned by the reviewer from Midwest Book Review, Beware the Tufted Duck is told from the point of view of Lucy's unrequited lover, Markus Bloch, who is willing to go to any lengths to impress Lucy. Unfortunately, as the book unfolds, it becomes apparent that Lucy is not a very nice person; she is, in fact, consistently so bent on getting her own way that she is often rude and inconsiderate. One begins to question Markus' judgment and wonder how he could possibly be so besotted with Lucy, when she treats him as shabbily as she does.

I read, in part, to enjoy spending time with likeable, inspiring characters. Since the character of Lucy is remarkable only for her extreme audacity and her knowledge of bird lore, this book was a very unsatisfying read.