13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Welcome back Miss Zukas!, June 26, 2006
I am thrilled to have Miss Zukas back - this is one of my favorite series! I love the stories, I love the humor, I love the evocation of place, and I love the writing, but I have a strong preference for character-driven stories, especially series, and that is one of the best part of these.
Wilhemina "Helma" Zukas has a very unusual personality, especially for the protagonist of a story. Methodical, meticulous, extremely neat and not particularly an animal lover, it is very unusual to have a character like this sympathetically portrayed. Authors generally to to either "cure" characters like this, having them discover that they really want to be loud, boisterous and reckless; or they turn out to be psychopaths.
Miss Zukas is an interesting mixture of individual certainty and slight social ineptness, especially when it comes to intimacy. She is certain of her values, her preferred way of life, and fearless in pursuit of matters of principle. She deals well enough enough with her colleagues, although she is not close to them, she is a perfect public servant to the patrons, and can be quite firm and forceful, but she is uncertain when it comes to close relationships, especially romantic, which in this book add greatly to her confusion.
Miss Zukas is balanced by her rather wild, artist friend, Ruth in what is in someways an unlikely pairing, but in other ways an understandable attraction of opposites. It supplies a great deal of the humor and human interest in the book. There is a nice cast of continuing minor characters as well.
Her reluctant relationship with the stray Boy Cat Zukas supplies a great deal of understated humor. Her mixture of fastidious relectance to have a pet and her inability to abandon an animal in need are very true to life.
There has been some concern about Miss Zukas as a librarian stereotype - being a librarian myself, I understand the concern. While someone like Miss Zukas might be likely to choose to be a librarian, I think that her colleagues are varied enough to make it clear that all librarians are not like Miss Zukas. The office politics, expecially with the library director, Ms. Moon, are only too real and too funny. The one thing that strikes me as odd is that Ms. Zukas seems to be able to get away from the library a lot, but she still works more than most literary characters.
In this story, Miss Zukas is having a midlife crisis and Ms. Moon leaps in to "help". Meanwhile, Boy Cat Zukas disappears, and Helma, although she really didn't want him in the first place, is still terribly worried. Just to add to her stress, her friend Ruth drops in for a visit while she resolves her own issues, nearly trashing Miss Zukas's apartment in the process. And this is before anyone gets killed!
I hope that this is only the beginning of a renewed spate of books.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Miss Zukas returns to the mystery shelves, June 9, 2006
After a five year absence, a new book about librarian Wilhelmina Zukas, her friend Ruth, and police chief Wayne Gallant finally graces the mystery shelves. This ninth installment in the series begins on Helma's birthday, and the normally fastidious and staid woman is flustered and off her mark. (If you remember the ending of "Miss Zukas Shelves the Evidence," you shouldn't be surprised.) Is she or is she not in an exclusive relationship with Wayne? Is Ruth just visiting or moving back to Bellehaven, Washington? Does her boss, May Apple Moon, really expect Helma to attend a week's worth of counseling sessions? Where is Boy Cat Zukas hiding? And what's the deal with that new too-perky library employee, Glory Shandy? Helma's personal and professional lives get ever more confusing as two women meet with "accidental" deaths, and both were connected to the library's new Local Authors project, Helma's baby. Of course, she cannot sit idly by while the local police force ignores key clues in what must have been murder. Helma and Ruth become a team again and pursue and interview possible suspects until they eventually uncover the facts. And the culprit.
It's not rocket science, but it doesn't have to be. We librarians can especially relate to the situations Miss Zukas finds herself in. This is an enjoyable read for a rainy spring weekend in New England ... or anywhere else, for that matter.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So happy Miss Zukas is back, June 25, 2006
Three cheers! After a long wait, Miss Helma Zukas is back in our lives. The reviews below are more specific about the story line than I need to be here.
In real life, the author, Jo Dereske, has gone through the death of her husband since the last Miss Zukas mystery. In this book, there are touches of the author's personal grief and courage as she has Helma overcome deep personal feelings (unspecified) to reclaim the vigor of her life. I was very happy with the book and the promise of a new love in Helma's life.
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