Customer Reviews

Last Lessons of Summer

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm on Tape 2 of the unabridged audio version, and find myself unable to continue. It was very difficult to keep the characters straight when they were all introduced at the business meeting (no family tree on tape!). However, I kinda managed to get past that. My problem is the mystery angle; I just don't care who offed the old lady! These are stock characters to me, with a bit of melodrama thrown in.
I can fully understand the author's wanting to branch out beyond Judge Knott (whose books I really like). This effort seemed a slightly wishy-washy way of doing so in having a similar enough protagonist and being set in the same area as the Knott series.

Margaret Maron has created another great mystery that is NOT based on her wonderful Deborah Knott series.

Amy Steadman is the heir to a toy/childrens book empire left to her by her Grandmother(Francis Barbour.) Amy is an artist and wants nothing to do with the business side of the company. However, since Amy's mother Maxi committed suicide when Amy was only 3 Francis was determined that Amy's father could run the company but the ownership would remain Amy's.

The company business has been run for over 30 years by Amy's father. Now, he is talking of retirement and the step-brothers and half-sister that she's grown up with are showing some resentment for the years of knowing that she was the Heir to the vast empire they all had grown up with.

Amy's recent marriage is having problems and it's only adding to the pressure she's under. Amy doesn't like confrontation so after her Grandmother's murder she's offered a large sum of money to sell the southern home her Grandmother inhabited in the later years of her life with her Grandfather in North Carolina.

Amy decides that she wants some answers not only to the death of Francis but of the secrets behind the suicide of her mother years before. It's the perfect excuse for her to escape her problems and hopefully get some of the answers that everyone has made a point of making her forget over these years. Afraid of sending movers to go through boxes of personal items she heads off to clear the house out herself.

She arrives to a family full of secrets and a murderer still out there and now threatening Amy.

Her half-sister Beth runs away from her own problems with the family and shows up on her doorstep with tales of woe of her own. For two sisters who have never been close it's a learning experience and search for a killer.

Around every corner you'll be wondering who could it be and does it tie to her mother's suicide? Just when you think you've figured it out you're wrong. The emotions of Amy, a woman who has wondered for so much of her life how her mother could have killed herself and how her family erased her mother from her memory Leaving Amy with no answers is emotional.

I felt for her and was along for the ride wanting them to tell her what they knew and why no one spoke of Maxi.

This story is wonderfully written. It made me love some of the characters and hate others. I couldn't wait for the next page. I wanted to know what happened but I didn't cheat. It's that kind of book.

I am a huge fan of Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series, and I totally enjoyed this book. Some of the Knott series characters make appearances in this book as well, but the main characters are all new. I read this book while on vacation, and was disappointed I didn't save more of it to read on the airplane ride home...so I reread the last 4 chapters! Is this the best Margaret Maron book that I've read? Well, no. But it was fun, and like her other books set in North Carolina, you feel immersed in the sweet Southern charm of the "Old North State!"

The inside jacket description of Margaret Maron's sensational mystery novel LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER refers to her as being the modern-day equivalent of legendary Southern writer Margaret Mitchell, who penned GONE WITH THE WIND and won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for best fiction.

Although the comparison remains open to argument, Maron's LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER does strike a familiar chord with Mitchell's literary masterpiece by providing memorable characters and the many nuances of living below the Mason-Dixon Line. Like Mitchell, Maron has deep southern roots and is a highly acclaimed mystery writer. She has won numerous awards for her Deborah Knott and Sigrid Harald serial novels.

But LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER isn't a serial novel. Rather it is a compelling murder mystery featuring Amy Steadman, a recent newlywed from New York City who returns to North Carolina in an attempt to investigate the grizzly murder of her grandmother, Frances, patriarch of the Barbour publishing empire. Along the way, she also looks at her beloved mother's apparent suicide and experiences swirling family angst over inheritance issues.

Before the novel begins, Maron masterfully introduces to her readers a simple family tree that aids in following the story. Without a doubt, you will find it pressing not to flip back to the family tree as you read.

Maron is extremely gifted in providing tension, intrigue and drama in this 295-page whodunit. There is also a measure of romantic overtones, as Amy fights the notion of a cheating husband and a sudden attraction to the local detective investigating her grandmother's murder.

While LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER is well worth reading, Maron could have delved more deeply into the psyche of her characters, especially her main protagonist Amy. By the end of the story, readers may feel that they have just begun to understand Amy and her somewhat dysfunctional clan, which is why I wish Maron had not cut to the chase so quickly.

In addition, Maron needs to work on her description of North Carolina. Everybody realizes the weather is hot within the confines of Tobacco Road. She could have also dug a little deeper into the description of Raleigh. The book's story takes place in North Carolina, but unfortunately Maron's initial landscape of Amy's surroundings just doesn't evoke a memorable setting.

Despite these problems, LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER does leave you guessing --- and that is mystery writing at its best.

--- Reviewed by David Exum from Bookreporter.com

Maron's Deborah Knott series offers tightly structured, clever plots suffused with Southern Americana. _Last Lessons of Summer_ reads more like a Mary Higgins Clark mystery and I'm afraid I don't mean that as a compliment. The plot lurches along with such obviousness that chapters ahead you can predict future story developments. The characters are not well developed and thus make such unexpected transitions that I was put to mind of _Little Women_ in which Louisa May Alcott succumbed to pressure to "mate up" all the characters by the end, resulting in the deus ex machina of Professor Bhaer as a love interest for Jo. Maron does interweave much information about entomology in to her story, and those passages are almost lyrical, but in the end that is not enough to save this clunker.

I am a huge fan of Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series, and I totally enjoyed this book. Some of the Knott series characters make appearances in this book as well, but the main characters are all new. I read this book while on vacation, and was disappointed I didn't save more of it to read on the airplane ride home...so I reread the last 4 chapters! Is this the best Margaret Maron book that I've read? Well, no. But it was fun, and like her other books set in North Carolina, you feel immersed in the sweet Southern charm of the "Old North State!"

I was sorry that the talented Ms. Margaret Maron decided to make this book a mystery rather than a multigenerational family saga. The family part of the story is rich in many dimensions, including intrigue, emotion, improper behavior and a struggle for power. Perhaps the richest and most intriguing dimension is that a major family fortune rests on the slight imagination of one young child.

We enter into the story as a member of the third generation, Ms. Amy Steadman, decides to flee to North Carolina to clean out the home in which her grandmother was recently murdered before agreeing to sell the property. It turns out that not all is smooth in Amy's life, despite her wealth. Amy is suspicious of her husband's lack of interest in her, dislikes her father's philandering, finds her siblings to be awkward to deal with, misses her Mom who committed suicide when Amy was small, and finds her myriad relatives to be confusing in their behavior.

All of this takes a more sinister turn when Amy begins receiving threatening telephone calls . . . and finds herself in danger. What will this sheltered woman do to protect herself and her family? What dark secrets are being hidden?

I found the mystery to have two serious drawbacks. First, this book is way overpopulated with characters who are in Amy's family. Thankfully, Ms. Maron provides a family tree in the beginning. But I couldn't seem to remember who was who because there are so many of them. Do you really want to keep track of 30 plus people in one family? I found most of them to be hard to distinguish in any way that added to the story.

Second, the mystery itself is only marginally mysterious enough to require any thought. I found that the ending was telegraphed in way too many ways . . . and too much too long to develop. In fact, without all of the extraneous (to me) characters, this mystery would have not been difficult enough to be interesting.

I hope that Ms. Maron will consider writing another book about Amy and her family that will not be a mystery. This family is too good to be lost in thinly veiled mysteries!

Amy, a New York City heiress to a toy company, who is made out to be flighty, returns to Raleigh, North Carolina after her grandmother's murder. While she is clearing out the house, she finds herself investigating her grandmother's murder and the apparent suicide, years before, of her own mother. The heroine urges herself on with sayings from a beloved book about two stuffed animals: "What do you think, Pink? What'll we do, Blue?" This comes across as jeuvenile. Amy doesn't so much solve the various mysteries as stand around while people decide to divulge their secrets.

Enjoyed this even more than her Knotts books. Very smooth, with lots of "He/she could have done it". Well, worth giving a try if you've read the author before and certainly a good starter book for future Maron followers.

This is more of a character study than a real mystery, but I for one didn't fully anticipate all the twists and turns. It kept me up most of the night because I found the characters and their development compelling and credible. What really made this story was the complexity of the characters and relationships, especially Amy's slow realization of exactly who her grandparents really were. The way various characters changed and grew was believable. I have read all of Maron's novels and this is a worthy addition.