Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week.  Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists!
Besides now having it's own blog, Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia at The Printed Page, is now on a blog tour! This month Laura de Leon at  I'm Booking It is hosting.  Stop on over and see what everyone else got this week.

This week, maybe to celebrate St Paddy's Day, the luck of the Irish was with me.  I got two books --both from my two favorite authors:  Julia Spencer-Fleming and Donna Leon.

ONE WAS A SOLDIER

Thanks to the good folks at St. Martin's Minotaur who participate in the Early Reviewers program of LibraryThing.com, I got an ARC of Julia Spencer-Fleming's latest.  I was so excited - this is one of my favorite series.  And I've already finished it- couldn't put it down.  I will be posting a full review later this week. Here's a teaser:

At the Millers Kill Community Center, five veterans gather to work on adjusting to life after war. Reverend Clare Fergusson has returned from Iraq with a head full of bad memories she’s using alcohol to wipe out. Dr. George Stillman is denying that the head wound he received has left him with something worse than simple migraines. Officer Eric McCrea is battling to keep his constant rage from affecting his life as a cop, and as a father. High school track star Will Ellis is looking for some reason to keep on living after losing both legs to an IED. And down-onher- luck Tally McNabb has brought home a secret—a fatal one. Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne just wants Clare to settle down and get married—to him. But when he rules Tally McNabb’s death a suicide, Clare sides with the other vets against him. Russ and Clare’s unorthodox investigation will uncover a trail of deceit that runs from their tiny Adirondack town to the upper ranks of the Army, and from the waters of the Millers Kill to the unfor - giving streets of Baghdad. Fans of the series have been waiting for Russ and Clare to get together, and now that burgeoning relationship is threatened in this next tantalizing novel by Julia Spencer-Fleming.

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Then thanks to the folks at Grove Atlantic, through NetGalley I got an e-galley in my virtual mailbox for Donna Leon's latest in the Commissario Brunetti series. I'm ready to dive in this week.

Drawing Conclusions

Since 1992’s Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon and her shrewd, sophisticated, and compassionate investigator have been delighting readers around the world. For her millions of fans, Leon’s novels have opened a window into the private Venice of her citizens, a world of incomparable beauty, family intimacy, shocking crime, and insidious corruption. This internationally acclaimed, best-selling series is widely considered one of the best ever written. Atlantic Monthly Press is thrilled to be publishing Drawing Conclusions, the 20th installment, in Spring 2011 

Late one night, Brunetti is suffering through a dinner with Vice Questore Patta and his nasty Lieutenant Scarpa when his telefonino rings. A old woman’s body has been found in a Spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio. Her neighbor discovered it when she went to pick up her mail, after having been away in Palermo. Brunetti sees some signs of force on the old woman—the obvious wound on her head, what could be a bruise near her collarbone—but they could just as easily have been from the radiator near where she fell. When the medical examiner rules that the woman died of a heart attack, it seems there is nothing for Brunetti to investigate. But he can’t shake the feeling that something may have created conditions that led to her heart attack, that perhaps the woman was threatened.

Brunetti meets with the woman’s son, called into the city from the mainland to identify the body, her upstairs neighbor, and the nun in charge of the old age home where she volunteered. None of these quiet his suspicions. If anything, the son’s distraught, perhaps cagey behavior, a scene witnessed by the neighbor, and the nun’s reluctance to tell anything, as well as her comments about the deceased’s “terrible honesty,” only heighten Brunetti’s notion.

With the help of Inspector Lorenzo Vianello and the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra Zorzi, perhaps Brunetti can get to the truth, and find some measure of justice.

Like the best of her beloved novels, Drawing Conclusions is insightful and emotionally powerful, and it reaffirms her status as one of the masters of literary crime fictio

Hang in there....publication date for both is next month.  We who are fans can't think of a better way to welcome spring.