313. & 314. The Graveyard Book & Fool's Puzzle
Our hero is Nobody Owens, a baby who grows up to be a child and then a teenager in a graveyard, after the brutal murder of his parents. As long as he stays in the graveyard, Bod is safe, taught by the ghosts who live there and protected by something darker. It's inevitable, of course, that the man who killed his parents is still looking for Bod and one day their paths will cross again.
As with all Gaiman books, The Graveyard Book is beautifully written, but somehow (for me at least) it's not quite as spectacular as Coraline or American Gods, my favourites of his. Still, it was an enjoyable and entertaining read, just as I've come to expect from this author, and I continue to look forward to what he produces next.
In Fool's Puzzle, Benni has taken over the job of curator of a small town museum and artist's cooperative as she tries to come to terms with the sudden death of her husband a year earlier. The museum is organising an exhibition of quilts, but Benni's plans are interrupted by her discovery of one of the coop's members, murdered - her equilibrium is also disturbed by the man whose job it is to investigate the murder, who is understandably vexed when Benni gets more involved than she should.
If there's one criticism I have of Fool's Puzzle, which is generally an entertaining book with a nice characterisation of Benni in particular, it's the speed at which she and Ortiz reach an understanding given the amount of tension and disagreement between them. There's no real resolution of this, yet it's clear that this relationship is going to be the core of the rest of the series, which continues with Irish Chain (soon to be reviewed here, as I have already read it...).
