LIbrary Loot—May 30–June 5

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've participated in one of these ... in fact, I think this is my first one this year. But I had a fantastic time at the library this week!

First up: The Intelligencer. This is a reread for me. I read it when it first came out in 2005 and I remember loving it. It's a mystery/historical fiction mash-up that switches back and forth between 16th-century England and the present day. The book subscribes to the conspiracy theory that playwright Christopher Marlowe was also a spy and that he was killed in the service of the Queen instead of in an ordinary tavern brawl. ("Marlowe attacked and got his own knife in the eye. Quarrel about the bill." "The bill! Oh, vanity, vanity!" "Not the billing, the bill!") In the present day, we follow a feisty private investigator named Kate Morgan whose expertise in Elizabethan ciphers draws her into a dangerous international mystery. The two stories are intertwined, and the secrets of the past are revealed along with some surprises in the present.

I also got Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned. I haven't read anything by Anne Rice and I'm still skeptical about the vampire craze, but I can get behind a story about an undead pharaoh.

And I walked out with Consumer Reports Best Buys 2012 and four issues of Consumer Reports, so that should keep me busy for the near future.

Photos from Goodreads