About a year ago in this space, I published some information about local author R.L. Anderson's Will Nickerson mystery series. Anderson recently contacted me again to let me know he has a third novel published in the series, and all three parts of the series are now available for Amazon Kindle, Nook and in print.

Anderson writes:

I now have a third novel published, titled Viking It Is, which is set in a small Scandinavian community in North Dakota and also features Will Nickerson, plus many of the other main characters who appeared in the first two.
...
All three are "whodunits" with rural/small town settings and feature Will Nickerson, a small town merchant turned amateur detective, who lives in the fictional community of New Oslo, North Dakota.  As noted previously, Lake Metroparks and the Holden Arboretum inspired the settings for the first two.  Viking It Is focuses more on the town of New Oslo itself, with its Scandinavian heritage (I am half Swedish myself, so I can relate very well to the Swedish and Norwegian cultures which come out in this and my other stories).  In this third installment of my series, an obnoxious and enigmatic stranger comes to town and promptly vanishes without a trace.  Is it murder--or what?  It's up to Will and his fellow townsfolk, plus a host of equally enigmatic visitors staying at the New Oslo Motel to find the answer.  As with Ranch Park and It's A Place For Trees, I've packed a lot of twists and turns, subplots, surprises, plus the occasional shock, into the story, to keep the reader guessing till the very end--just whodunit.  

If you're interested in purchasing any of his books in any of the formats:

Ranch Park: A Will Nickerson Mystery (Will Nickerson Mysteries) (Volume 1)	Paperback	Kindle	Nook
It's A Place For Trees: A Will Nickerson Mystery (Will Nickerson Mysteries) (Volume 2)	Paperback	Kindle	Nook
Viking It Is: A Will Nickerson Mystery (Will Nickerson Mysteries) (Volume 3)	Paperback	Kindle	Nook

-- Cheryl Sadler | CSadler@News-Herald.com | @nhcheryl

Chicago's Open Books has jumped on the bandwagon of of making "Call Me Maybe" videos with this parody "Read It Maybe." The singing is pretty bad, but the sentiment is pretty good.



In defense of e-reading, I looooove my Nook for several reasons — one of them is that people in public can't see what I'm reading. (Sometimes I like reading bad/trashy books, but I don't always want others to know about it. And it's much less embarassing to check out a trashy e-book through CLEVNET's emedia site than to have the cute guy at the library counter scan it for you after seeing your name on your library card.)

Any reading is good reading — whether it's a hardcover classic novel or a trashy pink paperback, The New Yorker or The Onion, on an e-reader or on a hard copy.

(Hat tip to Poynter for blogging about this video, where I found out about it.)


-- Cheryl Sadler | CSadler@News-Herald.com | @nhcheryl

Since I got my Nook, I've been voraciously scanning CLEVNET's emedia site for reading material. I came across "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows on a top-read list, so I put my name on the waiting list and had my usual giddy reaction when I got an email notifying me I could check it out.

The historical fiction is told through letters among the main characters. That's all. No dialogue, no additional text -- just letters. I had come across this before (in "The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters" by Elisabeth Robinson), so I adjusted to the format fairly quickly. The story is set in London shortly after World War II. Writer Juliet Ashton begins corresponding with members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and decides she has to go to the island.

This is where the book should get interesting, but I didn't find it that way. The letters continue, and the story becomes kind of predictable. I guess I just wasn't interested enough in the characters to care about what happened.

Part of what drew me to selecting this book was the time period in which it took place. But the really sad stories of the war came too late. I had already lost my investment in the story when I learned of the really awful things some of the characters went through.


The "deluxe" part of the book is the annotations throughout. Instead of having footnotes, like in a traditional book, the ebook links text to annotations in the back. Below, a video of me demonstrating how the annotations work (or watch here):



I didn't use the annotations much. Maybe I would have enjoyed the story more than I did if I had read through all of that background information to add context to the characters' situations. But I felt like the lengthy notes took away the momentum of the letters.


-- Cheryl Sadler | CSadler@News-Herald.com | @nhcheryl