More house-keeping

As noted in an earlier post, a while ago I read The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman, about a cholera outbreak in industrial England in the early 1800s - death, disease, body snatching,  mass hysteria...and lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! It was okay. Imaginative plot and characters, and Holman has a skill for setting a really evocative scene, with lots of sights, smells (mostly bad), and sounds. Some of the characters were a little over the top, though (especially Pink), and I was never quite sure how I felt about the narrator's role and voice, which was certainly unusual, but maybe a little gimmicky?
I got the book off of a shelf at home, so one of my parents must have read it at some point, but I was wondering, as I read, if I had already read the book. That is too much "read" and "ready" for once sentence, but oh well. I think it's probably NOT a good thing if you're not sure if you've already read a book (again - d*mn it), but, still, over all, I liked it. Didn't love it or anything, but enjoyed it. And I felt like, if nothing else, Holman clearly put a lot of effort into researching the time period. That's not to say that it was accurate - I really don't know much about that time/place/setting, and wasn't going to go look things up, but just the wealth of believable detail in the book made it clear that she tried (even if it wasn't totally right, but who knows). The back of the paperback edition I read includes a "conversation" with the author David Liss (a book of whose I quite liked in the past, and I've been meaning to read more of his stuff) and she mentions some of the books she read, like Death, Dissection, and the Destitute which sounds fascinating, and not like it was just for show.

Another one that was kind of familiar, and I also should have written about a while ago, was The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld. THAT one, which I read on the way home from San Diego, was familiar because I had read the preceding book, The Interpretation of Murder. Both are mysteries featuring, among other, original characters, Sigmund Freud. As I recall, I didn't particularly like the first book; in fact, I think I actually disliked it, or at least was disappointed in it. To be fair, I think it might have been one of the books I read while I was recovering from surgery, and being in pain and housebound did not put me in a very good mood, so I tend to not remember any of those books very fondly. But I vaguely remember thinking the characters were simultaneously flat and irritating, and the mystery not all that mysterious.
I still had some issues with the characters in this second book, and sweet Jesus was the plot predictable, but I still was okay with letting the story unfold, minus a little frustration with the slowness of the unfolding. Huh, this sounds pretty negative, but it really was fine. I wouldn't recommend it, necessarily, but if someone said "hey, I was thinking about reading this, what do you think?" I certainly wouldn't dissuade him or her, and would say there were some good things about it. Bored of talking about it now though.