If you haven't read Tea with the Black Dragon, read that instead. If you want another taste of Mayland Long, then this book is for you. It isn't top-drawer MacAvoy, but even an average book from her is a delight to read. ( )

This is a continuation of Tea with the Black Dragon. Mayland Long (Martha) is the manager of McNamara's Band. The whole story doesn't connect until the end and is too difficult to explain. ( )

Another tale of Mayland Long that stands up to rereading. A Celtic style band on tour is racked by interpersonal tensions that worsen when they come to Santa Cruz. A strange force seems to be a work and one band member is killed, leaving the others as suspects. ( )

A strange book. It's got a bit of the fantastical about it, with hints of supernatural power about Long (I believe the first book established this firmly) and others showing a touch of the pyschic. There's also some fairly obvious psychic influence at the mysterious child Jude. Despite that, it's set in the world pretty much as we know it; I couldn't work out to what extent New Agey stuff was supposed to be established reality, or whether it's just basically our world. I enjoyed the characters and the style, and the mystery that was growing up. I've got to say, though, the ending didn't do as much for me. MacAvoy layers lots of revelations, as well as a string of lies, making this shift a bit suddenly from a sort of supernatural story to an Agatha Christie-style string of "Aha!"s. The actual solution was a bit convoluted, and involved the reader (and all the characters) accepting some degree of pyschic influence from Jude, but that whole side of things was a bit vague. That made it hard for me to follow their shrugging acceptance that one of them was (basically) a murderer. ( )

The story starts five years after the end of "Tea with the Black Dragon". Martha Macnamara and Mayland Long are approaching the end of a folk music tour of the US, with Mayland acting as tour manager for Martha's band.

At the start of the story I could well understand why Elizabeth Macnamara had always found her mother's friends so annoying, since the other musicians are a motley crew. However the story soon develops into a mystery concerning the sudden death of a musician and the strange behaviour of Martha's three-year-old grand-daughter Marty, who is travelling with the group while her parents do some building work at home. ( )