Even with hot, humid Los Angeles as its setting, Rachel Howzell‘s latest thriller No One Knows You’re Here gave me the chills. And I mean that in the best of ways. No One Knows You’re Here is a spine-tingling novel of the highest order, demanding not only that I pay attention to the fear wrought [...]
Continue Reading →Pure by Andrew Miller is a mesmerizing book, a stunner of historical fiction set in 1785 Paris, when an ambitious provincial engineer is commissioned to clear out the oldest cemetery in Paris, disposing of the bones, destroying the attendant church, and filling in the holes left behind any way he can. It quickly becomes apparent [...]
Continue Reading →How It All Began, the new novel from Booker Prize Winner Penelope Lively can be read as a clever and fun romp, where we the reader get to play peeping tom, peeking into ordinary lives turned sideways by one incident. Charlotte, the eye of the storm, recovers from the incident in the home of Rose, [...]
Continue Reading →I love just about everything Walter Mosley writes. The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray is one of my favorite novels ever, The Tempest Tales made me laugh and think, his Easy Rawlins mysteries make me cry and think, and his most recent series, starring ex-boxer Lenoid McGill, make me smile wryly and think even more. [...]
Continue Reading →Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, is a bit slow getting started but then it soars in a gripping and sometimes terrifying “what if” flight of fancy: what if you could change history, what if you could go back in time and prevent a hunting accident, a hot-blooded murder, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy? [...]
Continue Reading →I absolutely loved the novel Jamesland by Michelle Huneven, which was loaned to me by a cherished and bookish friend. I am glad to have sneezed all over the book, for now I can keep it for myself — and I have ordered a brand-new copy for my friend. Jamesland tells the story of two [...]
Continue Reading →The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar is a sparkling and sharp slice of life that, in presenting four personal stories, reflects and illuminates universal truths. Four women have been friends since their student days in Bombay, during the heady but dangerous years of the 1970s when protests and marches dominated university life and parents [...]
Continue Reading →I read another Christmas present yesterday, this one from my friend Fernando. The book is Leon’s Story by Leon Walter Tillage, as told to and illustrated by artist Susan L. Roth. Leon was born in 1936 into a sharecropper family, descendants of slaves and still subject to a no-win existence of working hard with not [...]
Continue Reading →For Christmas, my uncle in Belgium sent to me a book written by the Flemish writer Stefan Brijs, titled The Angel Maker. The Angel Maker has been a huge hit across Europe and now that I’ve read it, I can understand why. Brijs creates, with creepy momentum and rich atmosphere, a thoroughly chilling and enthralling [...]
Continue Reading →I know it’s a bit late in the day to be offering my best gift idea for the mystery lover in your life but my life has been so hectic lately that I only JUST finished Twelve Drummers Drumming by C.C. Benison (I’ll admit I wasted time reading Mary Daheim’s The Alpine Winter which is [...]
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