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 →Suffering post-SuperBowl, mid-winter, pre-chocolate-of-Valentine’s-Day blues? Pick up any and all of three wonderful new mysteries and escape from the blahs. All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley, Ghost Hero by S.J. Rozan, and Motor City Shakedown by D.E. Johnson provide five different sleuths (yes, Rozan gives us not one, not two, but [...]
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 →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 [...]
Continue Reading →I am now officially a Flavia de Luce fan, having read Alan Bradley’s latest in the series starring 11-year old sleuth and chemist and beleaguered youngest sister Flavia, titled I am Half-Sick of Shadows. It is Christmastime at Buckshaw, the decrepitizing English estate of the de Luce family, and a movie crew has taken over, [...]
Continue Reading →Anne Perry’s A Christmas Homecoming is her annual gift to readers and a sweet one it is. If you are a fan of Perry, you will enjoy this Victorian-set tale with Charlotte Pitt’s mother as narrator. Caroline has married an actor seventeen years her junior and his troupe has been invited to gentry for the [...]
Continue Reading →I loved The Demon’s Parchment by Jeri Westerson. It is a masterfully written mystery, creating full-blooded characters, atmosphere so alive I could smell it (I pinched my nose shut in certain scenes), and a plot I followed with ease — and yet in the end, I was completely surprised! That is the proof of a [...]
Continue Reading →A Soviet-Era dictatorship still exists, as the people of Belarus understand too well. The oppressive regime of President Lukashenko is truly a hold-out from the days of the old USSR, with a KGB that takes care of dissent and a ruling government that brooks no opposition to its economic directives or political direction. Under President [...]
Continue Reading →Looking back on reviews I’ve written of other Andrea Camilleri mysteries involving Inspector Montalbano of Sicily, I realize I titled both reviews, of The Wings of the Sphinx and of The Patience of the Spider, “Marvelous Montalbano.” Last night I read the latest in the series, The Potter’s Field and I am here to say [...]
Continue Reading →One wonderful perk of writing book reviews for fun and to spread the love of reading among adults (great good comes from reading great books, remember?), is that I receive free books from publishers. And when a new book by a long-beloved writer arrives in my mailbox, it is like Christmas in September (or whatever [...]
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