This is the second Hilary Tamar mystery I’ve read. Just like the last one, this one was endlessly entertaining and charming. The Hilary Tamar mysteries revolve around a group of five young barristers in London and their mentor, Professor Tamar. In this one, all five barristers are involved in a probate hearing for a large, wealthy family. The mystery happens when a member of that family is found dead, having either fallen off a roof, jumped, or been pushed. When another family member is lost […]
A Graveyard Where Nothing Stays Buried
So, turns out some of those Civil War reenactors aren’t just pretending. I’ve never lived below the Mason-Dixon line, so this book is a bit of a shock. Confederates in the Attic is Tony Horwitz’s first-person account of his journey through the South, exploring Civil War battlefields, visiting memorials and museums, and taking part in reenactments with a “hard-core” group (hard-core here meaning they throw away the apple he wanted to eat because that particular kind didn’t exist in the 1860s, confiscate his sleeping roll, […]
The Cat was the Best Part
This has not been a great year for me, bookwise. There haven’t been a whole lot of books I’ve connected with or really loved, and that has made it difficult to write these reviews. Most of my reviews can be summed up as, “It didn’t suck, but neither did it rock.” The Magicians of Caprona is in that category. It’s part of the Chrestomanci series, and I read and enjoyed the first one last month. The Chrestomanci series all take place in the same universe […]
The Loneliest People in the Whole Wide World
“Mornings now, when I wake up, I have this springy, hopeful feeling, and I see that everything is worth it, after all.” This line from Morgan’s Passing is my favorite quote from a book, ever. No surprise that I also love the book. It’s the story of a man named Morgan who’s bored by his tedious job, his inattentive wife and dismissive children. He has a closet full of costumes, and the one joy in his life is wearing them out in public and pretending […]
Bad Priestess
Half Cannonball! Charmed Life is the story of Eric Chant (called Cat) and his sister Gwendolen, who are orphaned in the first few pages of the book and eventually wind up living with a mysterious, peculiar man called Chrestomanci, who takes charge of their schooling as well. Gwendolen is a promising young witch, but Cat doesn’t seem to have any magical talent. OR DOES HE? Of course, we’ve seen this before, with a luckless British orphan who doesn’t seem to be anybody special, who gets […]
Get Bent, Taxman
Oh, I loved this book. And seeing now that the cover was illustrated by Edward Gorey (I read it on my Kindle), I love it even more. Thus Was Adonis Murdered is the first book in a mystery series that revolves around a group of young barristers and their older mentor-type person, Hilary Tamar, who narrates the books. In this one, one of the barristers, Julia, driven to near-poverty by Inland Revenue (England’s version of the IRS, I assume), decides she might as well splurge […]
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