Detective Inspector Hal Challis is a homicide investigator who works in the Peninsula region near Melbourne, Australia. He consults across the police departments in the area – a nice conceit so the series won’t make one small town seem like the Sunnydale of serial killers! His role requires tact, as he steps in to provide expertise, It also requires him to get a strong sense of the officers he will work with, and they are a complex lot. A few thugs, some questionable personal decisions, […]
Character is not created in times like these. It’s revealed.
I read Still Life, Louise Penny’s first Inspector Gamache book, many many years ago, and while I didn’t gobble up the next several Three Pines mysteries, I have read most of them over the intervening years. The series, to me, is delightful but not essential, so I am always satisfied with what I read, but never crave more immediately. A Great Reckoning, to me, was quite different. Setting much of the action in the Surete Training School where he is the newly appointed Commander allows the […]
The weather outside is frightful…
I don’t live in a place that has much winter anymore, so when I get the hankering for snow and ice, I tend to reach for mysteries that take place in wintery places. Stan Jones writes a series of entertaining mysteries about an Inupiat state trooper in Chukchi. Nathan Active was fostered to a white family as a baby, so he knows little of the culture of the Inupiat – so an engaging fish out of water story. The focus of the mystery is on several […]
I sat there listening to “We Shall Overcome,” looking out of the window at the passing Mississippi landscape
Anne Moody’s The Coming of Age in Mississippi is not an easy book to read and certainly Ms. Moody did not have an easy life. She captures it with a somewhat ramshackle approach, which I appreciated because it read like someone recounting memories and impressions, rather than a carefully plotted reflection. Her parents were tenant farmers in Mississippi and she grew up in extreme poverty. They regularly ate just bread or just beans and her hunger throughout childhood certainly is a driver in her decisions […]
Full of sound and fury…
My heart was beating so fast at the end of the first section of The Quick, and Lauren Owen’s ability to write a ripping cliffhanger at section ends was phenomenal. She also has a gift for developing characters that feel real and compelling; to be fair, not all characters – I thought James Norbury, around whom much of the action revolves, was kind of a drip, for example. However, when I thought back over what I read, there was little there there. To take a […]
The Original 8
In 1948, the city of Atlanta hired its first 8 black police officers. They were not allowed to wear their uniforms to or from work, they could not arrest white people, they could not drive a squad car or operate out of the police headquarters. If they uncovered a crime, they reported that to white police officers, who would investigate it when, and if, they chose. Many in the black community viewed them with suspicion. Darktown is Thomas Mullen’s fictional interpretation of this endeavor. Historically, Henry Hooks, […]
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