My James Ellroy kick continues, this time with a book that’s more of a horror novel than mystery. Book two of Ellroy’s LA Quartet, this is where he began to find his voice. One could see glimpses in The Black Dahlia of the writer he would become. The Big Nowhere proves he can handle a story with a larger scope than a typical paperback mystery. Ostensibly about the police squeezing the communists who hold the line for unions combating their studio employers, The Big Nowhere manages to mesh in the mob […]
We’ll Always Have Budapest
Dang it! I really did not need another mystery series to get into. A few years ago, I read Roseanna, which is book one in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s famed Martin Beck detective series. I liked it fine as a procedural but I’m not much of a fan of procedurals in general. Many complimented the series for the social justice aspect; it was an outsized influence for Henning Mankell in his popular Wallander series. But it just didn’t grab me. The case was interesting enough but it […]
Hardboiled On the Go
It’s going to be difficult to draw out 250 words on this book. Not because it was bad. I rather enjoyed it. But because it’s really not much more than a fun, slim hardboiled tale. But I’m game to try. Denis Johnson is considered by many to be one of the best writers of the last few decades. I myself have never read him so I can’t comment on that. I’ve been meaning to get to Tree of Smoke for several years now. This one might encourage […]
Maybe in a different time and a different place…
Although her books are beginning to come back into print at last, and most (if not all) of her oeuvre is available for digital download, Margaret Millar is a name sadly lost to the annals of history. She was actually a successful writer for a long time who won an Edgar Award in 1956 for Beast In View. Had she lived today, she’d be right up there with women such as Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman who dominate bestseller lists with their exciting blend of thriller and […]
A Different Kind of Spy Novel
Charles McCarry meets the kind of Goldilocks/middlebrow standard I look for in spy novels: not too complex, not too simple, not too jingoistic, not too cynical. Juuuuust right. This is the third I’ve read of his Paul Christopher series and like the last two, the plot gripped me. It’s a deep plot but not so convoluted that it loses the reader. Every scene has a purpose; there are few red herrings. It hurtles its way towards its sad, surprising end, tying in perfectly with the […]
The Book Sensation That’s Sweeping The Nation!
Disclaimer: I don’t know what the political boundaries are for this website, i.e. what’s appropriate to talk about and what’s not. I’m a bleeding heart liberal who makes other bleeding heart liberals look like Birchers. I also bear the scars of many a social media fight over politics and have no desire to reopen wounds here. So I’ll be reviewing the quality of this book and what Woodward is saying in its context. Please do not take this as support of an administration I find […]
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