This was my first foray into Ilona Andrew’s popular “urban fantasy” series, and it was a fun ride—like Jim Butcher’s Dresden files with a little more sex and a lot more kapow, if possible! Gunmetal Magic is apparently a spin-off from the main series, and is centered on the story of Andrea Nash, best friend of the serie’s main character and all-around badass Kate Daniels. Andrea is definitely no slouch, and has an interesting backstory that calls to us from the very first pages. Andrea and […]
A new Lehane drama that I would call “Mystic River Lite”
A bleak story filled with flawed individuals trying to survive in a flawed society, expertly written in the dark and violent tone of Mystic River but somehow lacking the heart and soul and depth of that brilliant novel. Lehane created The Drop from a screenplay, which in turn was forged from a short story Lehane had written but shelved a decade ago. The story centers around Bob Saginowski, an emotionally-damaged guy who tends bar in his cousin’s crime-linked pub, devoutly attends church services on Sundays, […]
A powerful indictment of the colonization of aboriginal Australia
An excellent novel about the seizure of aboriginal lands by pardoned convicts from the British penal colony in New South Wales in the early 1800s, The Secret River could just as easily be the story of the extermination of Native Americans in early 19th century United States, or of the Spanish conquests in South America, or of the European colonization of India and Africa. Grenville is an Australian, but her story is a universal one. She begins with a truly Dickensian tale of Londoner William Thornhill, […]
Little Known Story of Italian-Jewish Resistance in WWII
This amazing novel tells the story of ordinary men and women—farmers, soldiers, priests and nuns, housewives, doctors, stonemasons—who took a stance against the Nazi juggernaut in Italy and waged a near hopeless war of resistance not only in defense of their homeland but in defense of Jews from throughout Europe who had fled across the Alps into an Italy which had broken with Germany, thinking to find a refuge from the genocide, only to discover that the Germans were occupying Italy and prepared to escalate […]
A Harry Bosch “cold case” turns red-hot
Connelly, the master of the police procedural, gives us another thought-provoking Harry Bosch novel, this one (#17 in the series) taking place near the end of Bosch’s long career as a homicide detective in Los Angeles. While not the best Connolly’s ever written, The Drop manages to engross the reader from the first pages to the last, while giving us some controversial social issues to chew on along the way. As is typical of Connelly, we have two simultaneous plots going on. One is an […]
Worthy successor to “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by JK Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith)
This is the second of Galbraith’s “who-dun-its” starring the one-legged private detective Cormoran Strike, and the quality of the writing, the pace of the action, the depth of the characters and the evocative settings are an equal to the first in the series. Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling, takes us behind the scenes of the vicious back-biting publishing industry, where one particularly unloveable author goes missing and then turns up horribly dead. Our hero Strike is still riding the high of his previous successful and high-profile […]
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