This classic noir mystery takes place during the summer of 1965, during the bloody rampages in Watts that devastated portions of Los Angeles and left a permanent boot mark on the nation’s collective backside. A white man in the wrong place and the wrong time is dragged out of his car and beaten severely before he manages to break away from the mob and is given shelter in the nearby apartment of a young black woman known as Little Scarlet. When her beaten, strangled and […]
JK Rowling Launches an Adult Mystery Series
This “debut novel” by Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) is an enjoyable who-dun-it with a complex hero by the name of Cormoran Strike. A former soldier-turned-P.I., Strike is the bastard son of a rock star and one of his drug-addled groupies, and is long accustomed to surviving on his own. Since losing a leg in Afghanistan and mustering out, Strike has suffered the end of a doomed relationship with a beautiful but broken woman, no money, no new cases to solve, and regular death threats from […]
A new Alex Delaware mystery that packs a punch
Killer is the latest in this long-running series about child psychologist Alex Delaware, who together with his complex detective buddy Milo Sturgis, gets repeatedly embroiled in murder mysteries which Delaware’s professional insights and his friend’s finely-honed cop instincts always manage to resolve. This time, Kellerman uses the clever technique of exposing the villain right at the very beginning of his novel, when the rich and brilliant sociopath Constance Sykes threatens to kill Delaware for causing her to lose an already-doomed custody battle for her baby niece against […]
On Slavery and Body-Snatching
Nemo Johnston is an intelligent black man with a strong instinct for survival. He is also a slave in antebellum South Carolina, and is purchased by Dr. Frederick Johnston and his colleagues of the South Carolina Medical College in 1857 to serve as a janitor, a butler and, most importantly, as a body-snatcher (or “resurrectionist”) for the school’s desperate anatomy department. Nemo undertakes the job with the understanding that it is primarily black bodies he will be unearthing for the dissections, but any sense of […]
Jack Reacher finds his lady love
An old Jack Reacher novel from 1999 that I somehow missed during my Reacher marathon years, this one reminded me of how much fun Child’s plots could be. And how the stress of having to churn out Reacher novels that can appeal to the likes of Tom Cruise are clearly threatening to ruin this delightful adventure franchise. Retired military MP Jack Reacher is hand-digging swimming pools by day in Key West, and working as a bouncer in a nudie club at night, and reveling in […]
A Heretic Monk and Murder at Oxford
This is the first of S.J. Parris’ thrilling Tudor mysteries centered on the former Italian monk and philosopher/scientist Giordano Bruno. The battlefront of the novel is in England, where Elizabeth I is fighting to keep her reign secure from Catholic forces in Europe and within her own country that want to topple her and capture the throne for Mary, Elizabeth’s imprisoned cousin and Catholic Queen of Scots. This first book gives us some background on our unlikely hero; Bruno has been buried in an Italian […]
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