Phryne and Dot, her maid, are traveling to Ballarat via train (no spoilers here, folks). But there’s one problem – there’s a bad smell and everyone in first class is passed out. Luckily, our hero(ine) Phryne stays awake long enough to shoot out a window, alert the engineer, and rescue most of her fellow passengers. Well, except one – the mean old lady who spent the whole time complaining and being nasty to her daughter. They were in the first car, where the chloroform was […]
The grit and flavor of a Lehane novel, set in Brooklyn
This book by a young Dennis Lehane protégé socked me in the gut. It is about a small tragedy in a depressed and ramshackle corner of Brooklyn, which has reverberations that reach deep into the ethnically mixed population of Red Hook and teaches them—and us, the reader– about loss, grief, redemption and hope. It is a sultry summer night, the bars and street corners are hopping, and teen friends Valerie and June are bored and antsy. They decide to go for a midnight float […]
Preston & Child’s Pendergast Series has Lost its Heart
Perhaps I’ve read too many of the Pendergast series by Preston & Child, but I found Blue Labyrinth to be, well, just plain cold. That is, it didn’t draw me in or make me root for the eccentric protagonist, or anyone else for that matter. My feeling is that if you’re going to write a series about an unusual person, you need to reveal more and more of the man’s character, backstory, flaws and strengths to hold a reader’s interest. Instead, we continue to get […]
If Serial Was Set in Victorian England
“The ordinary was made sinister.” Any Serial obsessed person can tell you that line pretty much sums up the whole podcast. It also accurately sums up the murder of three year old Saville Kent in England in 1860 at Road House. The residents and staff of Road House all had alibis that, if you believed them innocent, appeared innocuous. If you perceived them guilty, their testimony seems suspect. For example, when the governess awoke at 5am and noticed the three year old missing from bed, […]
“I know who killed him”
Tana French’s The Secret Place is based in a posh girl’s boarding school in Dublin, where a 16-year old boy from the neighbouring boys’ school was killed last year. The investigating detective (Conway) couldn’t solve the crime at the time – he was killed in the middle of the night, all swear he wasn’t dating anyone serious at the time, and there’s no evidence that the girls can get out of the building by night. No forensics, no confessions – Conway is stumped. A year […]
My first book for CBR7 was a doozie! The second installment in Robert Galbraith’s (ahem, JK Rowling) series on war vet turned private detective Cormoran Strike, The Silkworm, was quite an interesting crime novel. Set in wintry London several months after Strike famously solves the Lulu Landry case (in Cuckoo’s Calling), Silkworm begins with a tired housewife on the hunt for her artistically-temperamented, mildly-successful novelist husband. Naturally this being a mystery series, said husband isn’t missing; he’s dead, and in quite a gruesome way. Cormoran […]
's CBR7 Review No:1 ·
Genres: Fiction, Mystery ·
Tags: cormoran strike, J.K. Rowling, rachie3879, Robert Galbraith ·
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 801
- 802
- 803
- 804
- 805
- …
- 860
- Next Page »