Hello, Cannonballers! This is my first post of 2015, so I went with some low-hanging fruit to kick off the year: a very fun mystery featuring a mischievous girl detective! I had no less than 4 people recommend this book to me in the past few years- and that always makes me nervous. What if I don’t enjoy the book? What if I find it trite or boring or entirely too focused on something esoteric? Then, in this particular case, I would have to literarily avoid […]
Books, Blood, Love, And Barcelona
“Page after page I let the spell of the story and its world take me over, until the breath of dawn touched the window and my tired eyes slid over the last page.”
Unexpected testicle reference
I’m not sure if I really need to explain much about either Dan Brown or the writing style he spawned. Angels and Demons was published before The Da Vinci Code, but is part of the same world – mysterious historical cults with treasure hunts in famous art and a countdown before disaster. These books spawned a whole genre of occult mystery, or whatever it’s called. The books are best sellers, but not masterpieces of award-winning quality. HOWEVER. I had read this before but missed a […]
“Perfect” in a title raises my expectations
This book is a mystery romance where a couple are thrown together through contrivance, running from bad guys, chasing the past actions of a con man to prove our heroine’s innocence from a murder charge. It sounds good. It’s only.. ok. It’s engrossing enough while you’re reading it, but utterly forgettable and unrealistic. I will acknowledge I have issues. It’s not the greatest plan to read a book which bills itself as a beach read in the depths of winter. It contains adventure, romance, and a […]
Hot New Harlan Coben Paints Dating Services Extra Creepy
I’ve been stuck on Harlan Coben since his Myron Bolitar days, but I have to say that even though I miss the funny give-and-take dialogue his novels keep getting better, more along the lines of his marvelous Tell No One. Coben likes dealing in flawed characters and in delving into the emotion of loss, which colors most of his novels of late. This was the driving force of Missing You, in which there are not one, but two missing people with whose memories NYPD Detective […]
Debut Harry Hole book is not bad, but contributes little to the Hole story at this late date
This is apparently the debut novel of Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, released in English only recently and after a whole raft of later Harry Hole mysteries were already long in the public domain in their English translation. While it is gratifying to learn that (1) Hole was once capable of a romantic relationship and (2) that Hole was once capable of having a whole conversation with someone, this novel doesn’t reveal a whole lot more about this morose if brilliant drunk of a detective except […]
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