I do love Miss Marple. She’s plucky and clever, and the nosiest old lady ever. In this one, a friend of Miss Marple’s thinks she has seen a man strangling a woman on a train. Not her train, but on a train going in the opposite direction. The cops can’t find a body, and no one believes the friend. So of course Miss Marple figures it out. She starts poking around with train timetables, maps, all kinds of stuff like that, and she determines where […]
She’s a brick house. She’s mighty mighty and letting it all hang out to frighten you.
Oh. My. Gosh. This novel has been my albatross. I came across this book many years ago, borrowed from a friend. I tried to read it, but stalled out. I had my mother buy it for me for Christmas a few years ago and still was never able to conquer it. Yesterday, I was victorious. This is the most mesmerizing, confusing, terrifying, frustrating, wonderful novel that I have ever read. It is a literal and figurative labyrinth and the fact that a human brain could […]
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
I alternated between really liking this book and being very annoyed by it. I think if it had been one or two hundred pages shorter, I would have liked it a bit more. But with the hardcover clocking in at almost 600 pages, it didn’t have enough story to justify the length, which led to lots of filler to drag through. “He can’t really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them.” […]
Black sheep and stage fright
I can never decide whether Ngaio Marsh’s Died in the Wool (1945) has one of the silliest or best detective fiction titles I have ever seen, and there are a lot of bad ones out there (ahem, Charlaine Harris). The story seems to be constructed around the pun; the dead body of a lady sheep farmer and member of parliament in New Zealand is found rather mashed up in…a pack of wool. It’s like calling a book Bloody Mary and having the main character be […]
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr #11) by Lawrence Block
I first discovered Bernie Rhodenbarr, gentleman burglar, in middle school. My best friend and I were obsessed with Lillian Jackson Braun’s “The Cat Who” books. I was looking for one at the library one day, and something caught my eye “The Burglar Who…” bu Lawrence Block, just a few shelves up. I think the first one I read was second in the series (The Burglar in the Closet). I loved it, and quickly devoured the rest of the series. That would have been in the mid-90s. Block has […]
The sum of our experiences influences all
(This post original appear on Glorified Love Letters.) The holes in our lives require energy. Everything after must be arranged around that absence, and that effort often continues the devastation. In After I’m Gone, Laura Lippman takes the disappearance of one shady businessman, Felix Brewer, and follows the repercussions on his wife, daughters, and mistress. Facing a decade of jail time, Felix had his mistress, Julie Saxony, sneak him out of town on July 4, 1976. Ten years later, almost to the day, Julie disappears […]
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