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 […]
Fightin’ for Americaaaa!!!!
This one is technically a cheat because I’ve read it before, and I even reviewed it back in 2012 for CBR2. But with the talk of an HBO adaptation coming up over at Pajiba, I found myself straining to remember the details so I thought I’d revisit it since I still have it in my handy-dandy first-generation Kindle. It was good to rediscover bits I’ve missed before, such as the various different gods and deities that I didn’t recognize the first time around. Or to […]
A Tragedy of Psychological Proportions
On July 11, 1906, Grace Brown, a skirt factory worker, was killed after she was evicted from a boat and fell into a lake in upstate New York. Her body was found the next day, and her lover was targeted as the chief suspect in a homicide. Grace had been pregnant, and letters to Gillette proved that their relationship had been covert and tempestuous. Gillette was convicted of her murder and later executed after an appeal and appeal to the governor failed. Theodore Dreiser’s An […]
Troubling on so many levels
I’ve read Gillian Flynn’s body of work in reverse. I first became aware of her when everyone was reading Gone Girl, so I jumped on the bandwagon and tore through that novel like the suspenseful page-turner that it is. Next I read Dark Places, and in some ways I liked it even more, with its dark, In Cold Blood feel, though at times I felt like Flynn piled on the disfunction a bit too heavily. “How much more can this family go through?” I remember […]
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 […]
There’s a country house party in the 1920s…what do you think will happen?
A. A. Milne is a million times more famous for Winnie-The-Pooh than he is for this neat, compact and fluent little novel of amateur detectives and a body in a locked room. Which is a shame, as The Red House Mystery (1922), while not brilliant or innovative, is of value because it masters the conventions with precision and humour, creating an entertaining mystery, and likeable characters with enjoyably explicit nods to Sherlock and Watson in their dynamic. Mark Ablett is a patron of the arts, an […]
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