For five years, May 17th was an actual day of mourning for me. I put it on my calendar and wore all black. May 17th, 2007 was the day the CW canceled Veronica Mars. This five year period ended for me on March 13th, 2013 — O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! — when Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell announced they were Kickstarting the return of V-Mars, one of my favorite television heroines of all time. My love for her transcends my ability to think critically. I backed the project […]
A Grisly Thriller with a Touch of Humor
The fifth in a series of thrillers about Portland Detective Archie Sheridan and his arch-nemesis and former lover Gretchen Lowell is both grisly and well-written: two crucial elements in a thriller worth the read. The essence of the plot is that horrendous murders are happening in apparently random ways, with only one linking piece of evidence that no one as yet understands. Detective Sheridan receives a summons to visit Gretchen, also known as the infamous “Beauty Killer,” a sadistic serial killer who is doing life […]
A bawdy blend of Flashman and Lovejoy, with a little Lupin thrown in for good measure.
Originally released in the early seventies and recently resurrected by Penguin, Don’t Point That Thing At Me is the first in a trilogy starring Charlie Mortdecai, an aristocratic, narcissistic and ruthless antique dealer, accomplished fencer (of stolen property) and occasional hitman. Accompanied by his trusty manservant/vicious thug Jock, Mortdecai attempts to make a profit from stolen artwork and stay alive in the face of constant peril. Frequently witty and sporadically unpleasant, it’s a raucous ride across England and the US as Mortdecai struggles to stay one step […]
Where is the girl,
Where is the girl, who by the boatman’s door, Above the locks, above the boating throng, Unmoor’d our skiff when through the Wytham flats, Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among And darting swallows and light water-gnats, We track’d the shy Thames shore? (From Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1865) , set around Oxford.) More detective fiction! But this time it’s actually from the interwar period–the Golden Age–rather than just being set there. An all-female Oxford college, full of clever, high-spirited girls with enough time […]
Deaver’s Skin Collector is unfortunately NOT The Bone Collector
Once again, we see Deaver at both his best and his worst. I am a long-time fan of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs forensic mysteries, and despite the fact that this latest novel contains Deaver’s hallmark thrills and chills and surprise twists and turns, I felt let down by the end. Perhaps it was because Deaver has such a complicated overlapping of plots that, in order to solve them all, he has our hero make 13th-hour leaps to conclusions which are simply not justified by the […]
Playing Catch-Up — Five 100(ish) Word Reviews for the Price of One Click!
Flat-Out Celeste – Jessica Park Flat-Out Celeste is the story of a girl who’s not quite like everyone else. Sometimes she starts to Google “Asperger’s” but can’t quite pull the trigger. At 17, Celeste is looking forward to leaving behind the awkward interactions of high school for the intellectual freedom of an Ivy League education. And then she meets Justin. Justin is a student-ambassador for a California liberal arts school, 3000 miles away from Celeste’s world. He doesn’t save her, but he helps her embrace […]
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