Annihilation had a pretty cover. It was gold and covered in fine spores that drifted across the page invitingly, so I picked it up not knowing what to expect. (Although people say not to trust a book by its cover, I’ve not been burned yet, touch wood.) It started off with a simple premise: a small team of specialists are sent to a strange contaminated area in order to figure out what was going on. It soon descended into weirder and weirder territory, as the team […]
Mosley probes black-white relations in novel set in 1965 Watts
This classic noir mystery takes place during the summer of 1965, during the bloody rampages in Watts that devastated portions of Los Angeles and left a permanent boot mark on the nation’s collective backside. A white man in the wrong place and the wrong time is dragged out of his car and beaten severely before he manages to break away from the mob and is given shelter in the nearby apartment of a young black woman known as Little Scarlet. When her beaten, strangled and […]
JK Rowling Launches an Adult Mystery Series
This “debut novel” by Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) is an enjoyable who-dun-it with a complex hero by the name of Cormoran Strike. A former soldier-turned-P.I., Strike is the bastard son of a rock star and one of his drug-addled groupies, and is long accustomed to surviving on his own. Since losing a leg in Afghanistan and mustering out, Strike has suffered the end of a doomed relationship with a beautiful but broken woman, no money, no new cases to solve, and regular death threats from […]
A genuinely good mystery besides “Why do we like Logan so much?”
[Disclaimer: the Pride and Prejudice project has been placed on hold temporarily, due to a one-week library loan moving this book in the queue. I will return with more Jane Austen enjoyment temporarily] I want to enjoy the mystery genre more than I do. Truly, there are few things I enjoy more than a delicious, intellectual mystery. But I become discouraged by the overwhelming amount of hopelessly dense, insipid, or lazy mystery novels out there, and I just don’t wade into them. Sometimes, I even […]
Gone Girl
“Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.” “Page Turner” is the most accurate description I can come up with- it took me almost two weeks to finish Never Let Me Go and only two days to finish Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (which is about 100 pages longer). I realize I’m late to the discusion, Gone Girl seemed to populate the internet all of last year and has been officially cast by Hollywood for an October release. I wonder if my […]
Models, Vets, Trust Funds and Mysterious Deaths
Unless you’re blissfully out of touch with literary news, which is unlikely considering this blog is for readers, you’re well aware that The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith is actually written by JK Rowling. It’s why most of us have even heard of it, but from what I understand it was getting good reviews even before she was outed as the ‘man behind the curtain,’ so to speak. Since I knew who really wrote it when I picked it up, I admit I am incapable […]
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