It was a dark and stormy night… As funny as it might seem to echo the opening sentence of Snoopy’s novel in the Peanuts cartoons, it’s an apt description of the atmosphere and ambience of Carlos Ruiz Záfon’s second novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, The Angel’s Game. For anyone who has ever spent time in Barcelona and remembers it as being a sunny, youthful and vibrant place, Záfon imbues his Barcelona of the 1930s as a dolorous, dark and mysterious city full of […]
A romp through the bayou in pursuit of a mad axeman with a rogues’ gallery of investigators.
Based on the real life murders in New Orleans during 1918-1919, The Axeman’s Jazz is a pulpy slice of true crime that rattles along at a brisk pace, neatly filling in the gaps between facts with entertaining and believable scenes. Celestin populates the city with a motley crew of people that wouldn’t feel out of place in 1950’s noir. There’s the weary cop with the hidden secret, the mobster with dreams of getting out, the journalist with an addiction, the plucky young agent in search of meaning […]
Jack Reacher finds his lady love
An old Jack Reacher novel from 1999 that I somehow missed during my Reacher marathon years, this one reminded me of how much fun Child’s plots could be. And how the stress of having to churn out Reacher novels that can appeal to the likes of Tom Cruise are clearly threatening to ruin this delightful adventure franchise. Retired military MP Jack Reacher is hand-digging swimming pools by day in Key West, and working as a bouncer in a nudie club at night, and reveling in […]
This Town Should Have a Sign Which Reads: “Bad Things Happen Here”
Book Two in The Murder Squad series by Alex Grecian, The Black Country is the sequel to The Yard which I reviewed for Cannonball Read 4. As a refresher the books are set in 1890 and focus on Inspector Day of Scotland Yard, a member of the newly founded Murder Squad. The Black Country picks up a few months later with Day, Sergeant Hammersmith, and Dr. Kingsley being summoned to Blackhampton in the Midlands where three members of a family are missing and the local […]
Women Can Be Scary Part I: Agatha Christie
At some point in my young reading life, I think when I was in junior high, I read quite a few Agatha Christie mysteries. I still fondly remember the plots of Murder on the Orient Express and The Mirror Crack’d, but I’m pretty sure I never read And Then There Were None, considered Christie’s masterpiece. Unlike most of Christie’s novels, this mystery does not feature a detective like Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple sleuthing a path to the final revelation of the murderer’s identity. Instead, […]
J.K. Rowling does her thing
Like many others, I am a big fan of Harry Potter, but I haven’t had much interest in reading the later and more adult fare by J.K. Rowling. Even so, I wasn’t disappointed when my book club chose The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) by “Robert Galbraith” as its next book. Cuckoo’s Calling is a classic murder mystery reminiscent of the noir style of Hammett. Cormoran Strike is a war hero who lost his leg in Iraq. He’s just had a terrible break-up with his beautiful girlfriend, […]
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