This second in the “Red Princess” trilogy is an exciting and well-plotted mystery wrapped around a continued powerful in-depth look at modern China’s political, economic and social contradictions. The story begins in the impoverished Chinese countryside which was for a while the touted model of the Cultural Revolution, until it was once again abandoned to its fate and to the cruel exploitation of foreign investors and local opportunists. Then we are back in Beijing, where our heroine Detective Liu Hulan is called upon to investigate […]
A Beautifully Damning Nightmare
Fear is one of the most powerful emotions of the human psyche. It crashes our systems, lowers our defenses, and makes us act irrationally – all in the hopes that everything will turn back to normal, and the puzzle that is our fear will be solved into security. If someone can tap into this basest of emotions within us, we either praise them (when they do so for entertainment) or damn them (when they do so for our own suffering). I’ve experienced both, and now […]
Not as much fun as Real Vampires
I read this book a year or two ago, but I completely forgot that I had, picked it up from the library for some light entertainment, and got about three-quarters of the way through before I realised that the gory crimes and girly characters and burgeoning love triangles seemed strangely familiar. So…it’s basically unmemorable–generic in all senses of the word; indeed, it attempts to play with how closely it follows the procedures and developments of detective novels by being set among a group of avid […]
Antiques Roadshow, meet Murder She Wrote
Last year my book club read A Deadly Vintage, I think the third in the Molly Doyle Mystery series. It was fun and pretty cute. A quick read with friendly characters that was easy to jump into without having read the earlier volumes of the series. It did make me want to go back and read the previous ones though. To read more of my review, head over to my blog…
Time to branch out, I think, “Mr. Castle.”
I’m not sure whether I just wasn’t in the right mood for this, or whether the gag of having tie-in novels supposedly written by a fictional author in a TV show has just run its course, but either way Deadly Heat was less fun than the last couple of installments. (It was still fun, though.) This one picks up where the last one left off, with Detective Nikki Heat embroiled in a manhunt for the turncoat spy that ordered her mother’s murder. A new case […]
A Double-Helix of a Crime Thriller
Lucky me! I thought I had read them all, and then I run across yet another Connelly, this one from 2001, that I had somehow missed. A Darkness More Than Night teams up two of Connelly’s “heroes,” my favorite LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch and retired FBI profiler and heart transplant recipient Terry McCaleb, in a doubly-complex crime/courtroom drama that satisfies on all fronts. A man is found murdered in his own apartment, with no forensic evidence to pursue except for the weird way in which […]
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