There are no words adequate to describe how much I loved this graphic novel. I’ve never given a 5 star review to a graphic novel before, so that should say something. The premise is simple, a seemingly normal housewife, Josie, in the early 60s moonlights as a contract killer. She has a suspicious mother-in-law, a doting and clueless husband, and two sweet children. Everything is going perfectly until her family time cuts into her professional time and her annoying boss turns up at her house […]
A dark mystery with plenty of humanity
3.5 stars. I had a shaky start with this mystery book, but after I gave up on the audiobook version, we got along just fine. The story takes place in Payatas, a Filipino neighborhood that is home to a 50-acre landfill where poor people come to scavenge and eek out a living. Many of these people are small children, mostly undernourished boys. When some of these preteen boys begin to turn up dead with horrific mutilations, the National Bureau of Investigations brings in two Jesuit […]
The girl who has survived her creator
The Girl in the Spider’s Web was okay. I didn’t have any glaring problems with it; nor was I especially blown away by it. Lagercrantz does seem to have done a good enough job capturing the spirit of the original trilogy, and his background as a crime reporter certainly prepares him for suspenseful crime thrillers — particularly ones where one of the protagonists is himself a journalist. Here’s the Goodreads summary: “Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a source claiming to have […]
“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
I accidentally ended up reading Gillian Flynn backwards, starting with Gone Girl, moving onto Dark Places, and finishing with Sharp Objects. I can’t help but feel like this reading order taught me a little something about Gillian Flynn, at least as a writer: her most recent (GG) has, to my memory, some of the least graphically disturbing violence compared to the other two, but the most monstrous female protagonist. This book’s protagonist is psychologically damaged, to be sure, but at her heart she yearns to […]
Sex and crime, described in sentences containing five words or less
LA Confidential was a present from my boyfriend, a James Ellroy junkie, so the pressure for liking this book was already high. And since I’m a bit of a contrarian (A bit?! my boyfriend would say), I’m predisposed to dislike things that others so vehemently love. I’ll find the holes to poke through, the flaws that are there — whether intentionally placed or not — and I’ll do my best to skewer the book/movie/show that others love so much. Because I’m a bitch. There’s a reason why […]
Being of Two Minds
Patricia Highsmith might be best known for her Ripley novels and their film adaptations, but Strangers on a Train, her first novel, set the path for her career and has likewise been adapted several times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It is an unsettling, suspenseful psychological thriller that features brutal crime and some deep philosophical pondering. Guy Haines, an up and coming architect, is on his way home to Metcalf, TX, with the expectation that his philandering wife Miriam is going to finally […]
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