Good times with Miss Marple. I wish there would have been a bit more scenes with her, though. Maybe it’s just my own expectations of the role titular detectives should play in their own series, though. There is no written rule saying that the detectives must play the largest role in their books over other characters, it’s just what we’re used to. The vicar was a good pair of eyes to see this story through, after all. I admit it would be fun to see […]
Black sheep and stage fright
I can never decide whether Ngaio Marsh’s Died in the Wool (1945) has one of the silliest or best detective fiction titles I have ever seen, and there are a lot of bad ones out there (ahem, Charlaine Harris). The story seems to be constructed around the pun; the dead body of a lady sheep farmer and member of parliament in New Zealand is found rather mashed up in…a pack of wool. It’s like calling a book Bloody Mary and having the main character be […]
Meatballs and murder
This is the first book I’ve read in Andrea Camilleri’s series about the laconic and short-fused Inspector Montalbano, and I believe it’s somewhere in the middle of the long-running series. Inspector Montalbano is a man who is afraid of commitment and loves fine dining–which in Sicily means that there is very fine dining indeed, if you happen to like pasta and seafood. He has a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend, and a relationship of mutual irritation with his colleagues and superiors–and there is something of […]
Putting the “lady” into lady detective
The Hon. Phryne Fisher swaggers through the social scene of 1920s Melbourne, tossing cocktails down her throat and good looking young men into bed with equal facility. Melbourne in the 1920s is an uneasy mixture of glamour and poverty; Phryne, with her title, her unlimited reserves of funds and seductive sang-froid, as well as her street-smarts (and street-fighting skills) and connections, works as a private detective for the kicks rather than the cash, and as something to do between shopping for haute-couture and befriending the helpless and downtrodden. […]
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 […]
Blood Rites: Sex, Blood, Magic
Blood Rites (The Dresden Files, Book 6)
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