Laidlaw by William McIlvanney
Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: First in a series. This is perhaps the best 3-star book I’ve ever read. A quick explanation of my star system: 5 I give out semi-frequently to books I genuinely consider to be great. I’m not snobby with it, plenty of 5 star books are better than others but it’s my ratings system and I can do what I want. 4 is my most frequently distributed number, that’s for books that simply rise to the level of good. 3 […]
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia
#cbr11bingo #SummerRead Summer time and the livin’ is easy, so you need a fun, easy, vacation read. And Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia fits that bill. (And fits my #cbr11bingo #summerread requirement). Like several of my reads this year, this book has a “How I found it” story. Picture it, lunch June 2019. A woman is sitting at a table. Crap all over it (nobody cleans up after themselves) but there, in the middle of it all was a book with a […]
Fog Season by Patrice Sarath
Just from the reading, I have a hard time telling whether or not Fog Season is YA or not. It really seems more YA but that’s not where I remember finding it in the bookstore. The case for YA is that it’s very character driven, the few adults present are villains, servants, or non-presences like mom Alinesse and dad Brevart. Also, the presence of romance, more a factor in this book than the first, is reasonably PG. The violence seems to be a bit less […]
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
This is the 4th book in the Cormoran Strike detective series written by J.K. Rowling under her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, and she is really getting in the groove here. This outing has Strike and his business partner, Robin, trying to dig up the goods on a supposed blackmailer and also looking into cryptic allegations of a cold case murder. In diving into these investigations, which share some common threads, we’re introduced to scheming British cabinet ministers, horse-owning aristocrats, labour activists and the odd wiccan shopkeeper, […]
Breakdown by Sara Paretsky
Breakdown is a somewhat recent (2012) addition to Sara Paretsky’s Chicago-based V.I. Warshawski detective series (started in 1982, Breakdown is the 15th out of 20 V.I. novels). This outing kicks off with V.I. leaving a fancy awards gala to help her cousin track down a group of missing teenage girls who have snuck out to re-enact scenes from the latest teen novel sensation, a vampire thriller. V.I. finds the girls in a rainy graveyard, right next to the still-warm corpse of a small-time Chicago private […]
I saw a Goodreads description or review that called Cantero the heir to the Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams throne. Nope to that. The more I think on it, the more I like This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us, but it’s not the same level of clever, especially since it’s much more limited in the scope of the allusions. The wordplay of Pratchett is not there, nor is the narrative originality, or at least not original in the same way. Cantero’s pretty direct […]
