Secret Adversary is my first foray into Agatha Christie books. My only regret is that I didn’t discover Ms. Christie sooner. While it is nearly a century old, the book is (relatively) quickly paced, entertaining, and witty. Plotwise, it had me guessing until the very end! Since it was written in 1922, there is no copyright on the book and therefore you can legally download it for free. Although, for CBR purposes, consider buying a paperback version! Adversary revolves around a witty couple of members […]
Treason and Syphilis During the 7-Years War
This is Gabaldon’s first book in a new trilogy following her highly successful Outlander series. The “Lord John” series is based on the relatively minor character from the Outlander books Lord John Grey, who is a young and fiercely patriotic military officer and second son of a wealthy and prestigious family. Lord John is also a secret homosexual, a practice which was seen as akin to treason in these tumultuous days of the Seven Years War between England and France, and which causes him no […]
Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here!
A year or two I got back into comic books, and spent many a Saturday morning browsing garage sales and used book stores for anything that tickled my proverbial fancy. I bought a sealed grab bag of comics (gambling for collectors) and opened it up to find a few stray issues of Camelot 3000, a 1980s maxi-series written by Mike Barr and illustrated by Brian Bolland of The Killing Joke fame. The comic looked bananas, so in my weekly trips to the used book stores […]
Good Evening, and welcome to a new episode of Pointless
I know next to nothing about Philip Hensher, but after reading The Northern Clemency I think I can draw two conclusions. One, he has read The Corrections and The Line of Beauty. Two, he quite liked both of them and fancied trying something quite similar. I’ve only just finished The Northern Clemency so I haven’t Googled any reviews, but I suspect they may bring up these two novels as well, because a) zany family antics with a tragic edge and b) Thatcher-era Northern England. It’s […]
Worthy successor to “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by JK Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith)
This is the second of Galbraith’s “who-dun-its” starring the one-legged private detective Cormoran Strike, and the quality of the writing, the pace of the action, the depth of the characters and the evocative settings are an equal to the first in the series. Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling, takes us behind the scenes of the vicious back-biting publishing industry, where one particularly unloveable author goes missing and then turns up horribly dead. Our hero Strike is still riding the high of his previous successful and high-profile […]
Love the movie, love the book
I can say that I am now an unabashed Nick Hornby fan. A fellow book lover pal of mine mailed me their copy of About a Boy which started me on my road to fandom. It was delightful, and I remembered enjoying the film of High Fidelity so I decided to read the book. Luckily, it had been a long while since I’ve seen the movie so I was able to still have th element of surprise. It. Was. Great. Rob owns a record shop […]