In the third installment of Ben Aaronovitch’s series about magic, supernatural beings, and a special police squad in London, Aaronovitch does the Whedon/Buffy thing. There’s a “Monster of the month” plot for our hero, Peter Grant, involving a murdered American, unbreakable ceramics, a female FBI agent, and, as you might have guessed, the London Underground system. At the same time, Peter and his fellow officer and friend, Lesley, and his mentor, Inspector Nightingale, are trying to hunt down a rogue wizard known only as the […]
A sexy rogue vampire runs the gangs of steampunk London
Honoria Todd is on the run from vampire nobles in Bec McMaster’s Kiss of Steel. Her father was murdered while working on a vamp cure for the Echelon, the near-immortal royalty who injected themselves with the virus. She’s forced to flee with her sister and brother into the night promising her father never to let them have his notes. She lives under false name in the rookeries of Whitechapel. She lies to get a job working as linguist in the rich part of town to make […]
Turbulent Waters in Post WWI London
Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests has been getting a lot of good press since its release last month, and the praise for this novel is much deserved. It really is a masterful work. Waters creates a suspenseful and heartbreaking love story against the backdrop of post-WWI London. Its rigid moral climate and deteriorating social and economic situation contribute to an almost suffocating environment that limits opportunity for women and criminalizes unconventional sexual desires. Waters stands shoulder to shoulder with Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin in […]
Monks and Spies in Tudor England
Okay, I’ll confess I read this trilogy out of order, and–worse–I reviewed them out of order, but I still highly recommend them if, like me, you’re an afficionado of good historical mysteries. Even more so since I just learned that this “trilogy” is about to have a sequel. Anyway… In this third novel, it is now 1584 and our hero Giordano Bruno is being stalked by someone through the streets of London. He has made a lot of enemies in Parris’ previous two books, and […]
Mrs. Dalloway
I’m on a quest this year to read 50 books by 50 women writers (in honor of my impending 50th birthday and #ReadWomen2014), and as I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, this felt like the right time to get to it. Mrs. Dalloway is a short novel by Woolf that covers the span of one day, marked by the hourly tolling of the bells. I would characterize it as having stream-of-consciousness narration, with the narrators switching from one to the next as they encounter […]
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