Five students walk into detention, they have little in common, other than that they were all caught with phones in class, and all five claim that they were framed and that the phones weren’t theirs. But only four walk out of that detention alive. Number five is dead and the other four all have motive and opportunity. Who is guilty? What really happened? That is the story which unfolds in One of Us is Lying. However, it isn’t the only story that Karen McManus is […]
A somewhat problematic murder mystery
Last year, I gave up on Cannonball Read in February. I kept reading, but the pressure to review got to be too much, and I ended up too far behind. This year, I’m not going for quantity, but instead am aiming to tackle all the books that I’ve bought over the years that for one reason or another have sat unread on my shelves. The first of these books is The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham, which I bought several years ago at Hatchard’s because […]
Is it better to start a mystery with a character or a corpse?
My mom got me the first two Inspector Gamache books for Christmas, and they are delightful! I saw that book seven showed up on a Cannonballer’s Best Of list for CBR9, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. Inspector Gamache solves crimes in Quebec, and these books are COLD. Both books take place in a tiny village called Three Pines, in the dead of winter, and Penny does an excellent job of building the atmosphere and setting. I wanted a croissant and […]
I have watched you on the shore Standing by the ocean’s roar
Detective Inspector Hal Challis is a homicide investigator who works in the Peninsula region near Melbourne, Australia. He consults across the police departments in the area – a nice conceit so the series won’t make one small town seem like the Sunnydale of serial killers! His role requires tact, as he steps in to provide expertise, It also requires him to get a strong sense of the officers he will work with, and they are a complex lot. A few thugs, some questionable personal decisions, […]
Character is not created in times like these. It’s revealed.
I read Still Life, Louise Penny’s first Inspector Gamache book, many many years ago, and while I didn’t gobble up the next several Three Pines mysteries, I have read most of them over the intervening years. The series, to me, is delightful but not essential, so I am always satisfied with what I read, but never crave more immediately. A Great Reckoning, to me, was quite different. Setting much of the action in the Surete Training School where he is the newly appointed Commander allows the […]
The weather outside is frightful…
I don’t live in a place that has much winter anymore, so when I get the hankering for snow and ice, I tend to reach for mysteries that take place in wintery places. Stan Jones writes a series of entertaining mysteries about an Inupiat state trooper in Chukchi. Nathan Active was fostered to a white family as a baby, so he knows little of the culture of the Inupiat – so an engaging fish out of water story. The focus of the mystery is on several […]
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