Nearly Gone is about a girl named Nearly who finds herself in a cat and mouse game with a murderer. She was just trying to win a physics scholarship, get out of the trailer park. Alas, a killer has to prey on her obsession with the classified section and leave a bunch of clues, then a bunch of bodies, that all point to Nearly as suspect number one. It’s not too bad, especially considering that there aren’t many mystery/thrillers in Teen books these days. You […]
Buddhism, Sex and Snakes: Culture Shock in Thailand
Apparently Bangkok thrillers have a certain notoriety for sensationalism, and Burdett’s Bangkok 8 doesn’t fail in that regard, but it is also so much more. In fact, this noir detective story could be a Phillip Marlowe, if it weren’t for the fact that its hero’s name is a little harder to pronounce. Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is the son of a Thai bar girl and a long-gone Vietnam-era American soldier, is a little too comfortable with many of the denizens of Bangkok’s notorious red-light districts, is […]
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 […]
A captivating true 19th century Chinatown murder mystery
Frog Music is stuffed full of characters, humor, drama, sex, and tragedy. It sprawls across the stage in technicolor, a stunning contrast to Donoghue’s earlier book Room, which confined her two protagonists—and her readers–to a tiny claustrophobic space for much of the story. And yet Frog Music has carved an aching and tender place in my heart, just as Room did. Frog Music takes place in 1876 San Francisco, and is based on the true story of the murder of street denizen Jenny Bonnet, a […]
It’s like Rear Window but with more butts of malmsey
The Daughter of Time (1951) is the first novel by Josephine Tey that I’ve read, and it’s a rather unconventional mystery, so I have no idea how the style relates to any of her other detective fiction. Based around the aphorism that “Truth is the daughter of time, not authority” (Sir Francis Bacon), the novel, via Scotland Yard Detective Alan Grant, investigates whether Richard the Third really murdered his nephews in the tower. Grant is laid up in hospital and bored; a friend brings him […]
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 […]
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