Perhaps because of all the praise heaped on this book, I found The Dinosaur Feather to be one of the more disappointing murder mysteries I’ve read in a while. In a nutshell, the plot is centered on a furious and long-running cross-Atlantic brawl between two respected paleontologists over whether birds evolved from dinosaurs or are their own separate species (something which has been definitively resolved since, which in my view takes the wind a little bit out of the author’s sails). The strange and very […]
Another unbelievable conspiracy thriller
This is the first in a new series about FBI special agent and forensic artist Sydney Fitzpatrick, written by Burcell, herself an FBI-trained forensic artist. A somewhat better tale than Burcell’s The Dark Hour which I recently reviewed, this novel focuses on Fitzpatrick’s personal crisis over whether to follow up on brand-new clues about her father’s murder 20 years earlier, or to leave it alone. Of course, had she left it alone, we would have no story, so…. There is a race against time, as […]
Gothic crime and Victorian intrigue
A Victorian novel in the form of an epistolary, this is the supposed journal of 17-year-old Richard Shenstone, who has just been sent home, or “rusticated,” from Cambridge because of misdeeds that are only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. Richard has recently learned that his father, once a respected deacon of the church, has died of a heart attack while under suspicion of embezzlement of church funds–and worse–and that his mother and older sister are living in dire circumstances in a delapidated […]
A Who-Done-It Modeled on Greek Tragedy
I was expecting another courtroom drama, which Turow is famous for, but instead got a complicated who-dun-it which meshed power struggles and politics with family feuds and Greek mythol0gy. As Turow himself admits in his concluding notes, inspiration for the story came from the Gemini myth of Castor and Pollux, twins who shared in each other’s fates and spent half their time in Hades and half on Mount Olympus with the Greek Gods. Knowing that myth before reading the book gives added dimensions to Turow’s […]
Deja Dead All Over Again
It’s summer and it’s hot. I went on a Netflix binge and got through all available episodes of “Bones”. It’s not a bad show, but I never watched the show until this binge because it’s so different from the books. The show doesn’t do the books justice. So once I ran out of episodes I decided to go back to the books. The first time I read them it was out of order, based on what the library had, and what I could borrow from […]
Shakespeare, rare books, murder and mystery
This book drew me with the title alone, but when I read the blurb and discovered that it was about finding and restoring rare books, a cross-century literary mystery, Shakespeare, conspiracy, murder and mayhem, I knew this one was for me. The protagonist is a young American man named Peter Byerly, an antiquarian bookseller with an obsessive attraction to rare books and an equally obsessive aversion to social interaction. Byerly has become a virtual recluse since the death of his beloved Amanda nine months earlier, […]
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