Pen names are funny things aren’t they? It’s pretty impossible for the real author behind them to stay hidden for long. Either the books become so successful that the lack of personal appearances becomes telling, or someone in the know leaks the story just because they can. Sometimes, authors have pen names so they can publish books outside their own genre with impunity (Barbara Vine and Richard Bachman spring to mind here) and it’s no secret who the real author behind it is. It is […]
Sovereign. Deadly. (So nearly) Perfect.
Marisha Pessl arrived in a blaze of glory seven or eight years ago. Her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a critically lauded runaway bestseller. I read it and loved every page of it. Then, she did a Donna Tartt and vanished for aeons. I was about to give up on another novel being published when last year along came her follow up, Night Film. Unlike Tartt, the follow up wasn’t as critically reviled as The Little Friend, but it didn’t attract the universal acclaim its predecessor had. But […]
A Heretic Monk and Murder at Oxford
This is the first of S.J. Parris’ thrilling Tudor mysteries centered on the former Italian monk and philosopher/scientist Giordano Bruno. The battlefront of the novel is in England, where Elizabeth I is fighting to keep her reign secure from Catholic forces in Europe and within her own country that want to topple her and capture the throne for Mary, Elizabeth’s imprisoned cousin and Catholic Queen of Scots. This first book gives us some background on our unlikely hero; Bruno has been buried in an Italian […]
A 16th Century Tudor Thriller
Prophecy is the second of a trilogy of historical fiction novels that take place in Elizabeth I’s England, where the so-called “art of diplomacy” is but a thin veneer for a war of intelligence over which empire—French, English, Spanish– will reign in Europe and beyond. The year is 1583, and the Italian philosopher/mathematician/astrologer/poet and former Dominican monk Giordano Bruno has fled the Catholic Inquisition in his homeland and settled in the “relatively more enlightened” city of London, where he lives in the home of the […]
The Invention of Sensationalism
“What class the murder was, what class the victim was, how the death occurred, all these things made a great deal of difference to public interest,” writes Judith Flanders. She’s referencing Victorian England, but she may as well be talking about the U.S. in the twenty-first century (and England and many other places, no doubt). A full century before the term “missing white woman syndrome” was coined, so much about justice in Victorian England resonates with frightening similarity to our own time and place. First […]
I’m not sure I’d look for a new start in a town called Lovecraft
Tyler, Kinsey and Bode Locke move with their mother to Keyhouse, their uncle’s mansion in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, after their father, a school guidance councillor, is brutally murdered by a couple of Tyler’s classmates. The entire Locke family are naturally extremely affected by the event, especially the eldest brother Tyler, who feels responsible for the event, and for not managing to rescue both his parents. Kinsey, his sister, was hiding and keeping their youngest brother Bode safe, but she’s suffering with survivor’s guilt and dealing with […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- Next Page »