A house party turns a millionaire’s hacienda hideaway into a crime scene in this classic detective novel from an Edgar Award–winning Grand Master. If actual wealthy people died at the rate that they do in murder mystery novels, we would be down to one Kardashian. My bet is on the short scrappy one. Ellery is a writer maybe? Gentleman playboy? Private Eye? Not sure, don’t care. It’s summer in New York and Queen and his buddy, retired Judge McClain (I kept picturing Bruce Willis from […]
Honeycombed by Grifters at City Hall down to the Flatfeet on the Beat
Alan Hynd was a prolific writer of “fictionalized true crime” stories for the True Crime magazine. Which means he took real cases and created dialogue and filled in the blanks to form a complete story. While the magazines are hard to find, his son Noel has compiled some of his dad’s work into anthologies, of which this is the first volume. The introduction is so sweet. Noel’s love for his dad and his dad’s writing is evident from the start and his genuine fandom […]
Magical Babysitter-Check, Clueless Parent-Check, Crazy Adventures-Check
This recently re-issued classic children’s book is damn delightful. John, Janey and Pete are children growing up in 1950’s midwest. Their babysitter, Mr. Pudgins, has a magical pipe, a flying car and a pet Dodo. The children have a series of magical adventures, until Mr. Pudgins has to leave to share his magic with a new group of siblings. This book was re-issued as part of the Nancy Pearl’s Book Crush series for NPR. It’s a really sweet book with only a few issues. […]
No Sparkly Vampires or Helpless Females here.
I wasn’t going to read this book. I have already declared a moratorium on post-apocalyptic trilogies starring plucky youngsters sprinkled in fairy dust that are the saviors of the entire world. Especially since this is one of those series that is self-published on Amazon and included in the free Kindle library. But the other day I was looking for something fast paced and interesting and this one was free so I gave it a shot. It’s fairly obvious that the heroine, Penryn is modeled after […]
Curiosity Killed the Goat
I have become a big fan of Jon Ronson from listening to him on podcasts. He’s a nerdy effeminate British dude which is kind of my kryptonite. In my admittedly lazy fandom, I hadn’t realized that he was the author of this book. One of my personal goals is to read everything on my “to be read” shelf and review it for CBR. As a frequent browser of used book stores who also experiences poor impulse control, the unread pile is a little out of […]
If You Met the Devil In Person, Would You Notice His Horns?
This book kept popping up on my Amazon account as a recommendation so I thought I would give it a shot. It’s not bad. The afterlife is overcrowded and measures are taken to improve the situation. Those measures fail and the Devil gets fired. He ends up in a medium sized city in England living in an apartment and harassing his flatmates. I didn’t quite understand why they were introducing themselves as flatmates which I always thought was synonymous with roommate, when they lived in […]
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