If you’re looking for a lightweight quick read to go with popcorn, Baldacci’s latest thriller fits the bill. If you’re looking for subtley, nuance, serious character development and plausible plot, look elsewhere. Baldacci brings us another episode of his dynamic duo Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, former Secret Service turned private investigators who just can’t keep themselves out of trouble but who somehow manage to solve global conspiracies by themselves while magically winning the unpublicized appreciation of the U.S. President at the end of the […]
A trip down the Yangtze …. with a corpse!
The final volume of the “Red Princess” trilogy, Dragon Bones had me captured from the get-go. The author introduces us to the mighty Yangtze River in China by portraying the voyage of a corpse as it is swept, crashing and smashing and sometimes floating its way through the Three Gorges and the massive dam of that name still under construction, until fetching up on the outskirts of a city, setting the stage for an investigation by our intrepid couple Detective Liu Hulan and her […]
No Dwarves Around This Time
Unfortunately, this is actually the fourth novel a mystery series, but it’s the first one available in English. Of course, if it had really bothered me, I could have simply read the first three in German, but let’s be honest, this grabbed my attention because of the title, not because of anything I’d heard of the author. Full review.
There are all kind of ghosts in this life, and this book has most of them.
Nothing about this is the way I thought it was going to be. I really, really liked it. I think the main reason I’m always so surprised when I enjoy Stephen King novels is that the very first book of his I ever read was Cell, which I didn’t like, and which I now know is considered to be one of his inferior offerings. This is an especially dumb mindset to have now as I’ve read quite a few since then and enjoyed all of them […]
A Thrilling Mystery Amid U.S.-China Relations
This second in the “Red Princess” trilogy is an exciting and well-plotted mystery wrapped around a continued powerful in-depth look at modern China’s political, economic and social contradictions. The story begins in the impoverished Chinese countryside which was for a while the touted model of the Cultural Revolution, until it was once again abandoned to its fate and to the cruel exploitation of foreign investors and local opportunists. Then we are back in Beijing, where our heroine Detective Liu Hulan is called upon to investigate […]
A Beautifully Damning Nightmare
Fear is one of the most powerful emotions of the human psyche. It crashes our systems, lowers our defenses, and makes us act irrationally – all in the hopes that everything will turn back to normal, and the puzzle that is our fear will be solved into security. If someone can tap into this basest of emotions within us, we either praise them (when they do so for entertainment) or damn them (when they do so for our own suffering). I’ve experienced both, and now […]
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