The Dig is a brutal book – both physically and emotionally. It’s also a constantly gripping and involving story that will stay with you long after you put the pages down. At its heart, the story centres around two very different people, and how they react to the land and animals around them. One is a farmer named Daniel, recently mourning the loss of his wife and struggling to maintain the farm by himself, and the other is a vicious badger-baiter and all-round vacuum of […]
As a true lover of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I must confess that Brown’s choice of inspiration for his fourth Langdon novel hit just the right spot for me. While some readers may be bored by his lengthy descriptions of Dante’s cantos on the odyssey from Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise, I wanted more. Some readers may find his near tour-guide-style descriptions of Florence and Istanbul to be a divergence from the plot, but I was entranced and nearly salivating at the chance to visit […]
Another Nic Costa crime thriller set in Rome, which reads less like a movie script and more like a subtler and fully-fleshed version of The Da Vinci Code. Young cop Nic Costa has recently been partnered with burned-out detective Luca Rossi and is sitting outside St. Marks Square trying to figure out how to survive the intense summer heat and humidity when reports of a shooting in the Vatican galvanizes the bored Costa into action. Despite strict instructions to steer clear of Vatican affairs, […]
I picked this up because I remember my teenage self enjoying the movie (or at least Jeff Goldblum and Jeremy Sisto). That movie came out in 1995, and the book wasn
In NOS4A2, Joe Hill takes his remarkable eye for detail and applies it to a wide and expansive universe full of rich, memorable characters. The general throughline is Victoria McQueen and the discovery of inscapes. As a child, Victoria (or Brat, as her father calls her) finds out that if she rides her bike fast enough, she can make a demolished bridge appear that leads her to whatever she looking for. A fight with her parents leads her straight into trouble: a serial child abductor […]
If you
