Good times with Miss Marple. I wish there would have been a bit more scenes with her, though. Maybe it’s just my own expectations of the role titular detectives should play in their own series, though. There is no written rule saying that the detectives must play the largest role in their books over other characters, it’s just what we’re used to. The vicar was a good pair of eyes to see this story through, after all. I admit it would be fun to see […]
For The Love of Self (but not self-love)
I haven’t ever considered myself much of a collector. I had things I collected, but I’ve never been really obsessed with having or collecting (well, except once but I think that had more to do with sibling rivalry than anything else). And the idea of “collecting” things just to have them never really occurred to me as a possibility. And yet I still own books from when I was a very small child, and have spent a fair amount of time hunting down the Dragonflight and Harper […]
I Have Known Several Villains Who Were Perfect Gentlemen
The Hippopotamus Pool by Elizabeth Peters – 1996 Since I read “Crocodile on the Sandbank” almost thirty years ago, I’ve been madly in love with the observant, intelligent, and mule-headed Amelia Peabody. Set in the 1800s, Amelia is an amateur Egyptologist who always stumbles upon a murder, a robbery, or a kidnapping as she accompanies her husband on digs. I’ve read most of the Peabody books, and I enjoy them a great deal for several reasons. First of all, Elizabeth Peters is adept at the […]
Southern gothic, done right.
I am often wary of Southern Gothic novels. I am a Southerner by birth, but often feel my southernness is buried deep in my psyche in a way that allows me to understand southern ways of thinking and doing, but I rarely think or do things that way myself. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin spoke eloquently to my inner Southerner and I enjoyed every minute of reading it. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter pretends to be a mystery story, but is really a story […]
The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood.
This book probably deserves five stars, but for entirely personal reasons, it was very uncomfortable for me to read the last half, and I can’t give a book five stars that my mind bends away from so strongly. It’s like when you try to push two magnets together and all they do is repel each other. They’re so similar they can’t be in close proximity with each other. My hate is so strong for this character’s actions because I understand him completely, intimately. It’s horrible that […]
Is there such a thing as a jazz vampire?
This is the second book in the books about DC Peter Grant and as such, this review may contain certain spoilers for book one, Rivers of London. That’s the book you want to start with. Something is killing jazz musicians in Soho. A promising jazz saxophonist, Cyrus Wilkinson, drops dead of an apparent heart attack after playing a gig. Doctor Walid suspects that something supernatural may have caused it and DC Grant can hear “Body and Soul” playing when he examines the body. Some investigation shows […]
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