This is the first book I’ve read in Andrea Camilleri’s series about the laconic and short-fused Inspector Montalbano, and I believe it’s somewhere in the middle of the long-running series. Inspector Montalbano is a man who is afraid of commitment and loves fine dining–which in Sicily means that there is very fine dining indeed, if you happen to like pasta and seafood. He has a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend, and a relationship of mutual irritation with his colleagues and superiors–and there is something of […]
Amazing Amy is a “Cool Girl”
I recently finished reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. I wanted to read it before I saw the David Fincher film. In a way, I wish I had seen the film first, as the book was so fresh in my mind, and so riveting a read, that I may not have been as blown away by the movie as I could have been. Gone Girl is structured as a “he said,” “she said” novel. It would not be giving too much away to say that both the he and […]
How Not to Do Marriage
3.5 stars Nick Dunne’s beautiful wife Amy disappears on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary. Through diary entries from Amy’s diaries, the readers see how the couple met and fell in love, when they were both magazine writers in New York. Two layoffs and a move back to Nick’s hometown in Missouri later, taking care of his ailing parents, and things are no longer so idyllic. The last two years of their marriage have clearly not been all that great and Nick quickly becomes […]
Tough Guys, Tough Talk, and Treasure
I’m a fan of film noir. For my money, it doesn’t get much better than Fred MacMurray “Hey, Baby”-ing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Humphrey Bogart talking tough in The Maltese Falcon. But even though I’m a fan of the detective film and I love to read, I had yet to pick up anything by Dashiell Hammett, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Time to remedy that, I decided. The Maltese Falcon is the story of archetypal detective Sam Spade who, along with […]
This would have been better as just one case history.
Three unsolved and unrelated cases are introduced in the first three chapters of the book. Jackson Brodie, our detective protagonist who, of course, has ex-wife issues and a precocious daughter, goes about solving each of these cases, which slowly are revealed to be connected. This book starts out really well. Atkinson has a real gift for characterization, especially when she describes loss, grief, and frustration–and after the third chapter I was hooked, and curious to see where she’d go from that great set-up. There were […]
In 1866, the South Island of New Zealand was the hottest frontier for those who wanted to find their fortunes in the unexplored territories of the Southern Hemisphere. The California gold fields were mostly played out, so Europeans who had missed the opportunities of the fledgling West of America were booking passage to Dunedin, then on to Hokitika for a chance to strike it rich in the newly discovered gold fields. This exotic and diverse world becomes the setting for Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize winning, expansive novel The […]
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