This “debut novel” by Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) is an enjoyable who-dun-it with a complex hero by the name of Cormoran Strike. A former soldier-turned-P.I., Strike is the bastard son of a rock star and one of his drug-addled groupies, and is long accustomed to surviving on his own. Since losing a leg in Afghanistan and mustering out, Strike has suffered the end of a doomed relationship with a beautiful but broken woman, no money, no new cases to solve, and regular death threats from […]
Putting the “lady” into lady detective
The Hon. Phryne Fisher swaggers through the social scene of 1920s Melbourne, tossing cocktails down her throat and good looking young men into bed with equal facility. Melbourne in the 1920s is an uneasy mixture of glamour and poverty; Phryne, with her title, her unlimited reserves of funds and seductive sang-froid, as well as her street-smarts (and street-fighting skills) and connections, works as a private detective for the kicks rather than the cash, and as something to do between shopping for haute-couture and befriending the helpless and downtrodden. […]
The Angel’s Game: Barcelona as You’ve Never Imagined
It was a dark and stormy night… As funny as it might seem to echo the opening sentence of Snoopy’s novel in the Peanuts cartoons, it’s an apt description of the atmosphere and ambience of Carlos Ruiz Záfon’s second novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, The Angel’s Game. For anyone who has ever spent time in Barcelona and remembers it as being a sunny, youthful and vibrant place, Záfon imbues his Barcelona of the 1930s as a dolorous, dark and mysterious city full of […]
If you’re looking for a totally immersive reading experience, here you go, but be prepared to work for it.
The first thing to know about S. — J.J. Abrams’ and Doug Dorst’s literary experiment slash ode to the written word — is that you get out of it what you want to get out of it. If you want to get all crazy conspiracy theory and puzzle out a bunch of mysteries, you can. If you just want to sit back and be immersed in the story, with a little brain power, you can. If you want to engage somewhere in between those two levels, […]
Women Can Be Scary Part I: Agatha Christie
At some point in my young reading life, I think when I was in junior high, I read quite a few Agatha Christie mysteries. I still fondly remember the plots of Murder on the Orient Express and The Mirror Crack’d, but I’m pretty sure I never read And Then There Were None, considered Christie’s masterpiece. Unlike most of Christie’s novels, this mystery does not feature a detective like Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple sleuthing a path to the final revelation of the murderer’s identity. Instead, […]
What’s in a name?
Pen names are funny things aren’t they? It’s pretty impossible for the real author behind them to stay hidden for long. Either the books become so successful that the lack of personal appearances becomes telling, or someone in the know leaks the story just because they can. Sometimes, authors have pen names so they can publish books outside their own genre with impunity (Barbara Vine and Richard Bachman spring to mind here) and it’s no secret who the real author behind it is. It is […]
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