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 […]
Sovereign. Deadly. (So nearly) Perfect.
Marisha Pessl arrived in a blaze of glory seven or eight years ago. Her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a critically lauded runaway bestseller. I read it and loved every page of it. Then, she did a Donna Tartt and vanished for aeons. I was about to give up on another novel being published when last year along came her follow up, Night Film. Unlike Tartt, the follow up wasn’t as critically reviled as The Little Friend, but it didn’t attract the universal acclaim its predecessor had. But […]
The Invention of Sensationalism
“What class the murder was, what class the victim was, how the death occurred, all these things made a great deal of difference to public interest,” writes Judith Flanders. She’s referencing Victorian England, but she may as well be talking about the U.S. in the twenty-first century (and England and many other places, no doubt). A full century before the term “missing white woman syndrome” was coined, so much about justice in Victorian England resonates with frightening similarity to our own time and place. First […]
I’m glad I don’t have the sort of birthday parties Harry Dresden gets thrown
Dudes, this is book 14 in the series. Do NOT start with this one. Do NOT read this review if you haven’t read books 12 and 13, there will be spoilers, because it’s pretty much unavoidable when reviewing this book. If you’re interested in the series, I would recommend starting with nr 4, Summer Knight. I would also like to heartily endorse the audio books, narrated excellently by James Marsters. I’m hiding the review behind the link so as to avoid anyone being inadvertently spoiled. If you, however, have read […]
Are any of us really innocent when we get down to it?
3.5 stars This is book 24 in the In Death series. I wouldn’t recommend starting with this one, although if you’re interested in plot summaries of earlier ones, I’ve reviewed most of the previous ones on the blog. My experience is that either you really like these books, or you don’t. There seems to be very little in-between. Craig Foster is planning a history quiz for his pupils at a New York private school while having lunch, and dies horribly from ricin poisoning at his desk. The […]
A Hell of a Ride
My first review of an Agatha Christie book was of They Came to Baghdad, a light-hearted romp through global conspiracies to bring about World War III, archaeological digs, mistaken identity, and the intricacies of romance with a man who looks like Lucifer, star of the morning. Despite the joie de vivre of heroine Victoria, and the comic aspects of the perilous situations she found herself in, the central message of Baghdad was that it is better to “serve in heaven than reign in hell,” that what […]
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