Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
I’m going to be honest; I picked this one up based on the cover alone. And like they tell you not to do, I did sort of judge this book by its cover. Well, the cover and the first section of the book. And I thought I’d be dealing with a short set of vignettes about pulp horror monsters in space. Turns out that was a bit of a lowball there—there is actually a story arc that we follow throughout the book. Poor Dementer, has […]
Out on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-Young
Playing around with tropes is part of the fun of reading in any given genre. Seeing how an author chooses to put the pieces together, which ones they decide to leave out of the equation entirely, how they create an entirely new thing using components that are eminently familiar is what keeps us coming back. Following reading Next of Kin earlier this year I trusted Hannah Bonam-Young to play around with the romance tropes in unexpected ways, and in reading Out on a Limb rewarded […]
Old Black Magic by Ace Atkins
Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: starts with O I have heard from many living old school mystery writers that the modern PI mystery tales in the States can be traced back to Spenser. Having gone out of vogue with the deaths of Chandler and Hammett — and with only Ross Macdonald elevating the genre — the hardboiled PI tale had taken a back seat by the time Robert B. Parker began building his prodigious catalog in the early-70s. Which is why I’ve given more […]
