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A Delightful Gem of a Novel

Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins

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Wilkie Collins is best known for The Moonstone and The Woman in White, but I highly recommend this enjoyable social issues novel. The action keeps moving and the morals come quick and fast. Collins knew how to write a fully realized character and how to keep the reader’s attention continuously engaged. Man and Wife involves a tangle of relationships and social questions of the day. The main issue Collins is dealing with here is unfair marriage laws and the horrible situations women would be left in due to their […]

November Odds and Ends

The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake

The Dark Tower by CS Lewis

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk

The Feathers of Death by Simon Raven

The Drowned Cities by Paulo Bacigalupi

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

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The Hot Rock – 3/5 Stars A farcical kind of heist book. John Dortmunder is getting out of prision and his old pal immediately brings him a caper to work on. Together with three other specialists, the friends will be stealing an emerald from a museum that has cultural and sentimental value for two warring African nations. One of the nations currently possesses the emerald, while the other is hiring the thieves. Paid a salary, plus the promise of a large reward, Dortmunder begins to […]

Shining Bright

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

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Sometime during the 1860s, young Rachel Verinder turns eighteen and for her birthday, receives a large diamond named The Moonstone. It is priceless and the guests at her birthday party revel in its opulence before retiring for the night. As they wake up the next morning, the Moonstone has vanished. Did one of the guests take it? One of the staff members? Why does Rachel refuse to cooperate in the investigation? Why is housemaid Rosanna Spearman suddenly so secretive? And what do the three Indian […]

Delightful, Jane Austen-esque mystery

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

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The Moonstone is essentially a Jane Austen novel crossed with a detective novel- the first ever detective novel!  This was an unexpected delight. The plot is very 19th century Britain: several years prior, an English military officer returned from his posting in India with dubious ownership over a very large diamond that had recently graced a Hindu temple.  When the diamond appeared to be cursed, the officer gifted it to his estranged niece, Rachel, in an act that might be malevolent or generous, depending on […]

“Of course I do,” returned Arthur, a little irritably. “You mean that it is a double-bedded room, and that one of the beds is occupied?”

The Dead Hand and Other Stories by Wilkie Collins

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This is a collection of shorter pieces by Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. I recently read his early novella A Rogue’s Life. These stories are for the most part from the same era as that novella. The lead story here is “The Dead Hand” and at first I thought it was going to be a kind of cheap thrill of a story. A man goes to a hotel off the main road and is offered a solid, if suspicious, […]

Taking leave of my publisher, I went to consult an artist friend on my future prospects.

A Rogue's Life by Wilkie Collins

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 (http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_rogue.htm) This is an 1856 novella written by Wilkie Collins and published serially. The novel spends several years with Frank Softly, the titular rogue and someone from a middle-class, more or less well-to-do family, who goes from being a political cartoonist to a would-be artist to a would-be scam artist plying his artistic trade in numerous ways including producing fakes of masterpieces and counterfeiting money. This book is relatively short and you can feel within the writing that it’s being serialized because chapters to tend […]



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