Sometimes, a book is not at all what you expected it to be. You pick up a novel for the mystery but get sucked into the romance along the way, or a piece of historical fiction turns out to be more educational than any college textbook. Of course, this can also be disappointing, as in the case of Refuge on Crescent… Read more
Welcome to another edition of Wondrous Words Wednesday, where we share all the interesting words we’ve learned in the past week. Most of my words come from the book I just finished, The Rule of Nine by Steve Martini. Fabulous political thriller – I really enjoyed this one. But my first word is one I came across on a blog… Read more
Angel and Apostle takes up the story of Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, Pearl, and fills in the gaps left in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. At the end of the earlier novel, Hester and Pearl leave Boston and no one knows of their whereabouts. Years later, Hester returns to Boston alone, still wearing her scarlet A. There are… Read more
In Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen, an unhappy woman makes an impulsive decision that leads to tragedy. Stranded, cold and in danger, she has plenty of time to contemplate the choices that lead her here. Pretty standard stuff, really, as far as mysteries go. Luckily, Ice Cold has a handful of plot twists that keep the story moving along. Good… Read more
I love a good memoir! I tend not to enjoy celebrity memoirs as much as I do those books written by relatively ordinary folks who have lived really interesting lives. I’ve reviewed a number of them over the last few years, but The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers is by far the funniest — from the title,… Read more
What makes someone a freak? It’s the question at the heart of The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson. The story revolves around P.T. Barnum’s American Museum and the “freaks” who entertained the masses there. There were midgets and fat ladies, savages from exotic lands, musclemen and other oddities. But what made them freaks, and what would they choose,… Read more
Okay, ladies, we’re all readers here, right? And we know that seeing a guy with a book instantly ups his appeal — we immediately know that we will have something to talk about (books!), he is smarter than the average bear (he’s reading, after all), and we can tell a lot about him by what he’s reading. Now, someone has… Read more
The premise behind The Dark End of the Street is simple: When we proposed this book to writers from both banks of the stream dividing crime writing and literary writing, we thought we had a particularly alluring idea. Write your heart out on the twin subjects of sex and crime. Define each however you want, take any approach you like.… Read more
Little Bee is the sort of book I find hard to review. I want everyone to read this book — I want to tell you enough to encourage you to run out and put this on your wishlist. What I don’t want to do is spoil the story, and if I tell you too much, I will. The story at… Read more
The prologue will give you nightmares. (Do you know what sort of sound human vertebrae make when they give way under pressure?) Other sections of the book made me want to cover my eyes and read through my fingers. The killer in Thomas White’s The Book of Matthew would give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. This is not… Read more