Pratchett

I don’t know how, in my decade-long exclusive pursuit of all things science fiction and fantasy, I managed to miss out on Terry Pratchett. I discovered some of the contemporaries to whom he is frequently compared (Douglas Adams,… Read More

The Wong way

Vera Wong rises to another occasion in Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On A Dead Man), by Jesse Q. Sutanto, the second (but hopefully not the last) in the saga of this intensely curious proprietor of a Chinatown… Read More

Plagued by the penultimate

Have you ever reached the denouement of a book, the place where all the hints and clues and separately insignificant moments are tied up for you so that you have that blinding flash that the author has purposefully… Read More

Digging Finlay

I just finished the newest offering from Elle Cosimano in the Finlay Donovan series, and it definitely lived up to its predecessors and gave me a good time during the three days I took to read it. I… Read More

Cozy with nuance

I don’t remember who recommended this book to me; maybe I just read a review of it somewhere, or it popped up in my Kindle best buys or something. But probably someone told me about it because the… Read More

Boarding-school books

I’m off on my own personal nostalgia kick right now, re-reading Georgette Heyer novels to escape from the depressing real world of politics and sub-optimum health. But on one of the book-lovers’ pages on Facebook, a mom was… Read More

Part of Your World #1

I reviewed Abby Jimenez’s book Just for the Summer in February, noting that it was the third volume of a loose trilogy without a through-story; the books simply share a few characters. This week I picked up the… Read More

Odd mystery series

I was in between loans from the library a few days back, so I browsed the books on my Kindle to see what on there was still unread, or what I might want to reread, and I happened… Read More

Chartreuse

I just finished reading The Grey Wolf, Louise Penny’s latest (#19) in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, and I am torn. On the one hand, I found myself thinking, during the course of the extremely intricate narrative… Read More

Still waiting

I finally picked up Michael Connelly’s latest, The Waiting, which features Detective Renée Ballard, backed up in one of the three plotlines by the retired Harry Bosch and in another by his daughter, Maddy, a fledgling police officer…. Read More