Starts with “D”

I haven’t been on here for a while because I started reading a trilogy and decided that, since all three books were already published and I could read straight through it, I would wait until I was finished… Read More

The last?

I just finished what has been billed as the “last installment” of the Gunnie Rose story by Charlaine Harris—The Last Wizards’ Ball, number six in the series. And although I thought that it was appropriately told, with plenty… Read More

Hallmarked for letdown

I recently completed The Hallmarked Man, number eight in the Cormoran Strike detective series by “Robert Galbraith.” (I wish J.K. Rowling would just let go of the alias and publish these under her own name; it’s messing with… Read More

What makes a mystery?

This is a question I have been pondering this week as I started reading Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, a book that has been recommended over and over again by readers on the various Facebook reading groups to which… Read More

Best in Show

Today is National Dog Day, and I usually do some sort of post noting books that I have enjoyed that include dogs as characters. This year, however, I didn’t discover any new titles since last time, so I… Read More

Discworld

As I mentioned in my Cat Day post, I continued on with Terry Pratchett’s witch tales by reading Wyrd Sisters, and then when I finished that I ducked out of the witch-specific books and instead assayed Mort, the… Read More

One fierce moggy

I forgot about my usual post of cat stories for International Cat Day (today), so I’m going to do an abbreviated one honoring a single cat from the book I’m currently reading. Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett, is… Read More

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