I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. I haven’t got there yet, but I do vicariously visit by reading fiction set in the land of fire and ice. A new series by Quentin Bates, a UK journalist who lived in Iceland for 10 plus years, recently caught my attention. Cold Comfort is the second Officer Gunnhildur [...]
Crooked Letter,Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin is the story of two boys, one black (Silas) and one white (Larry), who become friends in rural Mississippi. The story takes place in the late 1970s/early 1980s and there still seems to be a lot of racial tension here. Larry’s dad owns 500 acres and his own business [...]
The Sherlockian by Graham Moore is a delightful and satisfying addition to the oevre of Sherlock Holmes tales written by other authors than Conan Doyle. The book tells two stories. The first story is contemporary and focuses on a possible murder among the Baker Street Irregulars, the pre-eminent Sherlock Holmes society. In this tale we [...]
Hazard by Gardiner Harris feeds right into my fears of being deep underground-I don’t know how coal miners do it! Hazard takes it name from the town of Hazard in eastern Applachian Kentucky and is indeed about coal mining (along with crime and corruption). Coal mining is no longer unionized here and companies start taking [...]
In Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto, Roy Cady is an enforcer for a loan shark named Stan. Roy is pretty good at his job but the one fact that he can’t change is that at one time he had a relationship with Carmen, his boss’s current girlfriend. It’s hard for Roy to believe that his boss [...]
Ken Bruen is one of those authors who usually can do no wrong in my eyes and The Devil did not disappoint me. The novel features one of Bruen’s most popular characters, P.I. Jack Taylor. I found this book actually somewhat scary because it seemed so realistic-Jack keeps running across this guy who goes by [...]
If you like the author C.J. Box, then you will like Paul Doiron. In The Poacher’s Son”, Maine game warden Mike Bowditch risks his job and his life trying to prove his father Jack is innocent of murder. Jack Bowditch is a rough and tumble drunk who likes to get into bar fights but that [...]
When the body of a murdered illegal immigrant teenage girl is found in Richard Helms’ Six Mile Creek, it leads to more violent incidents that ratchet up the tension between the latino and white populations in school and in town. The town barely has any middle class left and seems to be made up of [...]
I initially picked up Still Life by Louise Penny for Mondays are Murder, TCPL’s newest mystery discussion group. Then something magical happened, I fell in love with the bucolic village of Three Pines and Armand Gamache, Penny’s calm, courtly, thoughtful, compassionate and strong detective. Set in the Canadian province of Quebec, Still Life features many [...]
I am always interested in mysteries with a literary connection, no matter how tenuous! Here’s a new series of which this title, The Fitzgerald Ruse, is the second. The Fitzgerald Ruse is a Sam Blackman private-eye series in which both the setting, Ashville, NC and literature, in terms of novelist, F.S. Fitzgerald is featured. The [...]