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Beware the “undid”
Victorian London, with its veneer of manners and morals and its dark realities of poverty and crime, is often depicted in fiction. In this first novel by a young English woman, the dark side of Victorian London is even darker – and more terrifying – than usual. THE QUICK. By Lauren Owen. Read by Simon…
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One island, two stories
For the first 10 years of my life, I was an Army brat. My father’s last duty station before he retired was the island of Okinawa. In the late 1950s, being the child of a U.S. Army officer on that island was like living in paradise for two years. But not so many years earlier,…
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Not your typical sailor
Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson ANOTHER GREAT DAY AT SEA: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. By Geoff Dyer. Read by Jonathan Cowley. 5 hours, 52 minutes. Also available in hardback from Pantheon. 208 pages. Geoff Dyer is an eccentric, irreverent, funny, peripatetic, brilliant, Oxford-educated British writer of fiction and nonfiction, bending the “rules”…
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Going downhill
One night, many years ago, I saw Tom Dillon ski down Summit Street in Winston-Salem. So when he asked to review a book about skiing and snow, I wasn’t surprised. As he points out, this book has some important things to say even to the non-skiers among us. Reviewed by Tom Dillon DEEP: THE STORY…
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A Buffalo girl – detective
A few books and CDs sit heavily on the table in my office, emanating a cloud of guilt whenever I look their way. These are books I read or listened to and liked enough to review – but something happened, and that review never made it out of my head and into print. One of…
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Crime, Minnesota style
By Linda C. Brinson It should come as no surprise to me or anyone else that John Sandford’s novels are very good. After all, everything he writes lands at the top of the bestseller lists. He brings the writing and investigative skills of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to his fiction, with good result. He’s a…
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Nutty family meets axe murderer
Three years ago, I reviewed (favorably) Colin Cotterill’s first Jimm Juree mystery, set in Southern Thailand. Somehow, the second entry in the series (with the intriguing title of Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach) slipped by me, but I’ll be looking for it. I’ve just read third book about the intrepid Jimm, and it’s,…
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Those binding ties
In my mind, one of the great values of audio books is that I’ll try something that I wouldn’t normally sit down and read in the print version. Although I’ve abandoned audio books that were really bad or just not interesting to me, I’m more likely to give something I think I might not much…
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Spies: gentleman and madam
Speaking of mysteries, foul deeds and intrigue: I seem to have missed book No. 3 in Carol K. Carr’s entertaining India Black series. My very strong clue was the arrival of what appears to be book No. 4 in my mailbox, listing the two previous novels I had read and reviewed (favorably, I might add),…
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When “peace” isn’t peaceful
As frequent readers of this blog know, I’ve long been intrigued by the World War I era in England – the war itself and the aftermath, the effects of the war. So many men were killed, and so many others were maimed in body or spirit or both. And the war profoundly changed British society.…