Briar Patch Books

Category: Mysteries

  • Peculiar times in London

    What is literature for if not to take us into places and experiences that we might otherwise miss? I’m missing London right now; I see it nightly on TV coverage of the Olympics, and I wish I were there. There’s no way I could make it to London for the games, but I’ve done the…

  • Bess Crawford, on the battlefields of France

    A few years back, Charles Todd, the mother-son writing team in Delaware and North Carolina, started a new mystery series. Their Inspector Ian Rutledge series was highly successful, but they hoped that first-person stories with a young woman protagonist might attract some readers who find novels centered on the brooding Rutledge – struggling with what…

  • A lot of fun, with fringe benefits

    Paul O’Connor reports that while the temperatures have been up around 103 degrees in North Carolina, the highs have been in the low 70s in Portland, Ore., where he’s visiting. Maybe that’s why he has energetically written another book review, putting me to shame. I’ve been reading and listening, but not doing much writing. I’m…

  • Have we come to this?

    Every summer, Paul O’Connor sets out driving across the country, writing vignettes along the way. This year, he took a supply of audio books with him. Many he has liked, some not so much. I must say after reading this review that I think Paul enjoys panning a book more than he enjoys praising one.…

  • Spies, air raids, Churchill – and a young lady who can handle them all

    I like fiction that deals with fairly recent history and sometimes includes real people. Maybe that’s because most of the history courses I had in school stopped at about the beginning of the 20th century, so fiction grounded in fact helps to fill in the gaps. Maybe it’s because the links between what happened in…

  • Y’all come back now, hear?

    Once again, Bob Moyer and I have read the same book. I reviewed Margaret Maron’s latest for the Greensboro News & Record, and Bob is reviewing it for Briar Patch Books. I may have treated Maron’s book a tad more gently than Bob did, but we are in agreement that the new one is not…

  • Doing one’s best in Botswana

    Aficionados of fine wine and food speak of cleansing the palate so that their tastes will be fresh and clear, enabling them to fully appreciate whatever it is they are going to experience next. I find myself thinking of reading the latest novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series as a…

  • A quiet, thoughtful murder mystery

    Bob Moyer travels a lot physically, and when he’s staying home, he travels through reading. Here he travels through literature to Sweden and reviews a book by one of that country’s leading writers of mysteries. By Robert Moyer INSPECTOR AND SILENCE. By Hakan Nesser. Pantheon. 287 pages. $24.95  Some things just don’t translate. Take, for instance,…

  • Isaac Bell to the rescue

    Here’s another fine example of how listening to audio books to pass the time while driving has led me to a delightful discovery, a series of books I’d happily read in the print version, under other circumstances. But since this book was both well written and a perfect candidate for a dramatic reading, I thoroughly…

  • Kellerman: Double the pleasure

    Fresh from his triumph at the opening in Winston-Salem of the delightful show from his art collection, “Howard Sam and Bob – A Life With Relics,” Bob Moyer has written a pair of reviews of works by one of his (many) favorite authors. He takes a look at the new print novel out from Johnathan…