Month: January 2012

  • A review not to be missed

    Paul O’Connor started the year out by sending this review to me, which was an admirable way for him to start the new year. Unfortunately, I was on a bird-watching expedition to Lake Mattamuskeet when the review hit my inbox, so I didn’t start the new year in quite so efficient a manner. Fortunately, my…

  • Alexander McCall Smith: He’s not just about the Ladies’ Detective Agency

    Like many readers, I fell in love with Precious Ramotswe when Alexander McCall Smith’s first No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novel arrived on the scene in the United States in 2001 (a few years after it was published in the United Kingdom). I eagerly awaited the next installments in the series, and I was gratified…

  • Different landscape, same allegory

    Bob Moyer reviews James Lee Burke’s latest offering, featuring Dave Robichaux, evil and fools. By Robert Moyer FEAST DAY OF FOOLS. By James Lee Burke. Simon and Schuster. 463 pages. $26.99 In a James Lee Burke novel, the landscape always comes alive. The Louisiana bayous where Deputy Sheriff Dave Robichaux parlays justice reek of the evil…

  • Pride and prejudice and peril

    Jane Austen is such an interesting literary phenomenon. She wrote novels in which very little happened, other than people going to balls, taking walks, getting married and worrying about how many pounds a year they have or might expect to have. Some of her characters are deliberately portrayed as silly; others are admirable because they…

  • Read it and shiver – and laugh

    By Paul O’Connor CORPORAL BOSKIN’S COLD, COLD WAR: A Comical Journey. By Joseph Boskin. Syracuse University Press. Hardcover. 178 pages. $24.95. As a scholar of American culture, Prof. Joseph Boskin is very familiar with the work of Joseph Heller. As a Korean War-era draftee, Corporal Boskin can attest to the accuracy of Heller’s masterpiece, Catch-22.…

  • Wexford is still Wexford

    I’ll be tidying up from 2011 for a while. Somehow, life intervened, and I got behind with reviews toward the end of the year. Here’s a review of a book that Bob Moyer read during his trip to Germany, a review that somehow did not get posted in a timely fashion. But hey, the book’s…

  • H Is for Happy New Year

    When it comes to mysteries, I usually like cozy, village-type mysteries better than ones featuring hard-boiled detectives and on-page violence. But there are exceptions. I enjoyed Sue Grafton’s series starring P.I. Kinsey Millhone way back when she was working through the early letters of the alphabet. Then somehow I lost touch with Kinsey around “M”…