-
Need Christmas spirit? Read (or listen to) this book
Talk about getting into the Christmas spirit: In the past couple of weeks, I’ve read two enjoyable novels in which a murder is committed at Christmastime in a large English country house where lots of people (i.e., suspects) are snowbound. Save from those details I’ve just listed, the two books could hardly be more different.…
-
Christmas reading arrives
For nine years now, Anne Perry has been writing a short novel for Christmas, drawing on her expert knowledge of Victorian England, as well as some of her familiar characters. For Perry’s many fans, the arrival of her latest holiday book is as much a herald of the season as the parade, the bell ringers…
-
Rita Mae rides again
The prolific author Rita Mae Brown now gives us a new book in her “canine mystery series” each fall, to tide us over while we wait for the new book in her Mrs. Murphy mystery series (feline and canine) to arrive in spring. By Linda Brinson MURDER UNLEASHED. By Rita Mae Brown. Ballantine Books. 267…
-
Madam India Black, at it again
If you enjoy reading fiction set in Victorian England, then give this India Black series a try. Dickens, of course, showed the chasm between rich and poor, and focused his literary light on the dark side of London inhabited by thieves and worse. Today, Anne Perry, in her two mystery series, does an eye-opening job…
-
A tale of truffles and troubles
While Bob Moyer was in Germany recently, he reviewed another in Martin Walker’s series of “mysteries of the French Countryside.” Go figure. By Robert Moyer BLACK DIAMOND. A Mystery of the French Countryside. By Martin Walker. Alfred A. Knopf. 298 pages. $24.95. Peril has appeared on the horizon of St. Denis, where Bruno is chief…
-
Lay it on, MacBob
Oh Bob, Bob! Wherefore are thou Bob? I’d be tempted to say there’s something rotten in the state of Bob Moyer’s book reviews, but he obviously had a lot of fun writing this one. And after all, the play’s the thing right? Plus, there may be method in the madness. By Robert Moyer STAGESTRUCK. By…
-
A chase with a twist
In advance of his homecoming from his European junket, Bob Moyer has been sending book reviews. I’ll have to reward him with more books when he arrives stateside. By Robert Moyer THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS. By Bill Loehfelm. Farrar Straus Giroux. 322 pages. $26. By page 43, both the bar maid Maureen and the reader…
-
Of crime and the river
Whenever a new Anne Perry Victorian novel arrives, I know I am about to be immersed in another place and time, a place that is sometimes heartbreaking and grim, but always fascinating. Perry out-Dickens Dickens in exposing the social ills and inequities of the Victorian age in England. And she makes you eager to read,…
-
Off to the South of Thailand
It’s always a pleasure to run across another good author. And if you make this discovery by reading what’s billed as the first in a new series, that’s all the better. Colin Cotterill is, apparently, someone whose works I should have been reading already. He’s done quite well with a series featuring Dr. Siri, a…
-
Listening and laughing
There’s an odd thing about audio books. I find that I can enjoy listening to books that I most likely would not read. That’s been true of some pretty heavy nonfiction. And now I’ve found it to be true of one of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. I started to say “mysteries” or “thrillers” instead…