This is not a review. More of a warning, I suppose. The reason it’s not a review is that I can’t write one for a book that I didn’t finish, and I didn’t even come close to finishing Jane Harper’s… Read More ›
Books
The Little Altar Boy
No, not the song by that name, nor the TV series. What I’m reviewing here is the 2020 crime novel of that name, written by John Guzlowski. (Why, you ask, am I so late to read and review it? It’s… Read More ›
Death of the Party
Take one part gothic thriller, two parts cozy mystery clichés, and three parts Agatha Christie, stir them all up and you get Carolyn Hart’s Death of the Party. It’s a serviceable combination of those components, but what stands out is… Read More ›
A note from Langston Hughes to my dad
Seventy years ago the great Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes penned this inscription in the front of my dad’s copy of Hughes’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. (Note that Hughes’s co-author, Milton Meltzer, added his own autograph… Read More ›
Enough is enuf.
This book would have made an excellent New Yorker article. But a whole book? Not so much. All right, I suppose many a New Yorker article does feel like an entire book — but Enough is Enuf by Gabe Henry… Read More ›
Friends with words
Yes, you read that correctly: the title really is Friends with Words, not the more familiar phrase Words with Friends. And even the correct phrase, Friends with Words, has at least two meanings (think about it). If you yourself are… Read More ›
Language city: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues in New York
The title and subtitle may make this book sound rather esoteric. But in that case they are unintentionally misleading. You don’t have to be a linguist or a cultural anthropologist to enjoy reading Language City. If I still have your… Read More ›
A slowly dying cause
What do you know about Cornwall? Cornish hens, I suppose. And Cornish pasties, but only if you’ve been to Britain. That’s probably it, unless you have an esoteric linguistic interest in the lesser-known Celtic languages, as I do for some… Read More ›
The Last One
Don’t read this novel if you are susceptible to nightmares! Amazon calls Will Dean’s The Last One “an unputdownable locked-room thriller,” which is true as far as it goes. I would like to tell you more, but I don’t know… Read More ›
A Scourge of Vipers
My one-word review is “meh.” Bruce DeSilva’s A Scourge of Vipers is not a bad mystery. (There’s litotes for you. You can look it up, as I think I said in my last post in a different context, though still… Read More ›
Dead in the Frame
Sooner or later, in the lives of all private investigators, they always get arrested for a murder they didn’t commit. At least the fictional ones do. It’s apparently a requirement of the genre. And sure enough it happened to Lillian… Read More ›
An Enemy in the Village
Clearly this is another familiar, comforting Bruno-Chief-of-Police novel by Martin Walker. What’s not so clear is what the title, An Enemy in the Village, refers to. My initial guess, based on previous novels in the Bruno series, was that the… Read More ›
100 places to see after you die: A travel guide to the afterlife
That’s a strange title, isn’t it? And the subtitle is almost as strange. But this book by Ken Jennings — yes, that Ken Jennings — is perfectly normal if you’re looking for some Jeopardy fodder concerning the afterlife according to… Read More ›
Is Superman circumcised?
That question does sound like clickbait — but it’s not. In fact, the book titled Is Superman circumcised? is surprisingly rather academic and serious. Author Roy Schwartz explores the history and sociology of the Superman character with an emphasis on… Read More ›
The Photographer
Unlike most of the books I review, The Photographer by Mary Dixie Carter is not genre fiction of any kind. Not exactly a mystery, not quite a thriller, this is a mainstream story that has the vibe of a thriller… Read More ›
“Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair”
This 1983 story by Frederik Pohl was clearly influenced by Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery,” which had been published 35 years earlier. Probably some good high-school English papers were written in the ’80s comparing and contrasting the two stories…. Read More ›
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell
Even though it’s a Sherlock Holmes tale, this book was not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (You can see that in the cover image below.) Nor was it written in the 19th Century, as the cover contains a color… Read More ›
Petard
Is this really what MIT is like? Or, rather, what it will be like in ten years or so? I’m talking about Cory Doctorow’s science fiction story, “Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts.” Perhaps, like the author of an otherwise… Read More ›
“To tell you the truth… everybody lies.”
Says who? Well, the quotations above consists of the title plus subtitle of a new novel by Gilly Macmillan, all squished into one short sentence. This novel is supposedly “an unsettling and atmospheric thriller that’s almost impossible to put down,”… Read More ›
Switcheroo
The third and newest in E.J. Copperman’s Fran & Ken Stein series of mysteries, Switcheroo is both amusing and serious. The amusing parts evince Copperman’s trademark style. He is one of my favorite mystery authors, and if you type Copperman… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 