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 ›
Books
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 ›
Rare Tongues
“When a language disappears, a unique way of understanding the world vanishes with it.” If I had to pick a single sentence from Lorna Gibb’s Rare Tongues, that sentence (164 pages into the text) might be my choice. But the… Read More ›
The Plinko Bounce
You probably know what the title refers to, but I certainly had no idea what “Plinko” meant when I started reading this mystery a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I was halfway through the book when I finally found… Read More ›
Th1rt3en
Yes, the title of this book really is Th1rt3en, not Thirteen. It looks better in all-upper case as printed on the cover: TH1RT3EN. And, as you see in the image below, in case you’re missing the point, the digits 1… Read More ›
“A Murder Most French” and “A Fashionably French Murder”
Just over a year ago I reviewed Mastering the Art of French Murder, the first in a new series by Colleen Cambridge. Subsequently I read the next two volumes in that series: A Murder Most French and A Fashionably French… Read More ›
Gobsmacked!
As you can see in the image below, Gobsmacked! is the title of the latest book by Ben Yagoda. The subtitle, The British Invasion of American English, provides (as usual) much more information than the title itself. Of course those… Read More ›
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, a.k.a. Прекрасная глупая попытка
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is a sequel to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, which I reviewed last month. These books are similar but different, if you know what I mean. I very much enjoyed both of them, but I would never… Read More ›
The Future of the Republican Party (as written 61 and 75 years ago)
How did the Republican party get into the condition it’s in today? And where is it headed? Let’s start by looking at what was being said in 1964 and in 1950, in a book that I was assigned to read… Read More ›
Pronoun Trouble
“I never use pronouns,” says one Susan Sparks Smith in a Facebook post. I don’t know her, but I was sorely tempted to reply “You just did.” That’s just one example of Pronoun Trouble, the new popular linguistics book by… Read More ›
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Poor Hank Green: if you ask a random person who Hank Green is, the likely answer is either “the brother of John Green” or “never heard of him.” I suppose sibling rivalry is inevitable when your brother sells 23,000,000 copies… Read More ›
The Talented Miss Farwell
Who, you may ask, is this Miss Farwell? Probably the protagonist of a novel by Emily Gray Tedrowe, right? Right. Let me explain (without spoilers!): Becky Farwell buys far too many original works of art — more than she can… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 