Two thousand year-old druid Atticus O’Sullivan has relocated to present day Tempe, Arizona, in an attempt to avoid a centuries-in-the-making throw-down with his ancient enemy, Aenghus Óg, who wants Atticus’ sword and Atticus’ head, pretty much in that order. Smart dialogue, good action scenes, a series made for Jim Butcher fans. Of which I am…
Dana sez–I bought this when it was on special back in 2016, but you’ll do much better nowadays to forgo the collection in favor of downloading the individual titles. I still love Welcome to Temptation best, with Davy’s story, Faking It, a close second, but I want to single out two other novels in this…
Read more Min and Cal and their bumpy journey to love and happy ever after.
There’s a thing editors hammer home to the authors of a new book in a series–Don’t forget the backstory! You never know when someone new to a series will pick up a copy of, oh, say the sixteenth book in a series about a two-person PI agency in New York City, one a Chinese American…
Read more “When I go,” Juarez said, “I want to leave a crater.”
Dana sez—There are more biographies written about Winston Churchill than there are about Cleopatra and that’s saying something. I’ve read a lot of World War II history (I recommend Cornelius Ryan’s books about D-Day, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of Berlin) and Churchill is always prominent in them, but until now I’d never read…
Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas were vast tracts of empty land, cows, and sheep. These herds were in the midst of collapse from drought and overgrazing. Western mines produced silver that no one needed. So that’s a view of the lack of motivation for the building of America’s transcontinental railroads you don’t often hear,…
Read more Large, inept, but powerful failures whose influence could not be avoided
Like all writers Jane Austen reserves subtlety and nuance, not to mention backstory, for her major characters, reducing her minor characters oftentimes to caricatures, albeit ones so deftly drawn that they frequently steal scenes right out from under everyone else on the page. No one makes me wince more than Mrs. Bennet or cringe more…
Poor Billy Boyle. It’s Christmas Day 1944 and he’s managed to finagle a whole day’s leave from taking out Eisenhower’s dirty laundry at SHAEF. All he wants to do is take a walk down the White Cliffs of Dover hand in hand with girlfriend Lady Diana Seaton. It is not to be, however, as they…
The eighth outing in this Sparks and Bainbridge series, set in 1947 London, where everyone, especially Iris, is still in recovery from World War II. So is her fellow pre-war Cambridge classmate, Tony Danforth, newly returned from the Far East and soon to be employed at the Foreign Office. Iris is happy to see him,…
Read more Iris doesn’t like the idea of betraying a friend, but what if he’s guilty?
Never have I felt colder or wetter reading a novel, as this one is set on an island somewhere north of Scotland and the latitude is almost a character itself in the amount of wind and rain it besieges its setting with. Occasionally there is a break in the clouds through which can be seen…
Read more A pirate treasure celebrated in song and long thought to be only legend.
I mean it never, ever fails. As soon as I finish whatever historical novel I’m working on, the moment it leaves my hands for the last time, I find that one more resource I absolutely, positively should have read before I wrote the book. And behold! Harvey Houses of New Mexico: Historic Hospitality from Raton…
