** spoiler alert ** About 90 pages in there is a fantastic battle, California/ATF cops against drug dealers, at night, across the border in the Mexican countryside where they have to watch out for rattlesnakes as they’re sneaking up on the hacienda. The bad guys have flamethrowers. It’s very goosebump inducing. One of the things…
Read more Charlie has a close encounter with someone who may be the devil.
Here endeth Tanya Huff’s Torin Kerr series (5 books beginning with Valor’s Choice and continuing with her Peacekeeper trilogy, this one are being the last one (if you’ve read the books you’ll see what I did there). I envy you if you haven’t yet read them because you’re in for a real treat–these books are…
A beautifully produced book with quantities of illustrations from Cruikshank cartoons to Raeburn family portraits in oil. If you’re a fan of Jane’s and especially if you’re a devotee of Georgette Heyer, you will love paging through to find treasures like the pen-and-ink drawing of the 24 different styles of men’s hats to the full-size…
Michael Gilbert’s Death Has Deep Roots has more hats than heads to wear them. It’s a courtroom drama with the accused as the least part of the story. It’s a locked room mystery with an entire hotel featuring in the murder instead of a single room. It’s a PI novel without the PI. It’s an…
A Quaker version of the “if this goes on” science fiction story, told in three parts. Earth is poisoning itself and a Quaker community in what was western America builds a self-contained space colony and sets sail for Epsilon Eridani. Part two hundred forty-seven years later, they arrive at a planet that is cold and…
Read more What happens if they can’t grow mangos on the planet? They like mangos.
Gail Collins’ America’s Women (400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines) reads like the women studies class I was never offered at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It should be required reading for every US high school student today. Listen to some of this stuff: The most famous runaway slave…was [Harriet Tubman:]…In 1849, when…
[written in 2010] I’ve been rereading all the Dick Francis on the shelf in the Homer Public Library. This one is still my favorite, painter Alexander Kinloch, nephew of a Scottish earl, is summoned from his aerie in Scotland by his mother to tend to his step-father, whose prosperous brewery has been ripped off to…
Read more Yeah, he was a jockey and there is always a horse around somewhere…
“Romantic science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration…” As in Captain Cook’s first expedition, begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s voyage begun in 1831. “This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder,” Richard Holmes writes in his book of the same name, “and with…
A ripsnorter of an action adventure near future tale. Mankind has moved on to the asteroid belt and the gas planet moons but he hasn’t entirely outgrown Tsiolkovsky’s cradle. Earth is feuding with Mars, Mars is feuding with Earth, the Outer Planets Alliance is feuding with everyone, and the introduction of an alien bioweapon into…
Read more A ripsnorter of an action adventure near future tale.
Very funny, and if you’re looking for it (and even if you aren’t) really smart. Funny? The Willoughby brothers and their poor father, among many, many anecdotes. Smart? Bryson ends his experience of the Cuban missile crisis with “I haven’t trusted grown-ups for a single moment since.” There, in a sentence, the 60’s explained. …
