Ree Dolly’s father is due for a court hearing and he has signed over the family home as bond. Now he’s missing, and the cops tell his sixteen-year old daughter that their home is forfeit if he doesn’t show. Ree, sole support and care-giver of a mother who has slipped her leash on sanity and…
Cowboys on surfboards. That’s my thumbnail for Don Winslow’s The Gentlemen’s Hour, the second of two novels featuring San Diego surfer slash private investigator Boone Daniels (the first is The Dawn Patrol). I put “surfer” first for a reason. Boone’s the California version of an Alaskan Bush pilot. No matter what his day job is, brain surgeon,…
Read more It was, indeed, macking. Whatever the hell that means.
Christopher Kimball, whom I know well from my subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, finds an old cookbook in an older house and spends two years figuring out how to put on a Victorian spread for twelve, using a coal stove, no less. Along the way we are treated to a history of Boston by way of…
Read more Right away I was inspired to think of doing an Alaskan-style Victorian meal.
** 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…