Yet another recommendation from Smart Bitches Trashy Books, here is a romance novel for grownups. London stage actor Richard has an attitude problem and the producers of his current play decide a fake romance with second lead Lainie is just the thing to rehabilitate his public persona. She despises him and he is barely…
Like everyone else I’ve heard White on NPR but this is the first of her books I’ve read. This is sort of a memoir of her life in Florida told in anecdotal fits and starts and starring herself, her mother who runs off with a boat load of anthropologists, the local ornithologists who put…
Genre-bending graphic novel about a little girl, Nimona, with special powers, or maybe that’s special powers with a little girl inside them, who forces her services upon a wanna-be villain. There is some fun stuff here, like the big bad Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics, and names like Ballister Blackheart and Sir Goldenloin,…
Read more “Are you pissed you’re not the fairest of them all?”
This is the story the Boston Globe did on pedophile priests that published in 2002 and exposed the culture of pedophilia in the Catholic Church nation- and worldwide. I’ve read some history and I have a lot of time spent in Ireland where the Church behaved even worse to its members (see the Ryan and…
Read more “How come there is no mention of Geoghan going to hell?”
The Jennifer Crusie Collection by Jennifer Crusie It had been a while since I’d read Jennifer Crusie, so when Sarah Wendell alerted me to a one-day screaming deal on this collection on Kindle (7 books for $14!!), I went for it. I still love Welcome to Temptation best, with Davy’s story, Faking It, a close…
Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin This book begins with a crime commissioned directly by President Richard Nixon. They came to California to ruin a man. Not to kill him, not literally. But the next best thing. The man was Daniel Ellsberg. “They” were Howard Hunt…
Read more US citizens just flat stopped believing anything anyone in government said.
Cinder by Marissa Meyer There are a lot of, what, homages or ripoffs or whatever you want to call them out there these days, from Jane Smiley and Alice Hoffman rewriting King Lear to Sharon Shinn updating Jane Eyre to sf to some guy turning Elizabeth and Darcy into zombies (didn’t read it, please don’t…
Benn posits the existence of recently declassified files that reveal a mission Billy Boyle, Ike’s personal investigator, undertook in the Pacific theater of World War II between the second and third novels in the series. At the behest (read “royal command”) of Joe Kennedy Sr., delivered by arrogant shit Joe Kennedy Jr., Billy and Kaz…
Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime by Val McDermid Val McDermid is of course that well known crime fiction author of the same name, and this book is a brisk, crisp narrative interspersed with harrowing, you-are-there crime scenes, fascinating details, heartrending stories and a bunch of on-point commentary from…
Being the thirteenth of Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries. Jane, as the newly revealed author of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, is summoned to Carlton House. Not, as you might expect, to meet its tenant, the Prince Regent, who is occupied by sitting for his Waterloo portrait, but to view the prince’s magnificent library…
Read more When Providence provides, what can Jane do but investigate?