A story that reminds me of any book about cops written by Joseph Wambaugh, only true and set in the present day. Eric Tansey was in the military until he met The One, who told him she couldn’t marry a Green Beret, so he quit and followed her home. Every time she appears in this…
A history of the building of the railroads through the American West, as seen through two of its fiercest competitors, even including Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, who also get their due here. A lively, engaging prose style propels this narrative over a 12-year race to achieve the holy grail of reaching the Pacific Ocean…
Read more This frenzied competition, a blind, stupid, and utterly destructive jealous rage
DCS Kat Frank of the Warwickshire police, back too early from bereavement leave, demands her boss put her back to work. Fine; he saddles her with the first AI policeman and sets them to work on cold cases involving missing people, mostly as a way to totally disprove the utility of AI in police work.…
Read more At least until they build a body to download his consciousness into it.
Teenaged Charlie Warren rescues–mostly–his mother from a grifter who has married her for her money. Fourteen years later he’s a lawyer in L.A. when another woman who is being robbed of her savings walks into his office, who is then kidnapped outside his office but not for the reason any of them (or you) think.…
The title should have been American Oases, as Paoletta is telling the stories of the great cities of what is called “arid America” or the American desert southwest. He begins with his home town of Albuquerque, moves on to Phoenix, then Tucson, El Paso and finally Las Vegas. The five communities have much in common:…
Of course you’ve heard of the Brothers Grimm (Rapunzel). Of course you have, because they made sure of it, as did Charles Perrault (Cinderella). I bet you haven’t heard of Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, though. Or Henriette-Julie Murat or Charlotte-Rose La Force, or any one of the other French conteuses who lived and wrote immensely popular contes…
Read more These tales are not your Disney fairy tales. No, they’re better.
Mary Kelly’s The Spoilt Kill beat out John le Carre’s Call for the Dead for the Gold Dagger Award in 1961, and now I know why. This book is exquisitely written, with a totally character-driven plot in a fully realized workplace setting (a commercial pottery). The detective is undercover on a case of industrial espionage and the pottery’s accountant…
A London fable about five seniors looking for something to do other than bingo and the woman hired to organize a local seniors club who needs more help with her life than the rest of them put together. There is also Ziggy, a teenaged single father and M/Maggie/Margaret/Margaret Thatcher, a mutt suddenly orphaned when one…
Read more “I’m sorry, extremely young man, but we’ve only just met.”
For any fan of British police procedurals, even if the crime is set in 1901 and the current London police are less Dalgliesh and more Dalziel, only not as smart. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because the murder happens in the Temple, that cloistered fifteen acres in the heart of London where British law was…
I’m no Christie scholar, or even a Miss Marple one, but I am a Jane fan, much more so than an Hercule one as I found Poirot’s ego and affectations hard to take.* I’ve read all the Marple books and I think all the short stories. I’ve seen some of all the Marple television series…
