You’ve seen the movies and the plays and hopefully some of you have read the actual book (there are fourteen original Oz books total, FYI). There is nothing new I can tell you about this iconic story and another review would be superfluous, so I’ll save my breath. (There’s a great page on Goodreads with…
Wounded soldier Paul Craddock returns to England from the Boer War, there to discover his father has made a fortune in the scrap trade for his son to spend as he chooses. Paul chooses to become a farmer, buying an estate with half a dozen tenant farms. He learns his trade on the job, the…
An account of the United States in the 1890s, what the author calls the Reckless Decade and what historians have named the Gilded Age. In his prologue, Brand writes During the 1890s, Americans agonized over what the twentieth century about to begin held for their country. To many of them, America’s finest hours were behind…
Iris Sparks, ex-WWII spy, and Gwendolyn Bainbridge, noble-born society dame start a marriage bureau in London following the war. Finding every woman the right sort of man (or vice versa) should be enough to give Gwen a sense of purpose and pay Iris’s rent. Or so you would think. The difficulty is all the bodies…
One of the best plotted crime fiction novels in the genre’s history and worthy of being published in this British Library Crime Classic edition. In craft the first chapter stands on a par with Tony Hillerman’s first chapter of Skinwalkers, both in itself as a structural device providing an inspired introduction to the dramatis personae and as the…
Tao, a native of Shinara and an immigrant to Eshtera, is a teller of small fortunes by reading tea leaves and palms and fortune stones. But strictly small fortunes, take note. “Understand,” she said warningly to Cam, “I tell small fortunes only. No war, no politics, no harvest or famines, those are strictly for Seers…
Read more There are encounters with a troll and a phoenix and a rogue mage.
Five CIA agents retire to rural Maine, where people mind their own business and there are no nuclear first-strike targets nearby. But then the past rears its ugly head in the shape of another agent inquiring about a case that ended very badly indeed and forces all of them out of retirement, much to the…
Being the fifteenth and final Jane Austen mystery by Stephanie Barron. A friend’s son, William Heathcote, enrolled at Winchester College and handicapped by a severe stammer, has been unjustly persecuted by person or persons unknown, up to and including being charged with a murder he did not commit. Jane, laid low by what will be…
Click through the links below to read my reviews. NonfictionTim Marshall’s The Future of Geography.Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand. MysteryAllison Montclaire’s Sparks & Bainbridge mysteries.Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River.Martin Walker’s A Grave in the Woods.James R. Benn’s The Phantom Patrol.Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen series. Science fictionS.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series.Marko Kloos’ Frontlines series. I read each…
Those wonderful people at Kampa Verlag have published the first Kate Shugak novel, In der Kälte Alaskas (yes, that’s A Cold Day for Murder on this side of the pond), in a new German translation just in time for the holidays! It’s a very handsome paperback, with a sturdy, flapped cover, cover art with alpenglow…
