No Stars – Dana Stabenow

She had also a disconcerting habit of reaching up under her dress and adjusting something in the vicinity of her navel and of reaching down the front of her dress and adjusting her large breasts.

An oldie but a very goodie. The author of the beloved Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books (amazingly still in print, hallelujah) marries and follows her husband to a chicken ranch on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state in the 1930s. She is not a happy farmer, and she writes of everything and everyone from Stove (number one on…

Sector Center News ace reporter Presit a Tur de Valentrisy

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…

Men have been thrown overboard just for glancing.

Ruth, Dora, Alyce and Hank, four teens in Fairbanks and Southeast Alaska in 1965, are each stumbling through the aftermath of the loss of a parent or parents through death or divorce or negligence. The story is told in their alternating viewpoints, and the thing I liked most was the wealth of detail that comes…

Aenghus Óg wants Atticus’ sword and Atticus’ head

Two thousand year-old druid Atticus O’Sullivan has relocated to present day Tempe, Arizona, in an attempt to avoid a centuries-in-the-making throw-down with his ancient enemy, Aenghus Óg, who wants Atticus’ sword and Atticus’ head, pretty much in that order. Smart dialogue, good action scenes, a series made for Jim Butcher fans. Of which I am…

Min and Cal and their bumpy journey to love and happy ever after.

Dana sez–I bought this when it was on special back in 2016, but you’ll do much better nowadays to forgo the collection in favor of downloading the individual titles. I still love Welcome to Temptation best, with Davy’s story, Faking It, a close second, but I want to single out two other novels in this…

Young Martha Leeson leaves home to become an itinerant bronco buster

I’d call this book almost a sequel to Monte Walsh by Jack Schaefer, and I consider Monte Walsh one of the perfect novels. The writing is superb, in that run-on raconteur style that feels like the easy canter of a horse. It’s 1917, and young Martha Leeson leaves home to become an itinerant bronco buster,…

And poor little Vladi Putin never had any democratic potty training at all.

When a Sister Service paper pusher and a true believer in the EU discovers the conspiracy and is busted trying to give it to the Germans, Ned’s boss says: Point about Trump is, he’s a gang boss, born and bred. Brought up to screw civil society all ways up, not be part of it… And…

Stop that barking and hissing!

…the entire book is worth reading for Chapter xxvi, “The Chorus Line: The Trial of Odysseus, as Videotaped by the Maids.” Judge: What’s going on? Order! Order! This is a twenty-first-century court of justice! You there, get down from the ceiling! Stop that barking and hissing! Madam, cover up your chest and put down your…

The only sympathetic portrayal of a blackmailer I have ever read…

Excerpt… “The Mistletoe Murder” has a great “Aha!” at the end, “A Very Commonplace Murder” is not commonplace and not a single murder and will leave you with a creep of horror across your skin, “The Boxdale Inheritance” is a perfectly lovely little piece of bait-and-switch with the only sympathetic portrayal of a blackmailer I…

A perfectly delightful Christmas Eve story by Ed McBain set in the 87th Precinct…

Excerpt… There is a perfectly delightful Christmas Eve story by Ed McBain set in the 87th Precinct, a Jane Marple story by Agatha Christie with Jane at her self-condemnatory best, and not one but two, count ’em, two stories by Ellis Peters. One features Brother Cadfael and the other begins with one of the best…

Dana Stabenow

Tag: No Stars