This is the song the poets don’t sing. This is the story Homer never bothered to imagine. Construe the isle of Ithaca, home of Odysseus and his wife, Penelope. Odysseus has been absent lo these many years—eighteen, at last count—and Penelope is besieged in her fishy-smelling palace by uninvited suitors wanting to take her husband’s…
First time Jesus Christ ever died that I felt like I’d lost a friend. Told from the first-person viewpoint of his best friend Biff, who first sees Jesus/Joshua when he’s resurrecting his little brother’s lizard every time his little brother smashes said lizard to death with a rock. And then there is the scene where…
Read more Told from the viewpoint of JC’s best friend, Biff.
McKibben calls this a fable, but I donʼt know. What if people like Vern in states like Vermont all over the nation became accidental, nonviolent secessionists? What if they inspired their states’ equivalents of town halls to talk about and even vote on leaving the nation to be their own independent countries? If enough of…
The tenth and so far best of McGuire’s October Daye series about a fully realized Fae world living next to the real world of present-day San Francisco, which allows Toby to make Ewok jokes even if her squire Quentin, aka the heir to Faerie’s High King and Queen, doesn’t get them. In this installment a…
Around about 2005 expat British author Richard Grant decides to drive the 900-mile stretch of the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico. The Sierra Madres, a rugged, comfortless and dangerous place, are home to drunks, druggies, marijuana growers, meth cookers, drug lords, bandits, rapists, murderers, Mormons, mestizos, cave-dwelling Indians and entire companies of corrupt Mexican…
Read more The type of men who pride themselves on their willingness to kill.
Two detective inspectors from Glasgow, one of them recently back from sick leave (possibly too soon?) are sent to investigate a death on Eilean Eadar, a very tiny, very remote Scottish island. The island’s inhabitants have lived and fished there for generations, they aren’t welcoming to mainlanders, and they resent the fact that the only…
Read more The wood on the island is dark and deep but it is not lovely
A reread after many years, which holds up well. Not much style but a lot of substance—settlers fleeing a dying Earth emigrate across the stars to a planet in orbit around Rukbat. A story for our times for sure. Only—uh-oh—until…after they’ve landed and moved planetside they discover that an erratic body that transverses Rukbat’s solar…
What if FDR sent a twenty-one year old JFK to Europe on the very eve of World War II itself in order to find out if and how Hitler is smuggling money into the US to influence the next election? “I’ve been turning it over in my mind, Jack—this trip of yours,” the President was…
Read more To the Nazis, you’re just the American ambassador’s son. But to me, you’re a perfect spy.
My review: The twelfth in Martin Limón’s Sueño and Bascom series, featuring two CID agents in South Korea in the early 80s, and I think his best by far. Three GI’s have gone missing, all of whom have abused Korean women, and Command sends Sueño and Bascom to find them. It’s a solid whodunnit, a…
Read more I’d never known anyone who cared less about the opinions of others.
…Younger sons cannot marry where they like. …“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” –Jane Austen At the time she had wondered whether the remark had held a warning and the suspicion had caused her some embarrassment which she had attempted to hide by turning the conversation into a pleasantry. But the memory of the…
Read more James obtrudes bloody murder into the pleasant, ordered world of Elizabeth and Darcy