Mark Flowers
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That Old Black Magic
A little more than a year ago, I posted an Omnibus Mystery Review Post, featuring six mysteries, many entries in series and/or by prolific mystery authors. So I expected sometime around now to have a new crop of reviews of many of the same authors, but so far I’ve been striking out. Jacqueline Winspear is [...]
Biographies
I remember reading a lot of biographies when I was a teenager. Not memoirs or autobiographies (although I read those too), but big, thick books about famous people written by someone who had done a lot of research. I was obsessed with the Beatles, and I know I read several massive biographies of John Lennon [...]
Short Work
Neither of the books reviewed below looks much like a traditional short story collection. Eileen Gunn’s Questionable Practices includes stories as short as one page long, a poem, and a “steam-punk quartet” of stories. Novak’s collection, meanwhile, mocks the whole concept of a “short story collection”, calling itself, in the subtitle, “Stories and Other Stories”. [...]
Annihilation
Last week I praised Julianna Baggott for publishing her science fiction Pure trilogy within 2 years. Then on Monday, we posted our review of MD Waters’s Archetype, which has a sequel due out in July. Well, Jeff VanderMeer has got them both beat–if the scheduling works as planned, the entirety of his new SF trilogy, [...]
Burn
And so it ends. We reviewed Julianna Baggott’s Pure exactly two years ago. Later in the year, we named it one of our favorite books of the year so far, and were then validated when it won a 2013 Alex Award. A year after Pure, we felt just as strongly about its sequel, Fuse. Now [...]
The Pieces We Keep
Still trying to catch up on all those great 2013 books we recommended? Sorry, we’ve still got a few more to add to that pile. Today, we have Kristina McMorris’s fabulous new novel, The Pieces We Keep. In this her third novel, McMorris returns to the World War II setting of each of her previous [...]
Victorian Violence
Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, and the next year Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet, the first novel to feature Sherlock Holmes–both works set in the heart of London. And in September of 1888, the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper began [...]
Maybe Hubris Isn’t Such a Bad Thing After All
The 2014 Alex Awards have been announced – and they are an excellent group. We managed to predict one! Lexicon by Max Barry. That’s down from two in 2013 which I joked was a result of my hubristic claim to scientific accuracy. Maybe hubris isn’t such a bad thing after all. All joking aside, here’s [...]
Night of the Wolf
Probably the most successful program I have ever held at my library was a “minute mystery” program–where I simply posted a short mystery and invited teens to solve it. Today, I’m have a review of a collection of short stories by French novelist Paul Halter. You may remember that a little more than a month [...]
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