Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan is a Matroyshka doll of a novel – a story within a story in which the main character’s reality blurs with the fiction she’s reading. When the plot is interesting…
Posts tagged Mystery
Welcome to their world of suck
The best thing about reading Touch & Go by Lisa Gardner is that it made me appreciate how damn good Gillian Flynn and Gone Girl are. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not much a genre…
‘Sharp Objects’ — Never Dull
After Gone Girl, I knew I needed more Gillian Flynn in my life. So, I went with her first novel, Sharp Objects. Sharp Objects presents a little bit of a challenge for me, review-wise. It…
Heavy Metal Boy
The best thing about Gillian Flynn’s Dark Objects is that it allowed me to wax nostalgically about the Satanic Panic of the 80s, a phenomenon I had completely forgotten until this book. I don’t know…
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
I don’t read a lot of mystery, so when people recommended The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley to me, I just wrote it off as another mystery where there is…
Worth Dying For
A friend (with whose opinion I generally agree) told me I had to read Worth Dying For, Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel. I had never read a Reacher novel before (Worth Dying For is…
A Sickness in the Family
The Ushers are a family in decline. Mother Biddy’s having an affair, William’s just been kicked out of Oxford, Amy’s waging a battle with their father over his refusal to invest in her architecture firm,…
Duluth’s Dark Side
Duluth is the perfect place to set a murder. You’ve got Lake Superior, extreme weather, fascinating history, more lakes, bridges, lots of rocks, tourism and poverty side by side, and big (sometimes tall) ships. Every…
It?s all in the Cards
The Last Days of Madame Rey is a perfect companion to A. W. Hill's Nowhere-Land. Both feature the daring PI Stephan Raszer, and although Madame Rey came first, it has just been newly released in…
‘Murder She Wrote’ Meets ‘Dead Like Me’
Sadie Witt is a vibrant sixty-four year old woman who, with her sister, Jane, runs a small resort in northern Minnesota called Witt’s End. Unlike conservative Jane, Sadie wears miniskirts, a thong, tank tops, and…