Do you ever find yourself reading along, and when you come to a reference to ancient Greece or Rome, you start scratching your head? With sort of a, “I think I heard something about that somewhere, but I don’t remember much about it” kind of thought? The Classics: All You Need to Know, from Zeus’s […]
The Somnambulist features Edward Moon, a conjurer most easily compared to Sherlock Holmes, but with a freakish twist. His Watson is an 8-foot-tall mute man named–can you guess?–The Somnambulist. The pair are asked to investigate a bizarre murder in the seamier part of London at the beginning of the novel. Within pages, they have solved […]
In the interest of avoiding spoilers for the second book, I’ll just say that this picks up immediately after that awful cliffhanger of an ending in The Girl Who Played With Fire. So much has been said that I don’t feel like I have a whole lot more to contribute. I (mostly) raced through the […]
Lucía Álvarez is your typical teenage girl. She has a crush on cute Manuel, she and her best friend Ivette are interested in all the latest fashions and movies, and she’s trying to fit in at school. So when Fidel Castro cancels classes, her only thought is enjoying her unexpected freedom. She slowly realizes how […]
Stephanie Plum has just gotten laid off from her job as a lingerie buyer for a company that turned out to be owned by the mob in New Jersey. Her Miata has just been repossessed, she’s sold everything of value, and her refrigerator is empty. Out of desperation, she goes to see her cousin Vinnie, […]
A magus trying to capture Death captures her younger brother, Dream, instead. He’s trapped like a goldfish in a bowl for 70 years, a time when the “sleepy sickness” took over the earth. Some people slept through a lifetime. But the Sandman has patience and he has time to plan his revenge. I haven’t read […]
The Lies of Locke Lamora was a hugely fun tale of a group of con artists called The Gentlemen Bastards and their lives in Camorr, a fantasy version of Venice. I’m going to say right out that I actually struggled a little with this, and that says more about my attention span at the moment […]
Based true events, The Blind Contessa’s New Machine tells the story of Carolina Fantoni and her friend, Turri. Carolina is a beautiful, somewhat solitary girl. She loves to spend time alone down at the little lake her father constructed for her mother. When she gets older, she attracts the attention of the local heartthrob, Pietro. […]
Journalist Mikael Blomqvist has just been found guilty of libel and sentenced to 90 days in jail and slapped with a huge fine. He needs to take a break from journalism for a while, so when a former industrial tycoon asks him to write a family history while investigating a 40-year-old mystery, Mikael takes him […]
Susannah Charleson sort of fell into search-and-rescue. After volunteering as an assistant for her local search-and-rescue team, she eventually received approval to train a dog of her own. After a prolonged nation-wide search, the Golden Retriever Puzzle landed in her lap. I’m not a huge non-fiction reader. Let’s take a peek at my GoodReads shelves, […]
Mary “Jacky” Faber is an orphan in eighteenth-century London. She actually came from a good family, but when both her parents died of illness, there was nowhere for Jacky to go but the streets. Luckily, she made her way into one of the gangs of street orphans, groups of children who watch out for each […]