SJ Rozan’s latest Lydia Chin/Bill Smith title, Family Business, is a wonderful look at New York’s Chinatown, full of atmosphere and a strong sense of place. But it also addresses some complicated topics, starting on a small scale with Lydia’s own family dynamics, including her unstated “don’t ask/don’t tell” bargain with her very Chinese mother […]
Review of Family Business by SJ Rozan – recently published Read More »
If I hadn’t already known I was reading an English translation of a French murder mystery, I would have figured it out anyway by the fourth paragraph of The Sleeping Car Murders. That’s the paragraph where Pierre, the railroad employee whose job it is to check over the just-arrived Phocéen train, and thus the man
Review of The Sleeping Car Murders by Sébastien Japrisot – coming soon Read More »
A classic inheritance mystery – set in Japan… Before I read Seishi Yokomizo’s The Inugami Curse, I had previously read one of the few other books of his that have been translated into English, The Honjin Murders. That was a very recognizable classic locked room mystery. (See my review here.) And The Inugami Curse is
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A classic locked room mystery – set in Japan… I’ve read and really liked a few other books from the Pushkin Vertigo line, which, per their website, features “crime writing from across the globe”. So I was happy to receive a review copy of one of their latest titles – an English translation of Seishi
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Nice to get back in touch with Perry Mason and crew… Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the first mystery authors whose books I read after I realized there WERE mystery authors other than Agatha Christie. And way back then, while I was in graduate school, Gardner’s books were perfect for the limited leisure reading
Review of The Case of the Borrowed Brunette by Erle Stanley Gardner – e-book coming soon Read More »
A fun series finale… I’ve enjoyed each of the previous two books (see my reviews here and here) in Jessie Mihalik’s Consortium Rebellion series, and to avoid creating any suspense, I really liked Chaos Reigning too. I found it just a little bit slow to get started, but pretty soon the action got going, and
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I originally found the first title in this series, Polaris Rising, mentioned on an e-book forum a while back, bought it and loved it. So I was happy to be given a review copy of Aurora Blazing to review for my blog. Although I mostly read mysteries, I also appreciate a good space opera and/or
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My favorite Erle Stanley Gardner series… Erle Stanley Gardner is the super-famous author of more than 80 Perry Mason mysteries, which, in addition to being best-selling books in their own right, were also spun off into a long-running TV series and several movies. Few people, however, are aware that he also wrote almost 30 titles
Review of Shills Can’t Cash Chips by Erle Stanley Gardner Read More »
A great Golden Age-style series starter… Patricia Moyes has long been one of my favorite mystery authors, from back in the days when paperbacks of her books were crowded onto my shelves. Somewhere along the way, though, most of those books got loaned out or lost, and so I was really happy to be offered
Review of Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes Read More »
A multi-dimensional noir protagonist… I am not usually a huge fan of books that strike me as thiller- or noir-ish, but I very much enjoyed Killer Instinct, which is the first in the Charlie Fox series by Zoë Sharp. I think this was largely due to Sharp’s development of Charlie as a real person, complete
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