Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint is fascinating. Author Durkee is honest about his abuse of Adderall and alcohol while consumed with his obsession with finding the definitive portrait of William...
I enjoyed Night of Fire. Its structure is somewhat akin to A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan in that it is a series of short stories bound together by a rather subtle common thread, in the case of Night of Fire, a rooming house going up in flames, one floor...
Set in San Francisco during the Great Depression, The View from Half Dome is the story of sixteen-year-old Isabel Dickinson. After her longshoreman father dies on the docks, she and her family (her mother, a teenaged brother James, and a nine-year-old sister) move to...
Lightning Strike is the eighteenth of twenty Cork O’Connor mysteries, a new-to-me mystery series. I started with #18 because it’s the prequel to the rest of the series. I recently read Krueger’s extraordinary novel, Ordinary Grace, which is a beautifully-written...
I raced through Hyacinth in one evening. Regency historical romance tends to bog down in descriptions of the ton and its rigid social mores and not have a lot of pizzazz, so I really welcomed a novel with a neuro-divergent heroine with an aversion to touch and a...
Downfall is a fast-paced novel set in New York City in the 1980s. It is something of a mashup of a police procedural and character-driven fiction and includes the points of view of the two detectives, a physician, Richard Shepard, whose father is murdered, and the...
Bloodlines is the fourth of a trilogy that has turned into a five-book series, The Shadow of the Raven. I have not read books one through four, but as I’ve read all of Bernard Cornwell’s The Warrior Chronicles, I had no trouble following the storyline and characters....
Silver in the Bone by Alexandra Bracken is the first in a series of Arthurian legend-inspired Young Adult fantasies set in contemporary Boston and Avalon. I found Bracken has written less a retelling of the Arthurian legends and more used them as a springboard into a...
Hang the Moon blends true events in American history with the English Tudor dynasty with King Henry VIII and his multiple wives and his daughter who becomes Queen Elizabeth I. The names of the characters reflect this background: Seymour, Jane, Tom, Eddie, etc. “Duke”...
Play the Fool is billed as a thriller, but in reality it’s more of a women’s fiction with a mystery thrown in. Katie True is a strong female protagonist, but at times her actions border on sheer stupidity. She’s failed an attempt to live in Chicago and come home to...
Janie Whitman, the protagonist in First Course, undergoes a life-changing twenty-four hours. First, she loses her job in Chicago and the boyfriend/boss there breaks up with her. Then, hard on those happenings, her parents die in a plane crash, and her sister, Alyssa,...
The Lockhart Women by Mary Camarillo doesn’t read as a debut novel. She captures the epitome of a modern dysfunctional family. Stranded through the novel is the television coverage of the 1994-1995 O.J. Simpson murder and later his robbery trials, and each woman...
Annie Beyers, the main character of Kelley McNeil’s debut novel, A Day Like This, seemingly has everything she wants in life: a beautiful yellow farmhouse, a loving spouse, and an adorable daughter, Hannah. When she takes Hannah to the pediatrician, Annie is involved...
The Song of the Cell has achieved myriad accolades, including a NYT Notable Book and Best Book of the Year by Oprah Daily, the Economist, BookPage, Book Riot, and the New York Public Library. In reading it, I found Mr. Mukherjee’s prose to be elegant and...
Clytemnestra is a princess of Sparta; her parents are Tyndareus and Leda (of Leda and the Swan fame). The royal family includes Helen (of Helen of Troy fame), supposedly beget from the rape of Leda by Zeus in the guise of a swan, and several other children. In Sparta,...
Few books are more deserving of a sequel than The Odyssey. In his new book, On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and His Fatherless Son Telemachus, Tad Crawford continues the story of The Odyssey from the point of view of Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. Telemachus tells...
The Northern Reach is W.S. Winslow’s debut novel, but it certainly doesn’t read as a beginner’s effort. It is an ambitious collection of interconnected stories (somewhat akin to the structure of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan) told from multiple points...
The White Bone has been in my to-be-read pile for a decade, and I finally got around to reading it. Author Gowdy writes from the point of view of elephants on the African savannah as they face threats from mankind, climate change, and their natural predators. I cannot...
Like M.E. Hilliard’s debut novel, The Unkindness of Ravens, the newest in her Greer Hogan Mystery series, Three Can Keep a Secret, grabbed me from the onset. The first person narration rapidly pulls the reader in the the thought processes of amateur sleuth, Greer...
Initially I had trouble getting into Your Driver Is Waiting because the author's voice is so strident. As I got perhaps a chapter or two into it, though, I realized why and ended up really liking a fresh voice. Damani’s father has just died. Her mother is depressed to...
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