Play of Shadows is the third in Barbara Nickless’s Dr. Evan Wilding series. Kudos to her for developing an atypical protagonist (Evan Wilding is a dwarf with an enormous intellect and a PhD in semiotics) and thrillers that are atypical to say the least. I love reading...
Odyssey’s End is the tenth book in Matt C. Coyle’s Rick Cahill private investigator series. I am currently up-to-date on this series and have enjoyed following PI Rick Cahill’s life. Like the other books in the series, Odyssey’s End has enough back story sprinkled...
This series of three books (The Vanishing Woman, The Disappearing Man, and The Tubman Train) is based on true stories of how slaves escaped from their southern masters in pre-Civil War days. The crux of each tale is true, but parts are fictionalized. The Vanishing...
I always enjoy reading Kathryn Gauci’s extraordinarily well-researched historical fiction. The Embroiderer is a multi-generational, multi-point of view family saga spread from Constantinople to Smyrna to Athens then on to Cairo and England from 1822 to 1973. The book...
This is my third book by Lt. General (Ret’d) Roméo Dallaire, the UN commander during the Rwandan Genocide in 1993-1994. Though suffering from significant PTSD from his experiences there, Dallaire has pushed forward with multiple volumes based on current research that...
Set in a dystopic MAGA-esque near future, My Name Is Iris explores the dark side of the United States and fascism. Iris Prince and her husband have drifted apart over the years. Their divorce is unsurprising, but the lack of drama regarding it is. Iris (originally...
The Blue Monsoon is the second in the Blue Mumbai Thriller series, following The Blue Bar, but can be read as a standalone. Senior Inspector Arnav Singh Rajput is called to a bizarre murder at a Hindu place of worship, a Kaali temple: a man has been killed, his face...
Faed to Black is the second in a two-volume series by fantasy writer Sarah J. Sover and is a mystery involving the fae world. The story begins in book 1, Fairy Godmurder, in which Gwendolyn Evenshine drops out of her family and goes to the Academy to become a fairy...
As I revised my novel about the Rwandan genocide, Hunting the Devil, I ran across another memoir by retired Canadian Lieutenant-General and Senator, Roméo Dallaire, in which he describes his twenty year battle with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I had read his...
This is a review of the three-volume series The Stone Stories which includes The Walrus Mutterer, The Amber Seeker, and The Lyre Dancers. The first, The Walrus Mutterer, told from the point of view of Rian, a teenager living in Great Britain during the Iron Age...
During the World War II, Amie Stillwell lives in England and serves as a photo interpreter for the Allies. When the war ends, she works in Washington, DC, for several years but is eventually fired to make room for returning veterans. In a quandary, she returns to her...
Shadow is a Colour (as light is), an ambitious novel even for a seasoned writer, is particularly ambitious as a debut novel. I started out not liking it and, after several false starts and stops, nearly put it aside as a did not finish. For some reason, I persisted...
I read two of Richard Wagamese’s other works (Indian Horse and Dream Wheels) and loved them enough to decide to read his entire backlist. In Medicine Walk, the main character, a sixteen year old boy, doesn’t have a name initially, and the reader only learns his name...
This is a review of the four volume (so far) Sydney Rose Parnell Mystery Series by Barbara Nickless, including Blood on the Tracks (#1), Dead Stop (#2), Ambush (#3) and Gone to Darkness (#4). I read these because I enjoyed the first two of Nickless’s Evan Wilding...
House of Odysseus is an interesting retelling of the Odyssey, but centered on Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who he left behind when he went to fight the Trojan War. This is the second in author Claire North’s Penelopiad. Nearly twenty years after the fall of Troy,...
The Other Princess opens with a girl’s birth and with her mother naming her Aina (difficult) due to the difficulty with her birth. Aina is the daughter of a local king inYoruba. Their village is attacked, and she is torn from her family, most of whom were slaughtered....
I enjoyed reading Carol Potenza’s newest mystery, Sting of Lies, the first in the Lies series. Potenza writes strong female protagonists who don’t need to be rescued—my kind of women. Myrna (pronounced as in meerkat) P. Lee is smart, hard-headed, and has plenty of...
In the Time of Our History is a thought-provoking book that delves into family ties, alliances within families, subjugation and independence. Mitra Jahani is an Iranian-American woman who has moved to San Francisco after being disowned by her father. A year earlier,...
In Those People Behind Us, author Mary Camarillo writes of Wellington Beach, California, a beachside community caught in the crossfire between liberals and Trumpsters during the summer of 2017, but the story could be set in any American town. She builds multiple...
Fencing with the King is a fascinating story of Amani, a young Jordanian-American poet exploring her Jordanian roots. She has found a poem that appears to have been written by her paternal grandmother in one of her father’s old books. On the occasion of King Hussein’s...
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