Connelly, the master of the police procedural, gives us another thought-provoking Harry Bosch novel, this one (#17 in the series) taking place near the end of Bosch’s long career as a homicide detective in Los Angeles. While not the best Connolly’s ever written, The Drop manages to engross the reader from the first pages to the last, while giving us some controversial social issues to chew on along the way. As is typical of Connelly, we have two simultaneous plots going on. One is an […]
Worthy successor to “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by JK Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith)
This is the second of Galbraith’s “who-dun-its” starring the one-legged private detective Cormoran Strike, and the quality of the writing, the pace of the action, the depth of the characters and the evocative settings are an equal to the first in the series. Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling, takes us behind the scenes of the vicious back-biting publishing industry, where one particularly unloveable author goes missing and then turns up horribly dead. Our hero Strike is still riding the high of his previous successful and high-profile […]
Another Baldacci popcorn thriller we could probably do without
The Target is yet another Baldacci political thriller starring two government assassins with consciences, lots of colorful bad guys, and a totally improbable ending. This latest book offers multiple plots that don’t really intersect but which run parallel, a different approach to writing this genre which sort of works but which doesn’t save The Target from being more than just another in a long line of these kinds of popcorn thrillers. The U.S. government is planning to back a coup against the North Korean government. […]
A Serial Killer Haunts Post-WWII Italy
Bojhalian takes us on a visit to Italy’s beautiful Tuscany during one of the most horrifying periods in that country’s history, when the German occupation had splintered the nation between the resistance, the collaborators, and the majority caught in between who mostly struggled to survive without selling their souls to the devil. But beyond a thought-provoking examination of choices and consequences under wartime conditions, Bojhalian also throws us into the middle of a hunt for a serial killer 10 years after the war’s end, a […]