A laugh-out-loud/cry-out-loud tale designed to illuminate our lives and prick our conscience. It is the story of Rosemary, who begins her story “in the middle,” saving the big reveal for later. Rosemary is at college when the novel begins, suffering from a lack of friends, a lack of self-esteem and from a huge gaping hole inside her dating back to when she lost her twin sister Fern at age five, her beloved older brother Lowell not too long afterwards, and watched her father descend into […]
An unhappy Danish murder mystery with a science twist
Perhaps because of all the praise heaped on this book, I found The Dinosaur Feather to be one of the more disappointing murder mysteries I’ve read in a while. In a nutshell, the plot is centered on a furious and long-running cross-Atlantic brawl between two respected paleontologists over whether birds evolved from dinosaurs or are their own separate species (something which has been definitively resolved since, which in my view takes the wind a little bit out of the author’s sails). The strange and very […]
Wizard Harry Dresden in fine form in Death Masks
Harry Dresden is a highly respected (if impoverished) wizard among the supernatural scene, and when a Vatican priest calls on him to help find the stolen Shroud of Turin, he is thrilled to take the job and the fee that goes with it. He is less thrilled to learn that horribly mutilated bodies and hit men are turning up in the investigation, and that Chicago crime-boss Marcone seems to be in the thick of it. At the same time, a top noble of the Red […]
Another unbelievable conspiracy thriller
This is the first in a new series about FBI special agent and forensic artist Sydney Fitzpatrick, written by Burcell, herself an FBI-trained forensic artist. A somewhat better tale than Burcell’s The Dark Hour which I recently reviewed, this novel focuses on Fitzpatrick’s personal crisis over whether to follow up on brand-new clues about her father’s murder 20 years earlier, or to leave it alone. Of course, had she left it alone, we would have no story, so…. There is a race against time, as […]