Falling in love with a work of fiction or a fictional character can be a tricky business, and in many ways it resembles and reflects the experience of falling in love with a so called real person. Which is why Dustin Rowles comparing the Veronica Mars movie experience to briefly reuniting with an old lover was so apt, and also why I’m going to shamelessly steal that analogue for the purposes of writing a review for The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, the first in the […]
Character development and tension weave together a great mystery
This is yet another novel recommendation that I took from my favorite podcast, Literary Disco. They reviewed this one and after listening to the episode I was intrigued. Thankfully they do a wonderful job of curiosity whetting without spoiling, and my aim is to do the same. Larry Ott is a man of a simple existence. He has lived in the same small town his whole life and spends his adult days reading, feeding his chickens, and waiting for customers at his mechanic repair shop. […]
A Double-Helix of a Crime Thriller
Lucky me! I thought I had read them all, and then I run across yet another Connelly, this one from 2001, that I had somehow missed. A Darkness More Than Night teams up two of Connelly’s “heroes,” my favorite LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch and retired FBI profiler and heart transplant recipient Terry McCaleb, in a doubly-complex crime/courtroom drama that satisfies on all fronts. A man is found murdered in his own apartment, with no forensic evidence to pursue except for the weird way in which […]
In which a dog does most of the legwork
“There is very little peace for a man with a body buried in his backyard.” A year after killing a man and burying him in his backyard, Jason Getty is just starting to come to terms with his actions and to get a handle on the guilt. As he begins to think that the body in the backyard will just be his dark secret, a landscaping crew unexpectedly uncovers two other graves in the front yard to Jason’s surprise. As the police swoop in to […]