…The problem is the presentation. Each chapter begins with a specific date and a vague time of day, “evening” or “morning.” It takes on the feel of a journal, like the reader gets to peek inside each woman’s story. I say story because each of these women is an unreliable narrator. More than that, even, there is the sense that they have thought out what they are going to say and how they will present it to the reader. When it is assumed these are […]
Because Truth and Secrets Are Cranes
Blue van Meer was never going to be the typical “girl next door” — her father, Gareth, made quite sure of that. Having lost her mother at a very young age, Blue forms a very strong bond with her father, and thereafter, the riotous, seemingly invincible father-daughter team moves from town to town, following his teaching career all over the country. A professor of political science — “interested broadly in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of third world nations” — Gareth […]
Halloweenie
Hercule Poirot’s novelist friend Ariadne Oliver is visiting a friend in the country, and helping out with a Halloween mystery party for the local children. The party appears to be going well, until a young girl is murdered in the apple-bobbing tub. Who could possibly have killed an innocent child? Turns out the kid wasn’t very well liked, she was a big fibber. Even the morning of the party, she was telling stories about having witnessed a murder. Mrs. Oliver calls in Hercule Poirot to […]
If a dead body falls in the woods, and no one hears it. . . .
I do love Miss Marple. She’s plucky and clever, and the nosiest old lady ever. In this one, a friend of Miss Marple’s thinks she has seen a man strangling a woman on a train. Not her train, but on a train going in the opposite direction. The cops can’t find a body, and no one believes the friend. So of course Miss Marple figures it out. She starts poking around with train timetables, maps, all kinds of stuff like that, and she determines where […]