The thing about entirely plot-based books is that they don’t usually make for good re-reads, and I am a TOTAL book re-reader. “Do I want to re-read this someday?” is genuinely a question I ask before I will elevate a book to the four star level. If the answer is no, then there better be some damn fine extenuating circumstances as to why not (for instance a book that’s really good, but so traumatizing and upsetting that you can’t read it more than once). Mysteries sometimes […]
“People in the dark are quite different, aren’t they?”
Once again guessed the murderer by complete accident. I’m the mystery reader equivalent of those characters you often see in farces who are complete idiots (usually lovable) and bumble about doing everything so wrong they come back around and get everything right. I really enjoyed this book, which was apparently Christie’s 50th (although publishers had to count a book of short stories to make this true, and they really wanted to, because publicists never change). It starts out kind of like a game. An ad […]
A Change of Pace for a Formulaic Genre
Unfortunately, not like my previous review of Dead Men Don’t Ski, there were not a lot of wonderfully on-the-nose covers of this book to choose from. The one from Amazon is the same as my copy, which is lacking in over the top death melodrama. (Although this is the first time [out of all of two books of hers I read] that a big clue was printed on the cover.) Another first is the narration perspective. Instead of following Detective Harry Tibbett on his investigations, […]
There’s Actually a Lot of Things Dead Men Don’t Do
I really didn’t think anything would top my cover of Dead Men Don’t Ski – as a lone skier ascends a mountain on a ski lift, the rocks below form a skull. I have a handful of Moyes books, no idea where they came from, and they all find a way of inserting a skull into the picture, as subtly as a rhino crashing through your living room. But the covers on Amazon are all gems. Like the one on the left, with the Grim […]