Ok, so this is my second Ellery James book. Things started out okay. Then they got weird. Well, I mean things were a bit implausible all the way through. Let me give some examples: We begin with our main character, Ella Mae, going home to Georgia after witnessing her husband’s infidelity. So far, so good. The parts that I don’t get are: she found him boinking the two (reheaded) twins from another apartment in the elevator. Like, she presses the button and the door opens […]
Tartting up Rick Riordan and Castle
The Immortals strikes me as a combination of Castle and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I liked Castle until the romance ruined it. In The Immortals, there’s a relationship developing between Selene (aka Artemis) and Classics professor Theo, but it’s not quite clear until towards the end what exactly it’s turning into. Selene is an avenger of wrongs against women in modern day Manhattan as an unlicensed private investigator, and Theo is the academic rock star with a bit of a past who gets pulled […]
“I know what it’s like to tell yourself a lie so often that it becomes the truth.”
Five students walk into detention, they have little in common, other than that they were all caught with phones in class, and all five claim that they were framed and that the phones weren’t theirs. But only four walk out of that detention alive. Number five is dead and the other four all have motive and opportunity. Who is guilty? What really happened? That is the story which unfolds in One of Us is Lying. However, it isn’t the only story that Karen McManus is […]
A somewhat problematic murder mystery
Last year, I gave up on Cannonball Read in February. I kept reading, but the pressure to review got to be too much, and I ended up too far behind. This year, I’m not going for quantity, but instead am aiming to tackle all the books that I’ve bought over the years that for one reason or another have sat unread on my shelves. The first of these books is The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham, which I bought several years ago at Hatchard’s because […]