This one started out really strong for me, and then petered out near the end, for a couple of reasons, which I will be marking in spoiler tags. Mary and Holmes continue to be a great pair, and I find their cerebral marriage a compelling one, though I am beginning to get a bit annoyed with King for discounting Watson so much. Here, we meet an old friend from the first book, the archaeologist Dorothy Ruskin, who shows up in Sussex for a visit, and […]
This book was not for me. Maaaybe it would be for you?
Not quite sure what to say about this book, because not quite sure what to think about it. This book was written after a Buzzfeed article detailing Nico Walker’s life (soldier in Iraq, has PTSD, comes home gets hooked on heroin, starts robbing banks to fuel heroin habit, goes to jail) piqued the interest of a book editor, who began pursuing him to write a book. So this is basically a fictionalized version of Walker’s own story. Which is one of the problems I have with it. […]
A nice little Dresden Files snack.
I really like these story collections because I don’t have the patience to track them all down in their various anthologies. Extremely convenient, thumbs up. And to top it all off, I really enjoyed all the stories here. There were a couple in the last collection I was a little bored with, or that showed their age, etc. But they were all good here, entertaining and fit well into the larger Dresden Files universe. I especially liked that three of them took place after the […]
“The thing is, I suppose that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”
What Tana French, one of my favorite authors, has done here with The Witch Elm (her first non-Dublin Murder Squad book) is very interesting, but I will acknowledge it probably won’t be for everyone. The two starting points for inspiration on this book are Who Put Bella in the Witch Elm? and the idea of: what if your protagonist was a guy who has never had to work hard for anything in his life? And then you swirl those ideas around for a while in […]