Nicolas de la Reynie has the distinction of being Paris’s first police chief, a position he stepped into during the reign of King Louis XIV. Paris was a nasty cesspool full of criminals at the time, and de la Reynie turned things around by putting lamps up everywhere (which is how Paris came to be known as “the City of Light”). But not everything in Paris could be cured with a well-placed lamp. During de la Reynie’s tenure, people in Paris were getting poisoned left […]
Pick Your Poison!
Pick Your Poison – A Short Story Anthology edited by Emma Nelson and Hannah Smith (2017) – Just in time for Halloween comes a short story collection with a clever theme: toxins. Whether venomous snakes, raw almonds, quiet magic, or death by any of the other twenty-five poisonous tales in this collection, there’s a fitting demise for everyone. As with most anthologies I review, I’ll pick out several of the sterling tales that caught my squeamish attention. But all the stories are clever, well-written, and […]
We’ll always be troubled by how things are—that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.
By the time this came off the wait-list at the library, I had completely forgotten why my friend had recommended it to me, other than the obvious, which is that I love me some Ian McEwan. And what’s interesting to report now that I’ve read Nutshell is that I may have grown out of my McEwan faze, because this checked a LOT of my boxes but ultimately didn’t blow me out of the water. Which is not to say that this isn’t a beautiful book, […]
Politics and Poison, Oh My!
A big shout-out to Aviva for sending this book my way during book exchange! This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Francesca Giordano is a woman who needs a job after her father is brutally murdered in the street (don’t worry, you find this out in the first chapter), and she gets herself employed with the very prestigious, inherently corrupt Borgia family. Her employment soon has her on a wild ride through the world of Rome’s political and theological corruption as she follows Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia […]