“Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.” Not far from where I live, across the border into Belgium, you’ll find yourself in the Ardennes, a collection of rugged forests, ragged mountains and quaint, picturesque towns where it’s perfectly okay to have a beer at 11 AM and where French […]
Preston & Child’s Pendergast Series has Lost its Heart
Perhaps I’ve read too many of the Pendergast series by Preston & Child, but I found Blue Labyrinth to be, well, just plain cold. That is, it didn’t draw me in or make me root for the eccentric protagonist, or anyone else for that matter. My feeling is that if you’re going to write a series about an unusual person, you need to reveal more and more of the man’s character, backstory, flaws and strengths to hold a reader’s interest. Instead, we continue to get […]
This book is mesmerizing
This is my first foray into the works of Swedish crime-novelist Kepler, and it was –umm — mesmerizing. The horrible slaughter of nearly an entire family leaves Detective Joona Linna determined to solve the mystery, and as readers learn right away, the highly-respected detective is always right and is famous for his “told you so”s. The problem is that no one has any idea why someone butchered the father across town, then went to the home and murdered the wife, the little girl and […]