I have read so many Sophie Hannah books, and outside the Spilling CID novels (which tend to be pretty good), not one of her one-off novels has been great. But — they don’t quite suck either. And they’re usually an easy, one evening read. Cara Burrows has “fled” her perfectly nice husband and their two children in England to spend two weeks at a resort in Arizona. She has her reasons, but really, they’re pretty shitty. While at the resort, she wanders into the wrong […]
Recent Reads: A Summer of (Mostly) Thrillers
I have been really busy with my own writing and art project this year, so haven’t been posting regularly on my blog. But I did want to share some capsule book reviews of what I’ve been reading lately. Agatha Christie, The Monogram Murders – billed as a “new” Hercule Poirot mystery, by British mystery author Sophie Hannah. It wasn’t a bad read, but was it Poirot? For fans of Christie’s most famous and famously fastidious detective, there were definite pleasant notes scored, with nods to […]
The Book Within the Book
Man, this is one strange little book. I picked it up because I was going on vacation, and even when Sophie Hannah’s books aren’t very good, they can always be relied on to be interesting. The basic plot of this one is that the Merrison family has picked up and left London for a more peaceful life in Devon. The main character, Justine Merrison, has quit her job and is looking forward to staying home. The story gets going when she finds the beginning of […]
Sophie Hannah, are you okay?
I rarely bother to read books that are rated less than 3 stars on Goodreads. That community generally has decent taste. Sophie Hannah’s latest (or second to latest, I’m not sure) has a 2.76 rating. But I love Sophie Hannah! Most of her books are great, and the ones that aren’t great are at least pretty good. So I ignored the rating and grabbed a copy of The Orphan Choir at the library. I’m sorry, Goodreads — I should have listened. This book was so, so bad. “It […]