Shouting at the screen (and the page)
*Spoiler alert: The following review of The Sixes by Kate White doesn’t tell you who did it, but it tells you who didn’t* Jurassic Park hit theaters for the first time when I was nine years old. My mother had thought about asking our live-in nanny, Lori, to come with us but in the end … Read more
Gone Girl
After reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl I have had occasion to be irritated with my husband. Each time I think, yes, I’m mad, but am I mad enough to frame him for my murder? Lucky for both of us the answer keeps coming up a strong no. Gone Girl is one of those books that … Read more
Will the real Patrick Ashby please stand up?
In the opening pages of Josephine Tey’s classic mystery novel Brat Farrar (1950), a young man decides to commit a crime. The crime is impersonation and the motive is money, of course. The young man, the eponymous Brat (a derivation of “Bart”), looks almost exactly like Patrick Ashby, who had disappeared, believed a suicide, eight … Read more
Death, taxes, and telexes
Hilary Tamar, a professor of legal history at Oxford, is devoted to the sacred cause of Scholarship, not to mention Truth. But Hilary (gender unspecified) regularly ditches that high calling to instead investigate and solve crimes in Sarah Caudwell’s four mystery novels about British barristers. I read them all recently and enjoyed the heck out … Read more
Where the body is buried
SPOILER ALERT: In this review of Faithful Place, I’m going to talk about how the book ends. I usually shy away from that when I talk about books. It’s my hope that people will actually want to read the books I write about, and often knowing the ending can keep people from picking up the … Read more
