BY ANY OTHER NAME by Jodi Picoult
According to Ms. Picoult, Emilia is probably responsible for most of the Italian-themed plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo & Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello the Moor of Venice. She may have also written As You Like […]
MORIARTY by Anthony Horowitz ~ A Book Review
MORIARY is a very different book than THE HOUSE OF SILK. Whereas THE HOUSE OF SILK focuses on Sherlock Holmes and his side-kick Dr. Watson, MORIARTY focuses on—well, on Moriarty. Except that he isn’t there, at least not until the very end. Obviously, with the title of Sherlock Holmes’ famous nemesis, Moriarty must be around […]
Among the Mad ~ Maisie Dobbs #6
What I love about Jacqueline Winspear’s novels is that she doesn’t just portray the froth and fun of the 1920s and 1930s. She also probes deeper into the lives of the men and women who inhabited those times to give us a full picture of what it was like to be alive then. I love […]
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz ~ A Book Review
In THE HOUSE OF SILK, Anthony Horowitz writes a story that Conan Doyle could never have written, and has added all the details that Doyle left out of his original stories. Like most writers of his time, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was very comfortable writing about the aristocracy. He relished setting his most famous stories, […]
Murder in the Museum ~ Fethering #4 by Simon Brett
This volume is Number Four of Simon Brett’s alliterative murder mysteries set in the prosperous and benign-seeming county of West Sussex. Here, he takes us into the world of trustees ~ amateur volunteers ~ who are charged with running an estate, which in this novel consists of a country house and its grounds. Add to […]
The Torso in the Town ~ Fethering #3 by Simon Brett
In Volume 3 of the Fethering Mystery series, our two sleuths Carole Seddon (proper and rather puritanical) and her next-door neighbor Jude (not-so-proper and free-flowing) are at a dinner party in the nearby town with some incredibly snobbish people (this is set in the early 2000s) when they discover the mummified torso of a woman. […]
Death on the Downs ~ Fethering #2 by Simon Brett
Although set in 2000, this novel begins in October 1987, with a man who hates his wife, and a convenient storm. Graham Forbes has spent many years abroad for his work in the British Council, especially in Indonesia where he met his wife Irene, a Chinese woman with a breathtakingly lovely face. He is the […]
The Body on the Beach ~ Fethering #1 by Simon Brett
When a British writer creates a murder mystery series with alliterative titles, it is clearly meant to be funny. And so, when I picked up THE BODY ON THE BEACH I believed it would be an entertaining…beach read. However, that is not quite true, for it turned out to be much more than that. It […]
The Spanish Bride by Georgette Heyer ~ A Book Review
THE SPANISH BRIDE is not your typical regency romance. For one thing, the marriage that usually culminates a courtship comes near the beginning of the novel, so there is no arc of tension about this relationship. The other feature of this volume is that it deals with the gritty reality of warfare, at a time […]
GOD’S HOTEL by Victoria Sweet MD ~ A Book Review
This is a most unusual book. I guess the genre it fits into most comfortably is Memoir, since it is a first-person account of the twenty years that author Victoria Sweet spent as a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital. For those who don’t know, Laguna Honda hospital was founded in 1866 during the […]
