The book I took to WPF Residency this June was Janwillem van de Wetering's penultimate Grijpstra & DeGier mystery novel, The Hollow-Eyed Angel. My review of the previous volume indicated that Grijpstra, DeGier and the commissaris had all retired, and that I found that the retirements undermined the nature of the series. Imagine my confusion ( Read more... )

     Edward Marston's The Silver Locomotive Mystery is part of his Railway Detective series, set in Britain in the 1850s. It's the sixth in the series, but I picked it up because of the lovely Early Victorian cover, and then discovered that Marston writes two other series set in interesting times (in this reader's opinion): The Restoration Series ( Read more... )

 I'm down to nearly the end of the Tony Hillerman Navajo mysteries. The Sinister Pig is the antepenultimate Tony Hillerman. I'm not really looking forward to finishing the series.
 I seem to be finishing off a lot of dead-author series these days: van der Wetering, Van Gulik, Gur, Gill, and -- in SF -- Banks. Makes my reading-for-pleasure bleaker ( Read more... )

        I read Alexander McCall Smith's The Miracle at Speedy Motors during our recent trip to Savannah both because I generally take a Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency story on vacations, and in self-defense. The self-defense is against the anger of my wife, who is reading the series along after me and is irritated that I'm six years behind the ( Read more... )

        Janwillem van de Wetering's Grijpstra & De Gier mystery novel, Just a Corpse at Twilight was the book I took to SHU-WPF Residency, where I got through exactly 52 pages in the six days I was on campus. Distantly do I remember when the residencies were a reading vacation for me.

Ah, well.

I've loved this quirky series of ( Read more... )

         The Red Pavilion is the 10th volume in Robert van Gulik's classic Judge Dee mystery series. Judge Dee was an actual 6th century Chinese official, who was the hero of 16th century Chinese novels (which used a 16th century setting). Van Gulik translated three short Dee novels, and then began creating new ones of his own, but using elements ( Read more... )

         For my 50th book of the year-to-date, I guess I should mimic my previous review, for the start of this one.
First, the bad news: grimace count = 5
         Then the worse news, and the reason I don't want to be writing this review: Batya Gur is dead, (died 2005), and there will be no more Michael Ohayon mystery novels after Murder in ( Read more... )

         In Tony Hillerman's Navajo mystery novel The Wailing Wind the hero (spoiler alert) wins the heart of a dark-haired woman named Bernadette. What's not to like???
         Okay, the grimaces on page 8 and 27 are a problem, but that's way below Hillerman's usual quota.
         There's also the issue that the book is from the later period ( Read more... )

         Janwillem van de Wetering's Hard Rain may be the reason I found out about the series, but it wasn't the first I read. (I believe The Corpse on the Dike or The Japanese Corpse was the one I found, and then I started from the beginning.) The date is about right for when I heard John Leonard, on CBS Sunday Morning, extol the series.
        ( Read more... )

         If you're early in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, I have to warn you about the 8th in the series, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, (by Alexander McCall Smith, of course) because it will give you some stress. Half the cast of characters suddenly decide to cut loose from the ties that bind, and the other half are confused and ( Read more... )