Last night I stayed up too late, so as to finish Southern Discomfort. This is the second of Margaret Maron's series about Deborah Knott. I still have the mild complaint that she has a huge set of characters for such relatively small books, in part because Deborah Knott comes from a huge family, but I'm starting to keep them sorted out a little ( Read more... )

Finished reading The Bone Collector, by Jeffery Deaver, the first of his Lincoln Rhyme series. Also read Bootlegger's Daughter, the start of Margaret Maron's series involving Deborah Knott.

Both were good. The Deaver book is as much thriller as mystery, and the Maron book is as much novel as mystery. It would have been useful to have this ( Read more... )

I'm becoming a big fan of Laurence Shames. His books are somewhere between mysteries and novels, fun and well-paced, with a great sense of place and slightly offbeat, likable characters. I'd like them if that's all they were. Yet into these casual romps he manages to insert enough wry insightfulness and small wisdoms to take things to the next ( Read more... )

After spending several days last week slogging through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a good book that's about a hundred pages too long, I then quickly burned through opposing prepositions with Under World, by Reginald Hill, and Over the Shoulder: A Novel of Intrigue, by Leonard Chang.

Under World is the 3rd book in the Inspector ( Read more... )

I want to update but I don't want to focus enough to write the entries that need writing. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have that much of a brain ( Read more... )

I've managed to put a dent in (well, really only to make a small bruise on) my reading lists, but I haven't posted any book reviews. I'm not up for anything super-detailed right this second, but let's see if I can manage a quick overview of a few of them.

Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches, by Cornelia Dean. Nonfiction ( Read more... )

Somewhere in my top five favorite mystery authors is Janet Evanovich. I read her Stephanie Plum mysteries because they can actually make me laugh out loud. (side note: I was one of those kids who could read an entire stack of comic books and never even smile, let alone giggle). You don't read these books for the well-crafted puzzle. That's not ( Read more... )