Aki Ito has always looked up to her older sister, Rose. Rose was beautiful. She was popular. She was fearless. She was the one to strike out to Chicago to make a new life after the Ito family was incarcerated in Manzanar along with thousands of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. So […]
Charlie Parker returns in The Instruments of Darkness, by John Connolly, the twenty-first book in the series. Parker has been bruised and battered by his work as a private investigator, but he can’t stop when there’s a chance that he can take a measure of evil out of the world. Evil is absolutely real for […]
Trigger warning for anti-Chinese racism. Lao She lives a quiet life in London, teaching Mandarin at the University of London and making eyes at the daughter of his landlady, until he gets swept up in a series of murders and general skullduggery in The Murder of Mr. Ma, by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ […]
Vivvy Bouchet would much rather spend her time gazing at the stars, in the remote Texas desert, with the most powerful telescope she can get her hands on. Unfortunately for Vivvy, an old cop friend believes that she has a psychic ability to find the dead and missing. He keeps calling her in to “consult” […]
Trigger warning for brief depictions of interpersonal violence. The Night Flowers, by Sara Herchenroether, tells several stories at the same time. There’s the story of Jean Martinez, a detective who is one of the few who isn’t getting too old for this shit in spite of her husband’s hope that they can retire together. There’s […]
Trigger warnings for references to child sexual abuse, murder, and suicidal ideation. In Wolf at the Table, Adam Rapp spins a violent family saga based on elements of his mother’s life. Although this book contains more than its share of murders—including appearances from John Wayne Gacy—I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of […]
Sir Lawrence Linwood’s unlamented death summons his three adopted children from Peru, France, and London for a funeral and a will reading. There were already hints at the beginning of Christopher Huang’s intriguing novel, Unnatural Ends, that there is something sinister about the Linwoods but these hints turn into red flags when Sir Lawrence leaves […]
Robert Jackson Bennett takes the classic pairing of irritable genius detective and neophyte assistant and transplants it to a wild fantasy setting in The Tainted Cup. Sometimes when I read a book, I get the feeling that the author knocked their own socks off while writing it. The world Bennett has created here is a […]
Thomas Mullen dives deeply into the gray area between good and evil in The Rumor Game with two protagonists caught by conflicting loyalties in Boston, 1943: to truth and justice, to safety and pragmatism, to family ties and patriotism. Anne Lemire is a journalist struggling to make a name in the very sexist media world […]
I’ve put off writing this review because, even though I finished it nearly a week ago, I’m still not sure what to make of Liz Nugent’s novel, Strange Sally Diamond. Every time I thought the story was settling down, Nugent would throw a wild curve ball that knocked me off of my expectations. While I […]