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American Mysteries and Crime Fiction – Lioness at Large

American Mysteries and Crime Fiction

Literature Reviews

Lauren Belfer: City of Light

Blurb: “The year is 1901. Buffalo, New York, is poised for glory. With its booming industry and newly electrified streets, Buffalo is a model for the century just beginning. Louisa Barrett has made this dazzling city her home. Headmistress of Buffalo’s most prestigious school, Louisa is at ease in a world of men, protected by […]

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Literature Reviews

Kylie Logan: The Scent of Murder

Blurb: The way Jazz Ramsey figures it, life is pretty good. She is 35 years old and owns her own home in one of Cleveland’s most diverse, artsy, and interesting neighborhoods. She has a job she likes as an administrative assistant at an all-girls school and a volunteer interest that she’s passionate about — Jazz […]

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Literature Reviews

Margaret Millar: Vanish in an Instant

  The Appointment with Agatha group’s April side read, and the third book by Millar I’ve read this year alone. Though I didn’t like it quite as well as my very first foray into her oeuvre (An Air That Kills), it’s not very far behind, and I can definitely see how the two novels came […]

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Literature Reviews

Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap

Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot.  (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.)  So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]

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Literature Reviews

Margaret Millar: Ask for Me Tomorrow

Blurb: Tom Aragon, a young Hispanic lawyer, is hired by Gilda Decker to find her husband who disappeared in Mexico after reportedly amassing a fortune. Aragon travels to Mexico to unravel the past, which he finds shrouded in mystery. But as he starts getting close to his quarry, witnesses start dying. The first of Millar’s […]

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Literature Reviews

Vera Caspary: Laura

Blurb: In the doorway of an elegant New York apartment, blood seeps over silk negligee, over polished wood floors and plush carpet: a beautiful young woman lies dead, her face disfigured by a single gun shot. But who was Laura? What power did she hold over the very different men in her life? How does […]

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Literature Reviews

Marcia Muller: Ask the Cards a Question

Blurb: There’s trouble in Sharon McCone’s quiet San Francisco apartment building. Madame Anya, with her cards, her tamed crow, and her candles, had predicted evil for Molly Antonio. Linnea Carraway, drinking heavily and careening in the wake of a divorce, had argued with her. Now the sweet, elderly lady lies dead in her apartment. Linnea, […]

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Literature Reviews

Sara Paretsky: Killing Orders

Blurb: Killing Orders, V.I. Warshawski’s third adventure, starts when her great-aunt Rosa summons the detective to her cold suburban home. Rosa made V.I.’s childhood miserable and the detective resents the command to help her aunt prove she didn’t embezzle five million dollars from a local Dominican priory. All hell breaks loose when a mysterious opponent […]

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Literature Reviews

Raymond Chandler: The Little Sister

Blurb: “So you need help. What’s your name and trouble?” Private investigator Philip Marlowe’s latest client is Orfamay Quest. She’s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin.  Or at least that’s what she tells Marlowe, offering him just 20 dollars for his trouble. Feeling charitable, Marlowe accepts — though […]

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Literature Reviews

Sue Grafton: “A” Is for Alibi

Blurb: When Laurence Fife was murdered, few mourned his passing. Plenty of people had reason to want him dead. But the police thought his wife Nikki , with motive, access and opportunity, was the #1 suspect. The jury thought so too. Eight years later and out on parole, Nikki hires Kinsey Millhone, a gutsy P.I., […]

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Literature Reviews

Denise Hamilton: Savage Garden

Blurb: Los Angeles Times reporter Eve Diamond has been looking forward to a romantic date with her new love, Silvio Angila, including an opening night at the theatre, cocktails, and the night ahead. But when the play’s leading lady, Catarina Velosi, fails to appear, Eve learns that she and Silvio share a complicated past. Despatched […]

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Literature Reviews

Margaret Millar: An Air That Kills

Blurb: From the Edgar-Award winning author of Beast in View, this landmark novel of domestic suspense is a gripping tale of ordinary lives ripped apart by lust, deceit, adultery, conspiracy and betrayal. On a Saturday night in April, Ron Galloway’s friends have all arrived at his Ontario lakeside vacation lodge for a boys’ weekend without […]

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Literature Reviews

Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much

Blurb: Amanda Quick (Jayne Ann Krentz) transports listeners to 1930s California, where glamour and seduction spawn a multitude of sins. At the exclusive Burning Cove Hotel on the coast of California, rookie reporter Irene Glasson finds herself staring down at a beautiful actress at the bottom of a pool. The dead woman had a red-hot […]

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Literature Reviews

Chester Himes: The Real Cool Killers

Blurb: To detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, it looked like an open and shut case. After all, Sonny Pickens was still standing over the body of Ulysses Galen, smoking gun hanging from his hand. Only one problem: Sonny’s gun was loaded with blanks. There were plenty of people who wanted Galen dead, […]

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Literature Reviews

Michael McGarrity: Tularosa

Blurb: Michael McGarrity packs his powerful mystery with Southwestern lore and breathtaking action. In a wicked conspiracy reaching across the Mexican border, Tularosa pits a jaded ex-cop against tight-lipped Army personnel, hired thugs, and smooth-talking outlaws. Forced into retirement by a crippling gunshot wound, Santa Fe policeman Kevin Kerney seeks solitude on a small New […]

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Literature Reviews

Marcia Muller: Edwin of the Iron Shoes

Blurb: It’s Sharon McCone’s first case as staff investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative. She knows nothing about antiques, yet she has an affection for Salem Street with its charming mix of antique and curio shops. Now elderly dealer Joan Albritton has been found dead, stabbed with an antique dagger. Her neighbors are shocked. Recurring […]

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Literature Reviews

Dana Stabenow: A Cold Day for Murder

Blurb: Eighteen months ago, Aleut Kate Shugak quit her job investigating sex crimes for the Anchorage DA’s office and retreated to her father’s homestead in a national park in the interior of Alaska. But the world has a way of beating a path to her door, however remote. In the middle of one of the […]

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Literature Reviews

Donna Leon: The Jewels of Paradise

Blurb: Caterina Pellegrini is a young Venetian musicologist hired by two competing cousins to find the truthful heir to an alleged treasure concealed by a once-famous, but now almost forgotten, baroque composer. Sworn to secrecy, Caterina can solve the mystery only by searching through the papers contained in the composer’s two chests that have not […]

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Literature Reviews

Denise Hamilton (ed.), Various Authors: Los Angeles Noir

Blurb: Stories by: Michael Connelly, Janet Fitch, Susan Straight, Hector Tobar, Patt Morrison, Robert Ferrigno, Gary Phillips, Christopher Rice, Naomi Hirahara, Jim Pascoe, Scott Phillips, Diana Wagman, Lienna Silver, Brian Ascalon Roley, and Denise Hamilton. A reliable entry in the Akashic Noir series, though given the setting I’d have expected slightly more (especially more of […]

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Literature Reviews

Phoebe Atwood Taylor: The Cape Cod Mystery

The Appointment with Agatha group’s January 2022 side read: my first book by Atwood Taylor (though I’d heard her name before) and almost certainly not my last one. I’m not entirely sold on the main investigator, Asey Mayo; he comes across as rather too mannered and the book might have benefitted if the first person […]

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