California & Southwestern USA
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Attica Locke: Bluebird, Bluebird
Blurb: When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules — a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as […]
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Michael Connelly: The Dark Hours
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 3 — Light(s): Read a book with the sun, or festive lights on the cover, or a book that’s set somewhere sunny. Connelly’s (to date) most recent book of the Harry Bosch universe takes us back almost exactly a year, to NYE and early January […]
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June 2021 and Mid-Year Reading Recap
Sigh. Well, I think posting a monthly (and even half-year) reading recap a full three weeks into the next month has to be some sort of record, even for me, but here we are. And I admit that at this point I’d even been contemplating holding off another week so as to combine this with […]
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Mystery Writers of America Presents: Odd Partners
A few years ago, I read a Mystery Writers of America short story compilation named Face Off, which featured short stories where two different authors’ series detectives / protagonists teamed up to solve a given crime, with each of the authors writing part of the respective story. I thought that was an interesting (and surprisingly […]
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April 2021 Reading Recap
First things first: The persistent bug preventing followers / readers to comment on my posts straight off the post (i.e., other than by using the WP Reader) has finally been weeded out, thanks to my hosting service’s IT team … so you can, at last, comment even if you’re not using the WP Reader. (I […]
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Terry Pratchett: Eric & Moving Pictures (and a Reprise of the 2019 Good Omens Screen Adaptation)
In the good old BookLikes days (when they really still were good days), we used to have a Discworld group and associated book club, which had committed to reading the entire series in publication order, by way of bimonthly reads. We had gotten as far as Guards! Guards! by the time the site went down […]
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Joy Harjo: Crazy Brave
Poet Joy Harjo is one of today’s foremost Native American voices; her recently-published memoir was thus a proximate choice for the corresponding entry in my quest to broaden my literary horizons. Harjo’s life story is that of many Native Americans of her generation: as far removed from the American Dream as you can be; socially […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “Q”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “O”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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