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Sense of Time – Sense of Place – Lioness at Large

Sense of Time – Sense of Place

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

Neil Richards, Matthew Costello: Mydworth Mysteries 1-3: A Short in the Dark / A Little Night Murder / London Calling!

Blurb: This compilation contains episodes 1-3: A Shot in the Dark Sussex, England, 1929. Mydworth is a sleepy English market town just 50 miles from London. But things are about to liven up there considerably, when young Sir Harry Mortimer returns home from his government posting in Cairo, with his unconventional American wife — Kat […]

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Literature Reviews

Michael Jecks: The Butcher of St. Peter’s

Blurb: Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder. A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this menace caught and […]

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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

Agatha Christie: Come, Tell Me How You Live

Blurb: Agatha Christie’s personal memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan, where she worked on the digs and wrote some of her most evocative novels. Think you know Agatha Christie? Think again! To the world she was Agatha Christie, legendary author of bestselling whodunits. But […]

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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

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

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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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

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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Fun and Games Lifestyle Literature Movies

Holiday Movies

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 24 — Cherished Memories, Task 4: What’s your favorite Christmas/holiday movie that you can watch again and again? (This can be any movie that takes place during the holiday season, whether or not it’s in the ‘spirit’ of the season (i.e. Die Hard or Lethal Weapon). […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Martha Grimes: Jerusalem Inn

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 13 — Holiday Shopping: Read a book about someone who works retail, or that has a retail establishment on the cover (shop, café etc).   Of all the early Richard Jury books by Martha Grimes, this is probably my favorite — not only because it’s got, […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 20 — Travel: Read a book that involves the main character travelling, or a story involving pilgrims on a journey of faith, be it personal, or religious. (For example: Eat, Pray, Love would be about a woman on a journey of self realisation.)   The Appointment […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 16 — Charity: Read “A Christmas Carol,” or read a book in which poverty or hardship are significant plot elements.   This is one of my annual Christmas rereads; one of the books I’ll never get tired of — in addition to listening to the audiobook […]

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Fun and Games Literature

Festive Tasks: Door 2, Task 1 – The Spirit of Christmas Perpetual

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Task 1: Holiday books often have covers that try to evoke a certain emotion in the reader. Post a picture, or a gallery of pictures, of holiday themed book covers that really appeal to you, and, if you want to, tell us why. A large part of what I […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Nancy Mitford: Wigs on the Green

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE   What a great read! It’s easy to see how Nancy Mitford’s witty and merciless skewering of her brother in law Oswald Moseley’s fascist movement (along with the Victorian attitudes of parts of 1930s British aristocracy) would have infuriated parts of her family and driven a lasting wedge between […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Beryl Bainbridge: According to Queeney

Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE   Festive Tasks, Door 7 — Gift Giving & Wrapping: Read a book with a cover that would make beautiful wrapping paper; or read a book that you would have enjoyed giving or receiving as a gift: This is less a fictional biography than a portrait of manners and […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Martha Gellhorn: Travels with Myself and Another

  Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE   Festive Tasks Door 10 – Peace, Book: Read a book in which the ending of a conflict is a major theme. Gellhorn is a sharp observer and she has a way with words — I’d just wish she’d liked people and, for that matter, the places she […]

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Literature Music Reviews

May 2021 Reading Recap

Still a lot of work on the back end of the blog, including on my “featured authors” pages (see the right column on the main Literature page and the introduction of my April 2021 recap post).  So, contrary to plans, still no new posts in my alphabet blogging series in May.  However, the time-consuming back end […]

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Literature Reviews

Marcie R. Rendon: Murder on the Red River

When I took a look at Native American authors whose work I might want to explore, next to Joy Harjo (whose memoir Crazy Brave I read last month), Marcie R. Rendon quickly stood out as another obvious candidate.  A member of the (Ojibwe / Minnesota Chippewa) White Earth Band, she is a resident of Minneapolis; […]

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Literature Reviews

Marcie R. Rendon: Girl Gone Missing

Given how much I liked Rendon’s debut novel, reading her second book, too, was pretty much a given for me.  Again she writes from the heart; in this instance, about the trafficking of young girls and women for sex purposes, the victims of which trade formed a large part of her day job before becoming […]

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