A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George
★★★★☆ All police procedurals are the same at core. Each has a setting, a crime, police, obstacles, and a resolution. The difference lies in how the best authors make these elements hang together. A...
Category: Book Reviews
Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
★★☆☆☆ In Umberto Eco’s slight new novel Numero Zero, a struggling writer named Dottor Colonna agrees to ghostwrite a memoir for Simei, the future head of Domani, a yet-to-be-published newspaper. Simei’s intentions with Domani...
The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries by Jessa Crispin
★★★★☆ An “untimely blurt” about considering suicide while on the telephone with a friend leads to the arrival of police at her apartment in Chicago. Jessa Crispin was in a rut, constrained by the...
The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray
★★★★☆ The self-reflective metafictional novel – a book that, with a tilted head and a squint, appears to be written by one of its characters – is an engaging and dizzying concept that has...
A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan
★★★★☆ A Window Opens is a stellar example of what can be done with a genre novel, a model of the “working mom” genre. While it will never be viewed as classic literature, Elisabeth...
Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam
★★★★☆ It is not irrelevant that Homer Hickam grew up in the 1950s and watched “The Adventures of Davy Crockett” on television. That Disney series popularized tall tales, the wildly popular stories, some of...
Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
★★★★★ Adrian Tomine’s collection of short fiction Killing and Dying is one of the finest examples of comics-as-literature published to date: these six exceptional stories should be anthologized with the best from writers like...
Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving
★★★★★ Age cannot diminish nor practice stale the writing power of John Irving. In Avenue of Mysteries, his fourteenth novel, we see the full display of his authoritative voice. Humor and pathos are wrapped...
Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh
★★★★★ Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy has reached a worthy conclusion nearly a decade in the making with its cathartic and heartfelt final volume, Flood of Fire. Ghosh’s trilogy began in 2008 with the thrilling,...
