For these dark, cold winter nights, many readers turn to the cozy mystery genre. It is a genre full of stories of charming small towns beset by serial killers and warm winter cabins playing host to locked room mysteries – with victims and perpetrators alike trapped inside by record snowfall. While the book I read […]
When Nicolette Farrell was eighteen, her best friend went missing. The entire town came together to scour the woods for her, and the local police looked into everyone who knew anything about her disappearance. In the end, a detective was sent by the state to the small town of Cooley Ridge, and – according to […]
Over the last couple of years there has been a movement back toward mending. Rather than getting rid of old clothes, you can grab a needle and thread and give them a new life with a few simple techniques. And if the techniques are simple, they can be made complicated – that is where visible […]
As the title implies, MEXICAN GOTHIC by SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA is an homage to the gothic fiction novels of the 20th century, but one set deep in the mountains of Mexico rather than the English countryside. Noemí Taboada is the strong-willed, somewhat-spoiled daughter of a wealthy family. She spends her free time reveling in the glamor […]
With its brightly colored cover and its strange title, WE RIDE UPON STICKS by QUAN BARRY caught my attention immediately. If I had been more familiar with the plot, it is possible that I would have been more suspicious of the way it instantly grabbed me. In the summer of 1989, the members of a […]
18 TINY DEATHS: the Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics by BRUCE GOLDFARB tells the story of a woman whose impact on crime solving cannot be overstated. Lee first learned about the importance of forensic investigation from her friend George Magrath, who was the country’s only medical examiner at […]
Matt Haig’s THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY is a sliding doors novel about one woman’s search for a fulfilling life. In the course of one day, Nora Seed has been mugged, lost her job, and found out that her cat has died. On top of that, she has been reminded of all of the ways that she […]
Philip Pullman wrote the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (beginning with The Golden Compass) back in the late nineties. These books center on a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, living in an alternate reality England where every human is born with a shapeshifting animal companion known as a daemon. In the His Dark Materials trilogy, readers […]
THE LAST AMERICAN VAMPIRE by SETH GRAHAME-SMITH is an alternate history of America, from the colonies to the present, told by a person who experienced it all: Henry Sturges, the last American vampire. Henry Sturges has been a major player in many key moments of American history. He came to America as a newly-married twenty-five-year-old […]
Recently, an item appeared on my cataloging shelves that I needed to read immediately: THE ANNOTATED AMERICAN GODS by NEIL GAIMAN; edited with notes by LESLIE S. KLINGER. I did not know this book even existed before it appeared on my shelf, but I was very familiar with AMERICAN GODS – Gaiman’s epic novel that […]
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