clock … watching time, the only true currency

Easy to trust Bernard Cornwell for a good read after all the Sharpe novels. (Which reminds me, I should return to those…)
Wildtrack (1988) reads like a Dick Francis book with sailboats instead of horses, reminiscent of Sam Llewellyn’s thrillers. (I’ve read several, all before I started keeping track on this blog.)
The only false notes in [...]

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Murder in the White House by Margaret Patterson is an eminently forgettable mystery. Location, location, location may rule in real estate, but it’s not enough to make up for boring plot.

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Another John Le Carré, Call for the Dead blends espionage with procedural. Less than 150 pages in paperback, but a fine read. George Smiley’s introduction is pedestrian: even the opening chapter’s title is dry, “A brief history of George Smiley.”
Wonder if Le Carré had any premonition he would be writing novels with Smiley involved one [...]

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Sarah Andrews’s Bone Hunter has a dinosaur skeleton on the cover, and drags “forensic geologist” Em Hansen into the Utah desert to solve a mystery. Yes, this was one of the lighter reads. If you need the elevator pitch, it’s “CSI meets paleontology meets the Mormons, with an edge of romance to tease.” (OK, that’s [...]

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Jonathan Gash is the pen name of a doctor, John Grant. But he’s not known for his medicine. I’ve read all (I think) of the 23 Lovejoy crime novels, and The Ten Word Game from 2003 was a re-read.
I’m trying to avoid returning to old favorites, but sometimes a comfortable read is worth it.

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Apparently John Sandford can write a book without “Prey” in the name. I read Dead Watch a few weeks ago, and until finding the link earlier in this sentence, I couldn’t remember what it was about. That’s a commentary on my attention to this type of book and a condemnation of the book itself. I’d [...]

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What a nice surprise to linger in the public library on Saturday morning and find a Dick Francis novel I had not read: Under Orders. According to Wikipedia, this was the first novel since the death of his wife, Mary. Like all of the Francis books, a fun read that didn’t take much more than [...]

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I picked up The Fallen because it was sitting out at Cody’s Books (Stockton Street), on a table near the front. I wanted something I could dive into immediately on the bus ride home. Don’t ever let someone say that awards don’t matter, because the big “two-time winner of the Edgar award for best [...]

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John Dunning writes mysteries set in the world of books. The Bookwoman’s Last Fling is the most recent of his novels centering on bookman Cliff Janeway, a more dramatic version of the author himself, who does run a bookstore. I was drawn into these via my mother, whose fondness for Dick Francis she inculcated early [...]

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John Gardner’s Troubled Midnight was a jacket pickup. Meaning, I picked it up in the library after reading the book jacket and finding that one of the blurbs grabbed my attention.
Readers with a taste for intelligent international suspense in the spirit of Frederick Forsyth…should find this an exciting thriller.
Only after I got home did [...]

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