A Cineaste’s Bookshelf
Click here for information about my book review policy.
REVIEW: The Examiner
It's all well and good until the students become more interested in their own agendas than the coursework. When a corporate client with a sketchy past "hires" the the team for a launch party a crosscurrent of morals turns into a whirlpool of chaos.Read More »
REVIEW: The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia
The strength of the novel is in Francesca's voice. Her memories of the hardscrabble town clawing to the side of a mountain are vibrant. The characters were drawn with a sharp, dark charcoal pencil -- impressionistic in style but specific and bold.Read More »
REVIEW: She Left
It's a better than average thriller, with a smart protagonist and a cracking mystery. There are psychological complications, a dusting of clues, well-drawn characters and a quickly moving plot. Read More »
REVIEW: The Murders in Great Diddling
Every once in awhile you read a book you wish you had written. This is one of them. Great Diddling lies somewhere in the English countryside between the Father Brown tv series, the headquarters of the Thursday Murder Club, and Cabot Cove.Read More »
REVIEW: Wordhunter
When the mayor's daughter disappears, the local police ask for Maggie's help in analyzing the notes left by the abductor. Her professor, and law enforcement, think she can offer insights they are missing. She acts as an unofficial profiler considering the perpetrator's vocabulary and choice of phrasing.Read More »
REVIEW: Swimming Pretty
Swimming Pretty is not just a book about what we now know as synchronized swimming. It follows the throughline of women earning the right to be swimmers at all -- recreationally and competitively.Read More »
Spend July between the pages of a bookREVIEW: The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers
As a baby, Clayton was left on the front steps of a retirement home. He grew up among the Fellowship for Puzzlemakers, a group of enigmatologists, codebreakers, and crossword setters who share a reclaimed country estate. Now he has to uncover his origin to secure his future, and that of the Fellowship.Read More »
REVIEW: Bunyan and Henry
Mark Cecil has deftly reframed the hallowed figures of Paul Bunyan and John Henry in this book. The legendary men are forced to go toe to toe with the capitalistic greed of an expanding America. They remain heroes in this retelling but their foes now include amorphous ideals as well as bad guys.Read More »
A round-up of titles to kick off your reading in May. REVIEW: Death of an Author
Lorac is the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett who wrote dozens of novels from the 1930s - 1950s. Death of an Author pulls from her inside publishing knowledge to set up this snappy mystery novel.Read More »
REVIEW: In The Fog
On a rainy, late Victorian evening in London, a group of men sit in their club, bemoaning the fact that a bill they oppose will pass in Parliament that night. Then, they notice Sir Andrew, the bill's main supporter, is across the room and they hatch a Scheherazade plan to distract him until the vote is over.Read More »
REVIEW: How To Solve Your Own Murder
Deep family secrets create a domino effect no one could have predicted -- except maybe a fortune teller at an English country fair. Read More »
REVIEW: The Extinction of Irena Rey
An eccentric but ostensibly brilliant author has a new book ready for translation. She summons her equally odd but insightful translators to her home on the edge of the Bialowieza forest reserve in Poland. They all get together, go through the manuscript and spend all day translating from Polish into their respective languages. But this… Read More »
Books for February
“February, a form pale-vestured, wildly fair. One of the North Wind’s daughters with icicles in her hair.” ― Edgar FawcettRead More »