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Category: reading

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Book Review: Shamus in a Skirt by M. Ruth Myers

IT KEEPS GETTING BETTER

Each book in M. Ruth Myers’ series featuring Maggie Sullivan, a lady private detective just gets better and better.

In Shamus in a Skirt, Maggie is hired by a strange couple of former theater performers who now run an upscale and very discreet hotel. The hotel caters to the wealthy and powerful, but someone is breaking into the hotel safe — or are they? When a young cleaning lady is found dead in the alley behind the hotel, Maggie must learn if certain murder is connected to possible thievery.

Shamus in a Skirt is a very good historical mystery focused when World War II is breaking out in Europe, and many in the US asked if we’d be involved in another European war.

RECOMMENDED

Shamus in a Skirt, like all of her Maggie Sullivan books, feels so … immediate. I don’t really feel like I’m reading historical fiction when I read these books, though the historical details are very good. So good in fact they fit seamlessly in the narrative. If you’re looking for a historic mystery series of quick reading books you can really submerge in, pick up the first book No Game for a Dame in ebook format for FREE. And maybe like me, you’ll find yourself keeping an eye peeled for the next word of Maggie Sullivan.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.

 

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

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Win A Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal!

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Sign up and WIN A Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal. My review is here.

book giveawaySign up for my mailing list NOW thru September 30. I’ll announce a winner on October 1.

Continental US addresses only, please. Yes, this is the copy I read for my review, so it’s very gently used. My newsletter is only a couple times per month, featuring great stuff at the intersection of history and mystery, and also updates on my own stories. You’ll be the first to hear when my new books drop. THANKS!

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Book Review: Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal

book review Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal

Out of the Gate Like a Stutz Bearcat

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Radha Vatsal is a scholar and a talented storyteller, evident in her strong historical mystery debut, A Front Page Affair, just released this summer.

Capability Weeks (“Kitty” to her friends) and her father (a well-to-do, self-made mogul) live well in 1915 New York City. Kitty, a young addition to the New York Sentinel‘s Ladies Page, covers a July 4th society soiree and becomes tied to a murder and what looks like a plot to endanger the delicate international balance. 

Kitty Weeks (and supporting cast) are wonderful. She’s young and privileged and begins to recognize what that has meant in her life throughout this story. I don’t go for that combination in a hero much, but Kitty’s introspection and awareness redeem her (to me at least). A hero who can throw money at their problems and make them go away is not much of a hero. Kitty also works not only externally but internally as well, to find solutions, being creative and brave throughout.

Radha Vatsal has sentences in this book that are heavy with history. It’s hard to write historical novels without ‘info dumping’ on readers. It’s a challenge to weave historical information, foreign to modern readers, and achieve a native harmony so readers glide along, learning without being jarred by the thrills and not the history.

…

RECOMMENDED

Get in on this new series straight away. You’ll enjoy this plucky young hero as she matures during a time of great change in our nation and our world. Strong historical research sunk deep below the surface pushes this debut novel to the top of my recommendation list this month. For a work of fiction, there’s a fantastic ‘Further Reading’ and ‘Selected References and Sources’ pages. Old historian habits die hard.

About the Author: Benjamin Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.

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Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review.

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Old Gems found in Fourteen Great Detective Stories

I dipped into this wonderful old anthology over the past couple of weeks.  I once actively collected the Modern Library series, and this book was on those shelves, though it’s in far from collectible condition. It does have a fun old gift inscription and a big old crease through the front board, which somehow makes the book look more friendly.

Earlier I read an essay about how the story The Case of  Oscar Brodski, one of the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries by R. Austin Freeman was revolutionary for being the first We See Who Commits the Crime, Will They Be Caught style of stories.  In old essays about crime fiction, this is often called an Inverted Detective Story.  I had never read Dr. Thorndyke and was not familiar at all with The Case of Oscar Brodski.  Then, VOILA, springing forth from my own shelves, there it was. I think Freeman’s story holds up and was pretty good, even to this modern reader.

However, also in this book, the real treat was Cornell Woolrich’s short story The Dancing Detective.  Wow!  For suspense, menace, and just a straight-up creepy story, what a knockout! The narrator’s voice was so enjoyable, with just the right amount of dark humor. The contemporary slang, also very well done and hilarious. This short story exceeds a lot of stuff coming out today, but then again, Cornell Woolrich is still considered a master of the genre.

 

The stories included in this edition (earlier editions had slightly different contents):

Bailey, H.C. The Yellow Slugs
Bentley, E.C. The Little Mystery
Chesterton, G.K. The Blue Cross
Christie, Agatha The Third-Floor Flat 
Dickson, Carter The House of Goblin Wood
Doyle, A. ConanThe Red-Headed League 
Freeman, R. Austin The Case of Oscar Brodski
Futrelle, Jacques The Problem Of Cell 13
Poe, Edgar Allan The Purloined Letter
Post, Melville Davisson The Age of Miracles
Queen, Ellery The Adventure of the African Traveler 
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Bone of Contention
Stout, Rex Instead of Evidence
Woolrich, Cornell The Dancing Detective

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

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Christmas List 2016 started

It’s not secret, 

I really enjoyed the Blake & Avery series of historic thrillers by historian M.J. Carter last year. And my (not so) idle curiosity went ahead and tweeted the author herself when one could expect Blake & Avery 3 —– 
It wasn’t entirely presumptuous on my part she was working on it, she’s tweeted before that the manuscript was underway.  
So, this is what I learned:

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So, there we have it.  It will hopefully be a later 2016 release, and not need to be put off further still.  Until then, I hope M.J. Carter feels better!
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Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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We read Station Eleven aloud, and … wow.  My partner now wants to read more post-apocalyptic stuff (I recommended: Alas, Babylon).  We follow the intertwining strands of several people’s lives who experience a nearly extinction level pandemic in the near future.  I didn’t find it overly gruesome the way some books in the genre go, though there is death and injury, and other unsettling events, as anyone would expect.  The book does a lot of slipping and sliding in the timeline, but these shifts are handled deftly by Emily St John Mandel.  The post-apocalyptic chapters and scenes largely take place 20 years after the pandemic, which is very interesting.  If you’re at all interested, I know you’ll look at more reviews, and have probably already heard of this book.  I’m just adding my voice to the choir singing its praises.  It’s a creepy, beautiful, touching story about family, survival, and at its core: art.  I loved it.

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Book Review: First Impressions by Charlie Lovett

If you’re a follower of many bloggers, talkers, and reviewers in the bibliosphere (i.e., booklr, bookstagram, et. al.), you’ve probably already heard about Charlie Lovett’s new book, First Impressions.   I received a copy of Lovett’s latest bibliomystery from his publisher for review.

It’s good.

For a long time I was a “Decide to read a book, finish it no matter what” reader. If I chose poorly, it was an act of contrition to the bibliogods to finish a crappy book.

But, I began to feel like Life’s Too Short for that kind of strict observance. I asked around what other readers did. Some read to page 100, which seemed like a lot. I was surprised how many were like me — finish it no matter what. Those who would drop a stinker didn’t follow any guidelines, which should have been obvious had I also lead that kind of bohemian, lawless lifestyle like some kind of flamboyantly dressed Borneo ape-man.

Then I heard Nancy Pearl’s good advice, to subtract your age from 100, and that’s the number of pages you should give a book. As you age, and your reading time on earth shortens, and you become a better judge of literature, you don’t have to be quite so full of grace for books that don’t quite deserve to take up precious reading time.

So, for me, that means 66 pages.

By page 40, Fred got his answer:

Yes.  Yes, it is a kissing book.
 
And by page 66 (actually well before page 66 …), I was hooked.  But it was good I had adopted that guidance to give First Impressions a fair shake — the opening is cheesier than the pickup lines borne bravely by our protagonist.  (An aside: I had a lot of terrible First Impression puns I’ve spared you. You’re welcome.)  Not that I’m cheesy-opposed — I’m a big fan of the Aubrey-Mauturin series, but when it comes to romance, I prefer it given a bit more straight. 
 
I found myself drawn in by Sophie Collingwood, a bibliophile in modern London who inherits an amazing library and far more trouble than she ever wanted.  A curious bibliophile through and through, I was fascinated to tag along with her for a fun story, intertwined with a story about Jane Austen.  I’m no Jane-ite, so I’m definitely not the best one to tell you how accurate/ fulfilling/ uhhh….. Janey(?) that part of the story was, which I know is why many readers will pick this one up.  To be honest, I found myself frequently wanting to skip ahead to the modern side of the tale.  Not because the Jane side of the story was not interesting, but that I identified more closely with Sophie and her side of the novel.  
 
In the end, it was a good story I’d recommend especially to Anglophile bibliophiles, and I deeply hope it’s a dandy for the Jane Austen fans out there.  After all, it’s probably been at least a week since the Jane-ites had a new book to read, which can be way too long for you people.  Also in the plus column, I’d rank it highly on “bibliofactor”.  The book stuff was meaty and not at all the simple McGuffin some authors try to foist off on us, rather the only setting in which this story could be told.  Very good stuff.
 

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Ralph Ellison speaks.

I was catching up on some podcast listening this week, and heard the folks at Bookrageous talk about “one hit wonder” authors.  One of my favorites is Ralph Ellison.  A fascinating interview with Ralph Ellison has been digitized from the archives of my old work place, the Oklahoma Historical Society, and as of this writing has about 10 views. Thanks OHS for making this available to everyone to see.

You can browse Ralph Ellison’s personal library on Library Thing’s Legacy Library project.

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