Review of Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

This is Book One of the Harper Connelly mystery series, by the author of the Sookie Stackhouse series. Harper Connelly, aged 24, was struck by lightning when she was 15, and ever since then has been able to sense the location of dead people and also see how they died (but not who killed them). [...]

Unfinished Friday

Unfinished Friday is a new meme made up by that fantastic writer of literary reviews, Marie at The Boston Bibliophile. The idea is to inform readers about books you did not finish, and let them know why. I don’t want to say too much about the books I didn’t finish, because I am not only [...]

Review of True Blue by David Baldacci

I am always on the lookout for a good crime book set in D.C., and this one seemed especially promising because the main characters include two female members of the police force. My sister is in the D.C. Police, so I couldn’t wait to read it. Mason “Mace” Perry has just been released from prison [...]

Review of Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris

This is the last completed volume in the Sookie Stackhouse series of romance-mystery-vampire books, and so it’s a sad book for me on two levels: the fact that there are no more (for the nonce) and the fact that the story itself is sad. The book begins with the public “coming out” of the shape-shifters, [...]

Review of The Christmas Clock by Kat Martin

This is one of those books that you know the outcome even before you turn the first page. But you also know the plot of “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Does that stop you from watching it? No, and it shouldn’t. At Christmas you have a built-in excuse to watch and read heart-warming, obvious stories that [...]

Moby Dick Mondays – Week 4

Ti of the blog Book Chatter is sponsoring a challenge/readalong to read the classic Moby Dick. On Mondays, we’ll be posting about our progress. I am listening to the unabridged audiodisks for this book. In the beginning, we saw that the narrator, Ishmael, was both frightened of and appalled by the harpooner Queequeg. After getting [...]

Sunday Salon – Review of “Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World” by Douglas Hunter

Note: This book is reviewed by my husband Jim. Apparently it is not always easy to recognize a good harbor while sailing along the coast of a continent. For example, Francis Drake sailed right past the Golden Gate without noticing it on his famous circumnavigation of the globe. And quite a few French, English, and [...]

Review of “From Dead to Worse” by Charlaine Harris

This is Book 8 in the Sookie Stackhouse series, the delightful set of books featuring the barmaid/waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, Sookie Stackhouse. This particular book has a bit less charm that the previous books, as the author seems to have gotten waylaid by expanding the supernatural world, and by getting bogged down by the [...]

Review of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

It was ironic for me that I started this book for young adults right after finishing Her Fearful Symmetry, because I kept detecting parallels between the two books. It was fun to discover in the “Acknowledgments” following the story, that Gaiman actually mentions a debt to Audrey Niffenegger. The Graveyard Book tells the story of [...]

Review of Monk’s Hood by Ellis Peters

Monk’s Hood is “The Third Chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury.” Although there is some continuity in this cozy-historical mystery series, so far, at least, it seems that any one of these books can be read without the benefit of having read those preceding it. [...]