Great world building, but suffers in comparison with Harry Potter
I’m giving this one 3.5 stars out of 5. There’s a lot to like here. The Christian mythology is an interesting take on fantasy, the world-building is excellent, and the characters have depth. The illustrations scattered throughout enrich the experience. However, I found the book somewhat long, and the constant use of ellipses off-putting. The similarity to Harry Potter is also distracting, because one can’t help but compare, even though the story does stand up well on its own.
Yes, I know… A true cozy has an amateur sleuth, and Delanie Fitzgerald is a card-carrying PI. But The Tulip Shirt Murders has a cozy soul. Quirky characters, off-screen violence, and nothing you wouldn’t mind if your Mama caught you reading. It’s in the spirit of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, a cracking good mystery with a complex plot, authentic PI tradecraft, an excellent setting (Greater Richmond Va.); in short, everything you need to curl up for a few hours and forget your troubles. Who could ask for more?
Absent is a book about madness. It’s quite unsettling, because we’re in the head of a mother as she goes mad due to the death of her daughter. We see the world through her eyes, so it’s never certain whether we’re experiencing reality or not. The book is written in short chapters containing short paragraphs, sometimes single sentences, sometimes even sentence fragments. It’s a stream-of-consciousness style, and frankly, it becomes boring after a while, because there’s so much of it. I don’t know if there’s a way to do it better though, given what the author was trying to achieve. So reading Absent was not a pleasant experience. But given the subject matter, I don’t know how it could be.
The Portland Harbor area is upscale and touristy, but a nice place to be for restaurants and nightlife.
This blog is mostly about food, because we usually don’t have the energy to do much else than go out to dinner after we arrive at a destination. In Portland, we ate at Gilbert’s Chowder House. I sampled their super seafood chowder.
On leaving Portland, we took a driving tour of Congress Street, where my son Seamus used to live.
Portland Observatory on Congress Street
It’s three hours from Portland to Bar Harbor, mostly on back roads. There was quite a bit of traffic, thanks to Labor Day.
This morning we’ve got a boat ride around Acadia National Park.
Haven’t gotten a lot of feedback on your preferences for the cover of the latest Natalie McMasters Mystery, Sister! Please comment and let me know what you think.
Tana French is one of the best crime writers working today. Her prose is stunningly good, complex yet eminently readable. However, no one can write well enough to make a weak plot plausible. French’s scintillating prose was the only thing that led me to finish this very poorly plotted story. I knew the plot wasn’t going to work in the first 100 pages, and sadly, the next 500 bore out that conclusion. I expect the great length of the book was because the author used every artifice at her command to make the story work, but it just didn’t happen. Cassie Maddox is a former Dublin Murder Squad member and former undercover policewoman. When a woman who looks just like her is found murdered, Cassie goes undercover to find her killer. Not only was the vic Cassie’s double, she had also taken the same name that Cassie used as an undercover. Huh? Is your credulity strained yet? Just wait. Cassie goes to live with the victim’s roommates, a collection of oddball college students who live as a family in an old mansion in the outskirts of a rural village outside Dublin. She manages to convince four people who knew her doppelganger intimately that she is their roomie, successfully posing as a PhD student in English literature at Trinity College, even though she has only a BA. Her housemates are all English grad students too, yet do not see through her. Cassie wears a microphone the whole time and carries a revolver under her clothes, which nobody spots. She goes for an hour walk late each evening so she can sit in a tree and have long phone convos with her police colleagues. Her housemates suspect nothing. In the copy I read, it took 500 pages for the situation to come to a head. I frankly don’t see how any competent developmental editor would have allowed this. The ending was expected, lackluster and unbelievable. Tana French’s prose is always a joy, and is the only reason I gave this book as many as three stars. It’s a shame such great writing had to be wasted on such a poor story.
Three new volumes of the wildly successful MX Books of New Sherlock Holmes Stories will soon be released by MX Publishing. The release will comprise parts XXII, XXIII, and XXIV. With this release, the series has grown to over 500 new Holmes adventures by nearly 250 contributors from around the world. The theme is Some More Untold Tales, meaning adventures that were alluded to in the original stories by Sir Artur Conan Doyle, but that he never got around to writing. My new story, Another Case of Identity, will be found in Part XXIV.
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories was first published in 2015. It was a huge three-book set featuring over sixty new traditional Holmes exploits, all set within the correct time period. It was wildly successful, sparking the demand for even more traditional Holmes adventures
Each volume in the latest release contains forwards by the noted Sherlockians Otto Penzler, Roger Johnson, Lizzy Butler, Steve Emecz, and David Marcum, as well as stories by the following contributors:
Part XXII: 1877-1887
S.F. Bennett, William Todd, Geri Schear, Susan Knight, David Marcum, Bob Bishop, Tracy J. Revels, Chris Chan, Richard Paolinelli, Derrick Belanger, Stephen Mason, Leslie Charteris and Denis Green, Tim Symonds, Liese Sherwood-Fabre, Ian Ableson, Chris Chan, Mark Mower, Robert Stapleton, Roger Riccard, Kevin P. Thornton, and Denis O. Smith , and a poem by Christopher James
Part XXIII: 1887-1894
Will Murray (2 stories), Tim Gambrell (2 stories), Craig Janacek, I.A. Watson, Jane Rubino, Paul Hiscock, Hugh Ashton, Mike Chinn, Shane Simmons, Dacre Stoker and Leverett Butts, David Marcum, Matthew J. Elliott, Paul D. Gilbert, Tracy J. Revels, Margaret Walsh, Arthur Hall, Barry Clay, Steven Philip Jones, Jan van Koningsveld, and Marcia Wilson, and a poem by John Linwood Grant
Part XXIV: 1895-1903
Marcia Wilson, Brenda Seabrooke, Stephen Herczeg, Tracy J. Revels, Kevin P. Thornton, Thomas A. Burns, Jr., Dick Gillman, Jayantika Ganguly, John Davis, DJ Tyrer, Harry DeMaio, Arthur Hall (2 stories), Susan Knight, David Marcum, Craig Stephen Copland (2 stories), Gayle Lange Puhl, John Lawrence, John Linwood Grant, and Paula Hammond, and a poem by Joseph W. Svec III
The series is particularly noteworthy because all of the stories are strictly canonical – there are no anachronisms, supernatural events, or other occurrences not justified by Doyle’s original stories. Any of the stories in these volumes could have appeared in the Strand Magazine. Holmes and Watson are portrayed as the Victorian gentlemen and heroes that they were; not as the caricatures so prominent in other modern depictions.
This series was conceived as a philanthropic project; all contributor royalties go to the Stepping Stones School for special needs children at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes in the UK. To date the project has raised nearly $70,000 for the school. The collection has had some very famous authors contribute to it, including Lee Child, Jonathan Kellerman, Lyndsay Faye, Bonnie MacBird and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The link for the Kickstarter is below. Please follow it and reserve your copies now!
Angelo Sapiens and the Serpent’s Stone by Keerthana Balamurugan
