I’m not sure I want to say anything at all about Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane because someone made an offhand remark to me about it a couple of years ago, and that was enough to spoil the ending. The remark itself was really innocuous, intended to encourage me to read the book, but it was enough to [...]
Archive for the ‘Mysteries’ Category
Shutter Island (audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Fiction, Mysteries on December 23, 2009 | 8 Comments »
The Writing Class
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on November 25, 2009 | 8 Comments »
In Jincy Willett’s 2008 novel, Amy Gallup teaches an extension class on writing fiction. She was once a writer herself: her first novel was published when she was only twenty-two, and she wrote a couple of decent novels after that. But when her husband died, her motivation died with him, and now she makes a [...]
What the Dead Know (take two)
Posted in Fiction, Mysteries on November 17, 2009 | 11 Comments »
The very first book I ever reviewed for this blog was Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know. I really, really didn’t like it. In fact, I disliked it so much that I abandoned it. Imagine starting a blog that way! But I had started Shelf Love to talk about the books I was reading, and [...]
Capsule Reviews: Bookish Films
Posted in Bookish films, Classics, Mysteries, Speculative Fiction on November 16, 2009 | 14 Comments »
Recently, I’ve watched a whole bunch of movies or miniseries that are based on literature. I haven’t had time to write real reviews of them, but I like talking about films almost as much as I like talking about books, so I thought I’d do a couple of quick mentions of some of the ones [...]
L.A. Confidential
Posted in Bookish films, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on October 19, 2009 | 5 Comments »
There’s hardboiled fiction, which portrays crime and violence unsentimentally, and in which the detective is usually cool, cocky, and flippant, but relatively honest. Then there’s noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective at all, but a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator — something like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings [...]
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on October 11, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Mikael Blomkvist is in trouble. He’s a Swedish financial journalist, editor of a hard-hitting magazine called Millennium, and he’s being sued for libel: it turns out that the story he published about a wealthy and corrupt financier was false from beginning to end, and he didn’t have a scrap of proof for it. He’ll have [...]
An Expert in Murder
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on September 13, 2009 | 11 Comments »
I am often wary about new detective novels. Like the little girl who had a little curl, when they are good they are very very good, and when they are bad they are horrid. Give me Dorothy Sayers or Laurie King or Kate Atkinson and I’ll happily read my way through a weekend; give me [...]
The Language of Bees
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on July 29, 2009 | 7 Comments »
I read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first of Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery novels, in 1995. I remember it fondly: I was in graduate school at the time, and working at a bookstore, and the second book in the series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, had just come out on the shelves. Paul, one of [...]
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Posted in Fiction, Mysteries on July 13, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Flavia de Luce is no ordinary eleven-year-old. She has an unusual family (two difficult older sisters named Ophelia and Daphne, a distant father, and a mother who died in a mountaineering accident when Flavia was just a baby.) The household staff is peculiar (Mrs. Mullet, who is the worst baker in three counties, and Dogger, [...]
Gone, Baby, Gone (film)
Posted in Bookish films, Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on July 6, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I read Dennis Lehane’s mystery-thriller Gone, Baby, Gone back in 2004. I was on something of a Lehane kick that year: I read all four of his Kenzie-Gennaro private eye novels, plus his standalone novel Shutter Island. The books are great — well-written, solidly plotted, with a keen sense of place and an unequalled ear [...]
