Starting the Year off Right with More Great Fantasy!

Hi All! Goodness, it’s already the third week of this new year and new decade. The spring semester has already started. So far so good for me (for those you just joining us, I have some serious health issues resulting from Lyme disease and toxic mold exposure and who knows what else), although I am […]

“A Parliament of Crows” by Alan M. Clark #SouthernGothic #Mystery #HistoricalMystery

A Parliament of Crows “A Parliament of Crows” is another installment in Alan M. Clark’s collection of “horror that happened” historical mystery/horror books. It tells the story, based on historical fact, of the three Mortlow sisters, who went on a killing spree that lasted decades. The story could have been lurid, and there are certainly […]

What Are We All Reading?

Hi Everyone! I’ve been busy–and exhausted and sore–from the beginning of the semester and returning to teaching, so I don’t have a lot of news to share right now. So I thought I’d do another reading roundup. A number of you wrote back to me the last time I asked for reading recommendations, and now […]

“Bloody Creek Murder” by Susan Clayton-Goldner #Mystery #BookReview #NewRelease

Bloody Creek Murder I’ve been following along the Winston Radhauser series since the beginning, and have been enjoying it more and more. In this, its sixth installment, the author does a particularly excellent job of combining mystery with family drama. The mixture both brings out the pathos of the interpersonal situation the characters find themselves […]

“The Daemoniac” by Kat Ross

“The Daemoniac” is a venture into a new genre by epic fantasy author Kat Ross. It is, as it says in the subtitle, a Gaslamp Gothic story, meaning set in the late Victorian era. 1888, to be precise, shortly after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published “A Study in Scarlet,” and shortly before Jack the Ripper’s […]

Reading Recommendations, Giveaways, and…Sssshhhh, It’s a Secret!

With the coming New Year, as we say in Russian! I hope 2019 brings whatever it needs to bring for all of us. I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of reading over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d share some recommendations of books and authors that are not super well-known, and therefore may […]

“The Ashes of Aubrey Milner” by Ellison Blackburn

The Ashes of Aubrey Milner: The Chicago St. Clairs Ellison Blackburn “The Ashes of Aubrey Milner” is a detective story with a difference: the detective in question is a woman who has been brought from the future back into Victorian-era Chicago, and is now working as a police medical examiner, disguised as a man. When […]

“Forfeit” by Dick Francis

Forfeit Dick Francis I hadn’t read “Forfeit” in, oh, twenty years or something, until I recently picked it up and reread it. As always, rereading is as enlightening as reading. “Forfeit” is one of Francis’s slighter works in many ways, but it gets added depth by the interactions between Ty (the hero) and his wife […]

“River of Shame” by Susan Clayton-Goldner

River of Shame: A Winston Radhauser Mystery: #4 Susan Clayton-Goldner “River of Shame” is the fourth book in the Winston Radhauser series, and it continues the themes of the first three: family life and human relations, thrown into high relief by violent crime. The story starts a few months after the end of book #3, […]

“Innocent in Las Vegas” by A.R. Winters

Innocent in Las Vegas A.R. Winters Tiffany Black, Las Vegas croupier and aspiring PI, isn’t much good with guns or hand-to-hand combat. She’d much rather tuck into a nice chocolate muffin. But when an old-friend-turned-stripper-turned-trophy-wife asks her to solve the murder of the friend’s husband, she takes on the case when no one else will. […]