Book Reviews

Van Booy has created a masterful piece of fiction, although it is not an easy read. I found it disorienting at times, and sometimes the masterful demanded I take notice of the author’s skill rather than lose myself in his characters and their world. At the core of Everything Beautiful Began After are three very flawed characters whose emotional crippling as children leads them to unusual relationships as adults. Love and grief take extreme forms that enlighten and intrigue the reader. Click on title to read review.

Ransom focuses on the moment in the Iliad when King Priam retrieves his son Hector’s body from Achilles. In twenty years of teaching that part of the epic, I never survived a class without having to wipe away tears. For me, it is the single most revealing moment in literature about what it means to be human. Nothing tops it. To choose that moment for a book’s primary subject! —audacious and, it turns out, wise.

Waiting for Robert Capa is both a puzzling book and an alluring one. It contains gorgeous, vivid descriptions of life in Paris and Spain in the ‘30s, but we never lose ourselves in Fortes’s imagined semi-fictional world because she tells Robert and Gerda’s story with the all-knowing voice of historical retrospective.

Rhys Bowen’s latest offering in her Royal Spyness series, Naughty in Nice, is pure fun. The French Riviera in 1933, Coco Chanel, Mrs. Simpson and the Duke of Windsor lurking on the sidelines, handsome scoundrels and clever thieves, gorgeous gowns and too much champagne, not to mention a dark, handsome lover and a clever if somewhat naïve young Lady Georgiana (cousin to Queen Mary) out to solve all the puzzles even if it puts her life in danger.

An engaging interview with Elizabeth Speller, author of The Return of Captain John Emmett: what led her to write about the aftermath of WWI, her choice of shellshock (PTSD) and the execution of an officer as foci for the book, and what she discovered along the way of writing it.

Elizabeth Speller joins mystery writers like Jacqueline Winspear in setting her story immediately after World War I, filled with characters fractured by the Great War and trying to pick up the pieces. This debut novel has everything you want in a good mystery: well-developed characters you can’t predict, suspense, love, and twists. It also takes a new approach that works.

Typically historical fiction set in ancient Rome focuses on senators, military geniuses, mad emperors, and a lot of blood. This novel shows a side of Rome most will not be familiar with as it follows four upperclass women through the tumultuous year of the four emperors.

The Small Book opens in 1915 with a doctor’s diary entry from the frontlines of the World War I describing the execution of a private for desertion. “This has been a wretched business. They have made a murderer out of me and all of us who were present.” While the book quickly jumps to 1946 and later to 1998, the repercussions continue throughout from this soldier’s death at the hands of his own side.

Crystal blue sea, hot sand, sleepy villages with garrulous old men drinking ouzo in outside cafés, badly built tourist hotels and other monstrosities of modern development, corrupt police, and ancient Greek myths that don’t seem to want to go away—Zouroudi certainly knows Greece and creates a lovingly detailed portrait as she slowly unrolls her murder mystery. In a world of frenetically-paced thrillers, Taint of Midas has the cadences of a lazy afternoon nap in a hammock—just the thing if you’re suffering from an overdose of busy life.

Sophie Littlefield’s A Bad Day for Sorry is sassy, hilarious and chilling. Her “sleuth” is Stella Hardesty—how did Sophie phrase it, a self-help widow? In Secondhand Spirits, Juliet Blackwell’s sleuth has just opened a vintage clothing store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, and she’s a witch.