Somewhere, around the 200th page, I thought to myself: Larsson needs to stop introducing new characters. Every one of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels contains a large cast of characters, but The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest had so many characters who became major or minor protagonists or antagonists that the plot grew complicated...
To use a trite, overused, but descriptive phrase, Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman is a page turner. Once I picked up the novel and began reading it, I didn’t want to set it down, no matter how tired I felt, how hungry, how many other things I needed to do, and how many other pastimes I...
Last August I set out on a project to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes cannon, from the first book to the last. It was my intentions to read and review a book each month. Following that schedule, I should’ve finished this project in April, but I encountered a couple hiccups along the...
Imagine an elderly man, sitting in a parlor before a fire, rocking in a chair, and telling you stray stories about his adventures as the comrade to a famous detective. The detective is now retired in obscurity–a beekeeper, we are told–but the truth of his many mysteries have yet to be told. So now...
Everyday on a commuter train, Rachel travels between her home in Ashbury to London. As the train passes through Witney, she can see her old home through the window. Her exhusband still lives in the house, with his current wife, Anna, and their infant daughter. A few houses down, she also spies on the...
The cover of my Kindle edition of The Valley of Fear is pulp. It shows a scantily clad woman, screaming, as a muscular arm–its hand curled into a fist–threatens her in the foreground. The attacker’s arm is branded with a triangle enclosed in circle. The publisher’s logo appears in the upper left corner: Hard...
Spoiler alert! In The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixth Sherlock Holmes book, Sherlock Holmes, the famed detective, returns. “The Final Problem,” the last story of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, was set in 1891. “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the first story of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, is set...
A beast haunts the moors of Devonshire–a giant hound, ghostly in appearance, demonic in purpose. It is the curse laid on the Baskerville family by the evil done by one of its ancestry. The ancestral lord abducted a local girl and planned to rape her, but when she escaped, he hunted her with his...
One doesn’t have to dive deep into Sherlock Holmes research before he learns that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew to resent the character and regret his success. He began publishing Sherlock Holmes tales in 1886, and by 1893, when these stories that make up The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes appeared in The Strand, Doyle...
Early one winter morning, an elderly farmer woke up to an eerie silence. Though he had no idea what woke him, looking through the window, he realized there was something amiss at his neighbor’s house. At his wife’s insistence, he donned his clothing and went to investigate. When he looked through his neighbor’s window,...
