I have to admit that I requested this book based on the title. Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags is a title with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations.

The book separates the people in our lives into three categories. Angels are the people who love you and take care of you. Vampires are the people who are sexy and seductive but ultimately bad for you, and Douche Bags are the people who make your life more difficult. Things can also be in these categories. The whole prospect is kind of muddled and unfocused. It just didn’t quite work. [Read more →]

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This book really took me back to my heavy metal roots. I was a fan in high-school and college, saw a lot of head-banging bands play live, and still have the hard rock/alternative stations programmed in the car radio. Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir is a look behind the scenes at how a scrawny kid from La Mesa, California became a rock and roll god. It’s full of great backstage stories and plenty of gritty truth about how Dave Mustaine got to where he is today. It’s a must-read for heavy metals fans. [Read more →]

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If you wanted to completely change the face of American politics, what would you do?  If you had nothing left to lose, what risks would you take?  In Steve Martini’s The Rule of Nine, one character decides on a dramatic plan to change the political scene for decades to come.  The Old Weatherman is dying — he has nothing left to lose, a fortune at his disposal, and an idea so crazy that it’s not on anybody’s radar.  The Rule of Nine is a great twisty, exciting, political thriller. [Read more →]

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The other day, as I was browsing my cookbook shelf, looking for something that didn’t actually require cooking, it occurred to me that I have a lot of books there that deserve a review.  I’m a big fan of cookbooks — I like serious, gourmet recipes, ethnic choices, theme cookbooks — all kinds of cookbooks!

Rock & Roll Diner (Menus and Music) by Sharon O’Connor is an older book, but diner food is always in style.  The cookbook came as a box set with diner music!  Mustang Sally, Blueberry Hill, and Where Did Our Love Go? all remind me of those little jukeboxes you find on diner tables.  The only problem: it’s a cassette tape.  I don’t even own a tape player anymore. [Read more →]

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Proust’s Overcoat: The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust is an interesting little read — a case study in obsession.  It is the story of a book lover, his connections to the Proust family, and his obsession with preserving the author’s writings and possessions.  Author Lorenza Foschini does an excellent job of pulling the threads of this story together into a fascinating — if short — read. [Read more →]

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Sometimes, a book is not at all what you expected it to be. You pick up a novel for the mystery but get sucked into the romance along the way, or a piece of historical fiction turns out to be more educational than any college textbook. Of course, this can also be disappointing, as in the case of Refuge on Crescent Hill by Melanie Dobson. The blurb didn’t mention that this was Christian fiction, which is usually a red flag for me. I am sure there are some great writers in the genre, but in everything I have run into so far, the plot is far less important than the moral the writer wants to convey. In this case, we have the seed of a good story that never really blossoms into a great book. [Read more →]

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The Killing of Mindi Quintana presents a scenario we see in the newspapers every day: a murder has occurred, and the press is far more concerned with the murderer than the victim.  The accused gets to make his or her case to the press; he turns up on Larry King or Oprah, interviews present them in the best possible light and reporters are willing to kiss up to a killer for a chance at an exclusive or a book deal.  Defense attorneys use the media to try their case before the accused ever sets foot in a courtroom and district attorneys use high-profile cases to launch political careers.  Lost in all this is the victim; if they are mentioned at all, it is only when some lurid detail from their past is dredged.  But what if someone decided they weren’t going to play the game? That’s the case study Jeffrey A. Cohen presents in his first novel. [Read more →]

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Angel and Apostle takes up the story of Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, Pearl, and fills in the gaps left in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  At the end of the earlier novel, Hester and Pearl leave Boston and no one knows of their whereabouts.  Years later, Hester returns to Boston alone, still wearing her scarlet A. There are occasional letters from Pearl, who is married and living in Europe, and Hester lives out the remainder of her life alone.  Such a cheerful story, and one that infuriated all my budding feminist sensibilities as a teenager.  Why did Hester bear her burden alone?  Why didn’t she publicly declaim them — the man who dishonored her and the husband who abandoned her?  I’ve still got no satisfactory answers to those questions, but Deborah Noyes has given us the tale of Pearl’s childhood and marriage. [Read more →]

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In Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen, an unhappy woman makes an impulsive decision that leads to tragedy.  Stranded, cold and in danger, she has plenty of time to contemplate the choices that lead her here.  Pretty standard stuff, really, as far as mysteries go.  Luckily, Ice Cold has a handful of plot twists that keep the story moving along.  Good beach reading, when you need to cool off a little. [Read more →]

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I love a good memoir! I tend not to enjoy celebrity memoirs as much as I do those books written by relatively ordinary folks who have lived really interesting lives. I’ve reviewed a number of them over the last few years, but The Bucolic Plague is by far the funniest — from the title, which would have made me pick it up all on its own, to Josh’s thanks to Martha Stewart in the Acknowledgments. I started out marking funny passages that I might want to share in this review, but the book quickly became a forest of pink and green Post-It flags.

The names of some characters have been changed, and some are composites of various people, experiences and conversations I had then. If you think that’s unfair, you’ve obviously never lived in a small town and written a memoir about your neighbors.

[Read more →]

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What makes someone a freak?

It’s the question at the heart of The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson.  The story revolves around P.T. Barnum’s American Museum and the “freaks” who entertained the masses there.  There were midgets and fat ladies, savages from exotic lands, musclemen and other oddities.  But what made them freaks, and what would they choose, if they could choose another fate? [Read more →]

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The premise behind The Dark End of the Street is simple:

When we proposed this book to writers from both banks of the stream dividing crime writing and literary writing, we thought we had a particularly alluring idea.  Write your heart out on the twin subjects of sex and crime.  Define each however you want, take any approach you like.  What writer could resist?

The result is a terrific collection of stories from some of my favorite writers.  Editor S.J. Rozan (author of one of my favorite mystery series), introduces the collection and provides a particularly chilling story, “Daybreak”, near the end of the volume.  Great writers and great writing are the rule here, and there is a little something for everyone. [Read more →]

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Little Bee is the sort of book I find hard to review.  I want everyone to read this book — I want to tell you enough to encourage you to run out and put this on your wishlist.  What I don’t want to do is spoil the story, and if I tell you too much, I will.  The story at the heart of this amazing book is revealed slowly, piece by piece, a word here, a hint there.  There is a certain build-up to the story that could be easily derailed and I don’t want to do anything to take away from your enjoyment.  Author Chris Cleave has crafted a novel that literally took my breath away — confrontations that were like physical blows and passages that burned in my chest and made it hard to breathe — and I want you to enjoy the build-up as much as I did. [Read more →]

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These days, we talk about Banned Book Week and we talk about censorship in school libraries, but in the 1500’s, they were serious about censorship.  Get caught reading something on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) and your prize was an appointment with the local Inquisitor.  Based on the true story of Giordano Bruno – an Italian monk, excommunicated and on the run from the Inquisition – Heresy casts Bruno in the role of investigator, helping to solve a series of grisly murders while spying for Queen Elizabeth. [Read more →]

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The prologue will give you nightmares.  (Do you know what sort of sound human vertebrae make when they give way under pressure?)  Other sections of the book made me want to cover my eyes and read through my fingers.  The killer in Thomas White’s The Book of Matthew would give Hannibal Lecter a run for his money. This is not a book for readers with weak stomachs or those prone to nightmares. Not a lot of outright gore — I’ve certainly read bloodier books — but the sort of enlightened cruelty that makes you double-check the locks before turning in for the night. Not that locks would save you. [Read more →]

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True or False:
1. The safest seats on an airplane are at the back.
2. If you fall into a frozen lake, you have only 3 minutes to escape the water.
3.  In prisoner-of-war camps in Vietnam, optimists lived longer than anyone else.

Who lives and who dies in a crisis?  Do you have what it takes to be one of the passengers who walks out of the jungle after a plane crash or who keeps their cool and remembers how to work a compass when you get lost in the woods?  And if you don’t (or can’t) can you learn?  There are lots of books on survival tips and I have read more than a few of them.  The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood takes familiar territory and still turns it into a very interesting read.

[Read more →]

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I really, really hate the phrase “ripped from the headlines.”  It ought to be on one of those lists of cliches than can never ever be used again in print.  But open a newspaper or click on a news website and you are likely to see a story similar to Megan Gunther’s situation in 212 by Alafair Burke.  Megan finds herself the subject of some particularly nasty posts on a college gossip site.  The anonymous poster is familiar with Megan’s schedule — he (or she) knows when Megan is at home, when she goes to spin class, when she has her chemistry lab.  She’s a little freaked out; who wouldn’t be?  The police are no help — there are no threats, so their hands are tied.  But when Megan turns up dead, her roommate critically wounded, someone finally decides to take things seriously. [Read more →]

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Julius Fromm was born in Russia in 1883; when he was 10 years old, his parents left Russia for Berlin. At the time, Berlin offered the hope of more economic opportunity and a better life. Fromm grew up feeling like a German, and a patriotic one at that. It all came to crushing end when Hitler came to power, because Fromm and his family — patriotic though they might be — were Jews.

Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis by Gotz Aly and Michael Sontheimer is a detailed account of how Julius Fromm built a condom empire during the sexually permissive-period after World War I. His name became synonymous with condoms in Europe, much the way Kleenex or Xerox became household names. But his wealth and status could not protect him or his family when the Nazis came to power. [Read more →]

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There’s a heatwave in Oslo.  Anyone who can’t get out of the city is sweltering in the heat.  There are lines at the open-air pool, the city streets are deserted…and there is a killer on the loose.

Police investigations are apparently much the same the world over, as I didn’t find a lot of procedural confusion in Jo Nesbo’s The Devil’s Star. It’s good, gritty detective fiction — just the way I like it.  Harry Hole is a police inspector who is on his way down and out.  His drinking problem has started to take its toll: he’s lost his girlfriend and he’s about to lose his job, but he may be the only person who can solve this string of killings. [Read more →]

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Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things.  He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache…and a pair of horns growing from his temples.

It’s a great beginning to a promising story: part thriller, part horror, part treatise on the nature of the devil.  While Horns occasionally gets bogged down in reminiscence, it’s still an extremely entertaining read. 

A year ago, Ig’s girlfriend Merrin was raped and murdered.  Ig was the prime suspect — an alibi like “I was passed out in my car parked behind an abandoned Dunkin Donuts” is not very convincing — and although he was never charged, he was also never cleared.  There is a cloud of suspicion hanging over him already, and growing horns is not going to make him look innocent. [Read more →]

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In Raven Stole the Moon, Jenna Rosen walks away from a life that is fractured.  Two years ago, her young son drowned in a tragic accident at a resort in Alaska.  Her husband seems to have moved on, but Jenna cannot let go of her grief.  On the anniversary of their son’s death, they attend a party that turns out to be Jenna’s breaking point.  She walks away from the party, gets in her husband’s car and drives… straight through to Bellingham, Washington.  She gets on the ferry and heads to her home town of Wrangell, Alaska — and straight into a mystery.  [Read more →]

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I have occasionally described books as “a wild ride.”  Books are like trips we take — some are pleasant Sunday drives, some are fast and bumpy.  John Dies @ the End is like a ride on a twisting, speeding, swooping roller coaster.  On acid.  With no seat belt. [Read more →]

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Historical fiction can be challenging, both for writers and readers.  It doesn’t take much — just a word, a name, a description — to bounce you right out of the story.  In the Author’s Note at the end of Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin says “It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, at least in part.  To avoid confusion, I have used modern names and terms.”  Still, she manages to evoke a sense of the time that had me completely swept up in the story.  It’s an excellent combination of a compelling story, interesting characters and the romance of an earlier time. [Read more →]

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Paddy Meehan is probably the most flawed heroine I’ve read in a while. By page 10 of The Dead Hour, she has already taken a bribe. She lies, she has an affair with a married man — but in her own way, she’s trying to do the right thing. Her way is just a bit roundabout. [Read more →]

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Back in September, I reviewed The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. I was really impressed by the book — it wasn’t really something I expected to like, but I was sucked in and really enjoyed it. Garth Stein has a new novel coming out in just a few weeks: Raven Stole the Moon is currently available for pre-order. I hope to have a review here for you soon!

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If you have a weak stomach, this book is not for you.

Wake Up Dead is probably the most violent, bloody, gore-splattered book I’ve read in ages, and that’s really saying something.  A gang war in Cape Town, South Africa’s ghettos provides the setting and the gang-bangers, drug lords, junkies and an honest-to-goodness cannibal provide the action.

On a steamy night in Cape Town, Roxy and Joe Palmer have dinner with a cannibal and his Ukranian whore.  On the way home, they’re carjacked.  Joe is shot in the leg and, in a panic, the carjackers drop the gun and take off in Joe’s car.  What Roxy does next will cause more bloodshed than she can possibly imagine. [Read more →]

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I have always loved Joyce Carol Oates’ writing.  I love her combination of long, flowing sentences and short, choppy fragments. Little Bird of Heaven is lovely to read, even when the story is heartbreaking.

Krista Diehl’s family was fine before “the trouble” came.  Her father, Eddy, ran a construction company.  A handsome man, he was well-known around town as a bit of a flirt and a bit of a drinker.  Her mother, Lucille, a stay at home mom, her teenaged brother, Ben.  A happy family until trouble came along in the form of Zoe Kruller.  Zoe was small-town beautiful — she had an exotic name, she was everyone’s favorite at the ice cream shop, she sang with a little rock band on Saturday summer nights at the town bandstand.  When she is found murdered — strangled in her bed — the prime suspects are her estranged husband, Delray, and her lover, Eddy Diehl. [Read more →]

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 The amazing thing is that I finished this novel.

The premise of One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is a cliche: a group of people are trapped together after a disaster and they may die, but before they do, they are going to tell a story from their life — their one amazing thing. It’s a mixed group, the sort of group you would call together for a photo shoot to show your commitment to diversity. Their stories are sometimes interesting — there’s a ghost, a voodoo curse, and a misplaced aurora borealis. There are bad marriages, lost love and even a dead kitten. But none of it felt real to me. [Read more →]

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 I saw the movie, Let the Right One In, last year and was immediately drawn in by it. The stark settings and minimal dialogue gave the film a sense of isolation and dread. Nothing good could happen in these surroundings. As soon as I found out the film was based on a book, I had to have it. It just took me a little while.

The book, Let the Right One In resurrects all the chills the movie gave me.

Oskar is a lonely 13-year-old boy — chubby, friendless and a bit homicidal:

Strangely enough, he already knew the name of his victim, and what he looked like. Jonny Forsberg with his long hair and large, mean eyes. He would make him plead and beg for his life, squeal like a pig, but in vain. The knife would have the last word and the earth would drink his blood. Oskar had read those words in a book and liked them.

The Earth Shall Drink His Blood.

[Read more →]

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A comfy corner of a good friend’s couch, the other party guests are long gone but a few of you are lingering with vodka tonics and party snacks, dishing gossip, telling old stories and laughing your arses off. That’s exactly the atmosphere of Anything Goes, John Barrowman’s autobiography.

Dr. Who fans will recognize John from his role as Captain Jack Harkness, and from the spinoff series, Torchwood, which I adore.  He is also a star of musical theater in the US and UK (there are too many shows to name here - check out the list on his website). So even though he’s still a young man (just about a year younger than yours truly, so obviously a young man), he’s got a lot of material to work with. [Read more →]

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