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Tag: mystery

Review: A Dangerous Crossing, Ausma Zehanat Khan

What do y’all think it says about the year we’ve been having me that I glanced at Ausma Zehanat Khan’s bio on the back flap of A Dangerous Crossing, saw that she has her Ph.D. in international human rights law, and thought “gosh I wish she’d write some novel-length post-CACW Avengers fanfic”? Um, but anyway, this is the fourth book in her Esa Khattak / Rachel Getty series about a Canadian police inspector and his right-hand woman, who are always investigating crimes to do with human rights violations. A Dangerous Crossing sees Esa and Rachel headed to Greece in search…

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Review: Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty

What a genuinely great, fun book. Six Wakes was one of my most anticipated books for spring, and with good reason! In this future, humans have perfected cloning: with regular backups (called mindmaps) and a fresh computer, a clone can die as many times as it likes and wake up again in a brand new body. If you haven’t backed up your mind lately with a new mindmap, and you die, your clone will be missing some time. Space janitor and chef Maria Elena wakes up in a new clone body to find that her last body is dead. The…

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Review: The Secrets of Wishtide, Kate Saunders

Note: I received a copy of The Secrets of Wishtide from the publisher for review consideration. I do not read many mysteries. I think the reason is that so many mysteries come in serieses, and as a completist I find this very daunting. (Yes yes I am in love with the Amelia Peabody books, of which there are infinity, but I started reading them when I was like fourteen so it barely counts.) Also, a lot of mysteries feature divorced dude private eyes wandering around thinking bitter thoughts about their exes. Or really gruesome autopsy details. And I don’t like those…

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Review: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy Sayers

Tra-la, tra-la, I am jonesing so hard for Dorothy Sayers right now I don’t even know what to say about it. My clever-but-not-always-right friend tim stopped me from buying several other Dorothy Sayers mysteries or else it would be a Dorothy Sayers Festival all up in here. I want to read all her books. And then I want to travel to an alternate universe where she wrote more books than Agatha Christie, and read all those additional books. Many of them would feature Harriet Vane. Sigh. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, an old guy dies in the club…

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Review: River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters

I have a girl-crush on Elizabeth Peters.  She set a murder mystery at a romance novel writers’ convention; she spoofs H. Rider Haggard and Gothic novels; she made one of her characters lament “the first sour grape in the fruit salad of togetherness”.  The woman cracks me up.  However, I thought that Children of the Storm should have been the last in the Amelia Peabody series (it gave me the pleasing feeling that the series had come full circle), and I have not cared much about the books that came after that. But I liked River in the Sky.  It…

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Review: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Laurie R. King

Mary Russell is a (half?) Jewish (half?) American girl who takes up with Sherlock Holmes.  Like him, she is brilliant and unemotional; she becomes his protégé at age fifteen, and they solve cases together.  In The Beekeeper’s Apprentice they run up against a villain more villainous and clever than all the clever villainous villains heretofore encountered by Holmes (he says) (though obviously not because I have heard he got outwitted one time), and they work in tandem to thwart the villainously clever villain.  This did not bother me because I have hardly read any Sherlock Holmes stories (apart from Hound…

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