Our valley is in darkness, but Everest blazes far beyond and above us in a cold, powerful, self-contained isolation. That strikes me as terrifying. In 1924 the British alpine climbing community was dealt a serious blow when George Mallory and his partner Sandy Levine disappear high on Mount Everest. At the same time a lesser known but titled Brit disappears and his mother ... Read More...
Compound Fractures
The last couple of weeks have been big reading weeks. Intense reading weeks. Worth every minute and page but leaving me fairly drained. So when I saw that Stephen White had come out with a new Alan Gregory mystery in August I decided to break away and revisit a favorite character. Compound Fracturesis the 20th and final novel in the Alan Gregory series and I’ve read all of ... Read More...
Lexicon: A Novel
There is no introduction in Max Barry’s novel Lexicon. From page one where two men have inserted a needle into another man’s eye in an airport bathroom the reader is flung hard into a wholly different world. A compulsively readable, high speed, freakishly intelligent world. I read Lexicon during a 24-hour read-a-thon and it was the perfect novel for it because I didn’t want to ... Read More...
The Sleep Room
There is nothing more frightening than that which cannot be identified, no engine of fear more powerful than the unknown. It is 1955 and the psychiatric field is making its first foray into sleep as a treatment for extreme mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar. Dr. James Richardson has been studying the field and written a paper about it when he is summoned ... Read More...
Sandrine’s Case
In the early morning hours of November 15th a police officer is called to investigate a suicide in the small town of Coburn, Georgia. Sandrine Madison lies dead in her bed of an apparent drug overdose. There is no other trauma or indication of foul play but the officer gets a ‘feeling’ from the husband and that is how Samuel Madison comes to stand trial for the murder of his ... Read More...
The Light in the Ruins
The Light in the Ruins, Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel, is set at the Villa Chimera in Tuscany in 1943, a pastoral estate where the war is largely unseen. The Rosatis are a titled Italian family and while they have one son preparing for the Allied invasion in Sicily and another who works at a museum trying to control the flow of Italian art out of the country, their lives ... Read More...
