From the monthly archives:

January 2006

The Empty Hours

January 29, 2006

Just finished reading Ed McBain’s The Empty Hours, a collection of novellas in the classic 87th Pricinct mysteries series. I guess if you invent the genre, you ought to be the master at it. I loved this book. Sphere: Related Content

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The Godfather Returns

January 18, 2006

As a diehard fan of both the original novel by Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola’s triad of films (yes, I even like the much-hated “The Godfather, Part III“), I was wary of giving this a read. I was turned around by Stephen King. He listed it as one of his ten favorite books of 2005. [...]

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Kiss Me, Deadly

January 10, 2006

I wasn’t hooked by this book from cover-to-cover. It was great to read this master of the hard-boiled genre, though. There were lots of good parts throughout (I especially liked when Hammer first found Lily Carver … telling her to put the gun down or he would punch her out). Also the terminology used in [...]

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Fade to Blonde

January 6, 2006

I liked this book a lot. It was fast paced with a nice twist at the end that I didn’t see coming. I should have. Testament to the writer. I was reading one of the Amazon reviews of this book and the reviewer complained that Phillips didn’t update the hard-boiled style for 2004. Well, duh. [...]

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Night Walker

January 3, 2006

This wasn’t a bad read. It was a little hokey at times … the best example of that was the liberal use of the exclamation “I declare” by the Southern female lead. And by liberal I mean about a thousand times. But that’s likely attributed to the period, as well as the nature of the [...]

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