Book Reviews

Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of [...]

The pain that S. Yarberry suffers as a transgender person is strikingly described in their new book of jagged, anguished poetry A Boy in the City.  It is pain set [...]

In a writing career that spanned much of the 20th century, Howard Fast wrote some 76 novels, roughly one a year, starting in 1933. To avoid flooding his own market, [...]

Margery Allingham’s 1931 mystery Police at the Funeral is a truly excellent example of the genre — briskly told, peopled with interesting characters, investigated by a quirky non-detective and concluded [...]

The Horizon Book of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Lionel Casson is a fine book.  It’s just not what’s advertised. Or, at least, what I expected. Casson was a [...]

Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA [...]

When last we saw Sammy Tiffin, he was the central character of Christopher Moore’s 2018 comic mystery-thriller-fantasy Noir which, as the name indicates, was a stab by Moore at writing [...]

At the start, Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, is running away.  Later, he is running to — to the hospital.  At the end, he is running willy-nilly, without direction, into the [...]

Anna Dowdall’s third novel April on Paris Street is a literate and attractively convoluted murder mystery, with this odd wrinkle: The murder doesn’t happen until near the very end of [...]

In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array [...]