Book Reviews

Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine, set in rural West Texas in 1976, is a novel of relentless and brutally raw outrage, a fury-filled howl of women caught in a life and a [...]

  For students of westerns — or writing of any sort — the first forty pages of Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River are a masterful exhibition of how [...]

    Terry Pratchett — who died in 2015 at the age of 66 from Alzheimer’s — played for keeps. His 41 Discworld fantasy novels are the height of playfulness.  [...]

  There is the maddening mystery at the heart of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock — the disappearance of three teen girls and a teacher during a [...]

  Reading Neil Harris’s Chicago Apartments: A Century and Beyond of Lakefront Luxury, the newly published and expanded second edition of his 2004 book, it’s clear that the relatively modest [...]

  In the first two sentences of Anna Dowdall’s 2017 novel After the Winter, I learned that Sally Ryder had had a very unexpected letter and then had gotten grim [...]

    It is one of those random moments in life. Cate, running late, drives into Neale’s alley, puts on her blinkers and turns off the car, just as the [...]

    When I picked up Jane Leavy’s 2018 book The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, I was a highly motivated reader. I deeply enjoyed her [...]

  Near the end of Christopher Moore’s new novel Shakespeare for Squirrels, Pocket the Fool — he of two earlier books, Fool (2009) and Serpent of Venice (2014) — is [...]

  Dark Piper, one of Andre Norton’s best novels, tells of the twisting-turning odyssey taken by teenager Vere Collis and nine younger companions across and under their planet’s landscape, an [...]