Something I noticed while reading John Brady's Kaddish in Dublin … not till the first paragraph of Chapter ten, mind you… but here Minogue comments on the weather, ‘a break in the ceiling of cloud that had muffled the island for a week’: The air was fresh again. Clouds so white as to be patently silly-looking to Minogue hung themselves … [Read more...]
John Brady’s Matt Minogue
John Brady’s Matt Minogue series. Another on that ‘read, but neglected’ list. Honestly, I didn’t remember much about Matt Minogue… only that I’d considered him a candidate for this 'moody sleuth’ list I’m now getting around to recording. What I do recall of the first book, A Stone of the Heart, is that I picked it up after reading … [Read more...]
Commissario Brunetti – melancholy, not moody
Re that list of ‘neglected’ sleuths, the one I posted on Dec 27th: I think I should qualify my inclusion of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti. No, Brunetti doesn’t fit my definition of a ‘moody sleuth’... I’d consider him more ‘melancholy’ than ‘moody,’ but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed almost every book in Donna Leon’s series, twenty-two or … [Read more...]
Death, Drugs, Darkness
Maybe Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway should come with a warning label; the goings-on in Claire's second outing edge into the realms of 'dark and nasty...' and things just keep getting worse. Three excellent reviews: Hipster Noir: Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt Novels American Mystery Finds A New Voice On 'The … [Read more...]
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
Ostensibly, the story is this: Claire DeWitt is hired to find out what's happened to a well-known prosecutor who's disappeared from New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina. As the story progresses, we begin to realize that Claire's past is a tangle of unsolved mysteries. Frequent flashbacks highlight mysteries originating in … [Read more...]