The weather we’re having here in New Jersey makes a lot of people want to stay home with a good mystery, or possibly murder someone. Did you read that, over in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had to apologize to all the residents whose cars got tickets because the city snow-removal crews plowed them in?
I review relatively few mysteries and thrillers on this site, partly because I have trouble keeping up with their authors. To give you an idea of my progress: The last Sue Grafton novel I read was B Is for Burglar. And whenever I try to catch up, I seem to end up slogging through a book like Thomas Harris’s recent thriller, Hannibal Rising, which Entertainment Weekly www.ew.com rightly named one of the five worst books of 2006.
But Bill Peschel over at Reader’s Almanac specializes in mysteries and thrillers and has an archive of reviews of these, alphabetically arranged by author and title, on his site. So check out his blog www.planetpeshel.com when you’re in the mood for crime. His recent recommendations include Giles Blunt’s By the Time You Read This (Holt, $19.95), the latest novel about Ontario detective John Cardinal. Blunt won Britain’s Silver Dagger and Canada’s Arthur Ellis award.
As for me, I hope to weigh in soon on Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie mystery, The Right Attitude to Rain (Pantheon, $21.95). If you’ve read this one, please tell me it’s going to be better than Harris’s book.
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
