Category: Book Review: Mystery

Book Review: City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte

The Prague of City of Dark Magic is a city steeped in legends of magic, a history of blood, and a legacy of secrets. It has been home to geniuses and eccentrics. It is also a city of secrets as music student Sarah Weston discovers. Sarah has come to the Prague Castle for the summer with a team of colorful academics to restore the Lubkowicz Palace to its former glory and turn it into a museum filled with centuries old treasures. There, she finds clues that might finally unravel the mystery of Beethoven's famous immortal beloved. What follows is a tale of mystery, politics, murder, a time traveling prince, a centuries-old dwarf, and even a portal to hell. Yes, and its a romantic comedy. This isn't a book that follows genre conventions, it lays them out like toys and plays with them.

Book Review: “Mr. Timothy: A Novel” by Louis Bayard

I am not generally a fan of writers making use of another author's characters. While I have enjoyed more than a few modern takes on, say Sherlock Holmes, more often, we wind up with something like Scarlet, the unworthy followup to Margaret Mitchell's brilliant Gone With The Wind. Mr. Timothy: A Novel succeeds largely because in Dickens' original, Tiny Tim is little more than a caricature, a sort of cherubic plot point with a crutch. Building on our shared memory of "God bless us, every one!" Bayard shapes Timothy into a fully realized character—one that fascinates and, yes, makes us care.

Book Review: “The Meaning of Night” by Michael Cox

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post listing my fifteen favorite first sentences in literature. At the time, I hadn't read Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night: A Confession, or I would have been forced to give serious consideration to including it. It begins: After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an Oyster Supper. Now that's a pretty good start. It's an opening that hooks us immediately on the story, certainly. It's hard not to wonder what's going to follow that. More, it hooks us on character—who is this narrator, and how can he describe an act of terrible violence in such a casual manner? I'm happy to report that the book lives up to the promise of that first sentence. It is a dark, chilling read, and an utterly compelling one.