Category Archives: Books

"Carstairs!" he called now. "Oh, Carstairs!" Carstairs came in through the bedroom door and stared at him with a sort of wearily resigned disgust. Carstairs was a dog – a fawn-colored Great Dane as big as a yearling calf. "Carstairs," … Continue reading →

I’m on an ancient Egypt kick, and when I plucked The Third Translation by Matt Bondurant from the Aunt’s ever crowded shelves it seemed like the perfect read for the mystery part of my day. It’s a highly praised literary … Continue reading →

While I was doing my master’s at Columbia, she said, I discovered that most women’s studies and humanities departments were engaged in a form of hypocritical liberal fascism, victimization, and debilitating group-think strategies that eventually were swamped in a morass … Continue reading →

  Edgar Wallace was very successful in his time (he wrote King Kong) but not read much today in the English speaking world. In fact the people that most often ask for him are German tourists who tell me a bunch … Continue reading →

Print the Legend, Craig McDonald, Minotaur Books, $24.99. Considering that it revolves around Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 suicide by shotgun, I suppose it would be indelicate of me to say that Craig McDonald’s Print the Legend blew me away, but in … Continue reading →

It’s well known that I’m an unapologetic true crime afficionado, and one of my (oh, so many) stock lines is you couldn’t make this stuff up, which is my flip way of expressing that a good true crime writer, by … Continue reading →

Illustration by Satty

I ordered Fall for myself from my book rep because I’m a sucker for prep school stories, but it turned out to be one of those "literary" mysteries that fail at both ends of the hybrid, and it literally gave … Continue reading →

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters, Riverhead Books, $26.95. A lot of Advance Reader Copies come through Aunt Agatha’s, but only a few of them find their way to the "maybe to be read" pile. There’s the authors I know and … Continue reading →

In my reading of Heine I came across the startlingly prescient passage: Christianity, and this is its finest achievement, quieted this brutal Germanic lust for battle to some degree, but could not eradicate it entirely, and if one day that … Continue reading →