“It was a dark and stormy night…” Okay, it was not stormy, but in Mark Pryor’s second thriller starring Hugo Marston entitled The Crypt Thief, the story opens in a famous Paris cemetery in the middle of a dark night. Spooky. The villain, nicknamed The Scarab, is up to no good. He kills a young …
Merci, Notre Dame. Find sanctuary in independent bookstores, where you can honor the past and imagine the future.
An adventure story for the ages. It’s 1961, Charlie Fisher, the son of a foreign diplomat, finds himself adrift in the city of Marseilles. After witnessing a pickpocket in the busy city center, his intrigue draws him into an underground world of adolescent pickpockets, filled with a spirited, colorful cast of characters–ranging from identical Senegalese …
After nearly 40 years as a book professional, I retired in 2011 and began traveling for pleasure. Many of the trips my wife and I have taken have a close relationship to books I have read. In 2011 we traveled to Carcassonne in southwestern France. I had read several books in which that part of …
As a reader, I have lists of authors that are favorite writers. Sometimes I like to discover authors that are “new” to me. Brad Thor is an old favorite. The last time I read a book by Mr. Thor was 5 years ago (my bad!). I returned to the world of Scot Harvath with Use …
Michael Jecks has written many medieval mysteries featuring a defrocked Templar set in the early 14th Century. I have read about a dozen of those mysteries, the last one about five years ago. So many books, so little time! A few years ago, Mr. Jecks branched out to write novels about other historical events but …
I averaged three art classes a day during my last year of high school. It was the only thing that elevated my GPA above what could generously be called alarming. I spent the majority of those twelve semesters failing a lot of classes, or nearly failing them. A multitude of reasons were at play, but …
Okay, my only complaint about this series is that Martin Walker does such an amazing job transporting you to the Dordogne region of France that I want to be there drinking wine and sampling the food (cooked by Bruno of course) and not here typing this. Setting that aside, I love these mysteries, you catch Martin Walker’s …
Giving a lesser-known historical event— the development of the Citroën C2V, the brilliantly simple French “people’s car”— a fictional, kid-friendly spin by putting 13-year-old Angelo Fabrizzi at its center, McAllister has constructed a fast-moving plot packed not just with action and humor but with family drama, spy skullduggery, tween romance, and, in a mild form, …
