Eleanor Catton has a new book out. Unlike the sprawling The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is a taut little eco-thriller of a book. Whittled down to a fine point, this book is about what happens in a town that is cut off from the rest of the world after a tragic landslide. Naturally, everyone’s culpability and intentions are …
Instead of a hare with a pocket watch, it’s an enigmatic man with a proposition who leads our unnamed narrator down the rabbit hole. His offer is unusual, but lucrative: if she is willing to relinquish her identity entirely to work as a stand-in for a reclusive young actress until she is well enough to …
Bearskin by James McLaughlin took my breath away. A man fleeing a Mexican drug cartel by working in the wilds of Virginia encounters both brutality and beauty in the isolated hills. This is a thriller written with the clear intensity and detail of Cormac McCarthy, and it will totally absorb you. –Bobby, Annie Bloom’s Books, Portland, OR …
This one makes you think and entertains in equal measure. A literary thriller for people who read older classics and claim they don’t like mysteries. (Like me.) An English professor has come back from the dead, or at least a body claims he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, along with Dr. Samuel Johnson. Are they who …
The Goldfinch has been the much touted and discussed novel by Tartt, but I found her earlier novel, The Secret History, to be a much better read. It is a mystery where you know who was murdered, where he was murdered and by whom within the first few pages. Tartt spends the rest of the …
