Book Reviews

Every mystery has its dark secrets, but the best ones reveal them with a kind of perverse, teasing finesse. And author Melissa M. Garcia does so deftly in Stranger, her second mystery.

Ex-con Alex Delgado and her brother Ric have fled Los Angeles for a new start in the small, gritty town of Lake City, Nevada, safely removed from the disturbing memories and unhealed wounds of their past. Their sanctuary is the Death Valley Motel, the dog-eared roadside motel they run together, comfortable in their anonymity at the edge of civilization.

So when an aging ex-L.A. gang-banger’s corpse is […]

The author of several well-received regional mysteries, Sternberg (No Laughing Matter, 2007, etc.) hits his literary sweet spot with this imaginative throwback set on the high seas circa 1855. As the novel opens in Boston, a highborn lady named Elizabeth Godwin argues vehemently against returning with her family to her native England, begging to join her uncle in San Francisco. Within moments, our heroine has stowed away on the titular clipper, where she’s nearly assaulted by a savage crewman. Fortunately, rescue appears in the form of Captain Chance, who reluctantly agrees to carry his charge on the perilous […]

I started this thread on mobileread, hoping to get others to join in recommending some good free ebooks from indie authors. So far there’ve been a few additions.

Recommended: Free Ebooks by Indie Authors

Free ebooks by indie authors are getting kind of a bad reputation lately, and while it’s true that you have to dig through a lot of earth to find a little gold, this is true for “traditionally published” books too! I don’t want this thread to be confused with ‘Author Self-Promotions’ – there’s a place for that here – http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=226 – but I do want to […]

This is without a doubt the most unique book reviewed here. Michael Jacobson is at the forefront of asemic writing. What’s asemic writing? A work that is a collection of symbols totally invented by the author. We know the symbol “F” to represent the “ef” sound, but really F is just a representationof that sound. Asemic writing takes this premise and invents a totally new language – open entirely to reader interpretation. This means both that no two asemic books are the same and each experience reading it is different.

It is a style of writing with a long history[…]

Leviathan’s Master: The Wreck of the World’s Largest Sailing Ship
David M. Quinn
Review by Carol Buchanan

The leviathan of this short novel is the Thomas W. Lawson, a 7-masted schooner and the largest sailing ship ever built, which went down in a hurricane off Britain’s Scilly Isles on December 13, 1907. Her captain, or master, George W. Dow, and one other crewman survived the wreck. In Leviathan’s Master, David Quinn tells the story in first person from Dow’s perspective as he recuperates from his injuries.

Dow’s voice is clear and engaging, and Dow is a likable character, but […]

Below, a review of Samuel Babbitt’s Limited Engagement, a self-published history of the short but glorious life of Kirkland College, of which Babbitt was the founding and only president. Limited Engagement shows how self-publishing makes it possible to create great books that have a fundamentally limited audience. This review was originally posted on my site Wetmachine, part of a my very occasional series of reviews of self-published books.

One night in the late spring of 1978, two young women broke into the registrar’s office at Hamilton College. Their mission was simple: to remove their academic records, along […]