Book Reviews

Barnato’s adventure tale, which travels between Scotland and South Africa, begins dramatically in 1999 when Johannes, a young South African, sets fire to his neighbor’s house after catching him having sex with his wife. The next chapter rapidly shifts to a Scottish castle and is written through the eyes of Boysie, the new resident Jack Russell terrier, who gives an amusing account of the entertaining life of his masters Rupert and Dianna. The morning after one wild party, Boysie and the other dogs take advantage of the place: “By seven, the castle was as silent as if the occupants had […]

When retired Hollywood scriptwriter Glenn P. Wolfe succumbed to lung cancer in 2007, at age 81, he left unfinished this wildly inventive story about the tricks of memory and the emotional tug of baseball; about comic folly in a disorderly family, the neuroses of showbiz folk, and the glories of language itself. There’s so much energy and wit in “Book One” of Wolfe’s incomplete magnum opus that even its intermittent shortcomings—repetition and verbal excess—feel like blessings. Absent an ending, the tale still satisfies.

The title derives from the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, who is also the mother of the […]

Marshall Harrison presents this book as one Marine’s memoir of his experiences in Vietnam, but readers will quickly realize that these recollections are no more factual than those of George MacDonald Fraser’s popular character Harry Flashman. Leaving Brogado is actually a funny, honest, thoroughly engaging novel, published (posthumously) by a writer who experienced three tours of duty in Vietnam, one who knows and handles his time, place, subject matter and characters with consummate assuredness.

It is 1967 and Beauford T. Adams and his buddy AC Murphy, both 18, have to get out of Brogado, Texas, because if the tiny town […]

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 […]