I liked Harwood’s previous novel The Ghost Writer very much. The Séance shares several of The Ghost Writer’s hallmarks: reserved, chilly, almost 19th-century flavored prose*; dark, complex and secret-spiked family histories; an elaborate, almost meta-textual, structure with multiple layers of nested stories; a brooding, slow-growing aura of menace; and lingering questions about which — if [...]
Entries Tagged as 'historical'
John Harwood: The Seance
26 Jan 2010 · No Comments
Tags: h-author · historical · horror · s-title · suspense
Glen David Gold, Sunnyside
28 Dec 2009 · No Comments
On the whole I liked Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside, even if I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It shares only superficial similarities with Gold’s debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil: like the earlier book it seamlessly blends historical and invented characters in a story fully of derring-do, heartbreak, and coincidence-fueled plot twists. [...]
Tags: g-author · historical · s-title
Cherie Priest: Boneshaker
13 Nov 2009 · No Comments
The phrase that kept coming to my mind to describe Boneshaker while I was reading it was “purely awesome.” The back cover copy gives away a little too much of the setup for my taste, but I will say that it shifts between being a steampunk adventure story and a gritty, claustrophobic zombie novel so [...]
Tags: b-title · historical · horror · p-author · science fiction
George Mann: The Affinity Bridge
31 Oct 2009 · No Comments
The Affinity Bridge sets some derring-do and a Sherlock Holmes-ish mystery in an alternate history where England had much more sophisticated technology under the Victoria’s reign (some of the tech, in fact, extends Victoria’s lifespan farther into the 20th century). Sometimes it seems like Mann is juggling a few too many plot threads — a [...]
Tags: a-title · fantasy · historical · m-author · science fiction
Michael Moorcock: Gloriana
22 Aug 2009 · 2 Comments
Good God, I hated this book, with an unreasoning, visceral passion. (Had much the same reaction to Nabokov’s Lolita). I made the perhaps-mistake of reading the Moorcock’s afterword first, in which he explains that Andrea Dworkin took him to task for including a graphic rape scene (with a troubling thematic implication) in book she otherwise [...]
Tags: fantasy · g-title · historical · m-author
Lee Irby: The Up and Up
09 Jun 2009 · No Comments
Small-time hood Frank Hearn makes it out of Irby’s previous Prohibition-era caper novel 7,000 Clams with his skin fundamentally intact and the love of a really terrific dame, but (no spoiler, really) without enough scratch to give her the kind of life he wants to. So in this sequel he goes straight and tries to [...]
Tags: historical · i-author · mystery · suspense · u-title
Lee Irby: 7,000 Clams
24 May 2009 · No Comments
I think the worst thing about becoming a baseball fan for me is getting infested by the magical thinking associated with the sport. This intricately-plotted, noirish crime novel features Babe Ruth (as a Yankee, in the 1925 offseason) and I found myself vaguely worried that reading it was somehow disloyal to my team.
But there’s [...]
Tags: #-title · historical · i-author · mystery · suspense
Carrie Bebris: North by Northanger
09 Apr 2009 · No Comments
I probably wouldn’t write about Bebris again so soon if I hadn’t had somewhat harsh things to say about Suspense and Sensibility, the preceding volume of this series of sequels to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which Lord and Lady Darcy encounter characters from other Austen novels (and/or their descendants) in a mystery/suspense context.
North [...]
Tags: b-author · historical · mystery · n-title
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
29 Mar 2009 · No Comments
Translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear
I’m no literary critic; I’m read The Three Musketeers primarily because I recently saw Slumdog Millionare, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to read books a little farther afield from my usual choices.
But for whatever it’s worth, here are my impressions.
Initially I found The Three Musketeers an [...]
Tags: d-author · historical · p-author · t-title
Carrie Bebris: Suspsense and Sensibility
25 Feb 2009 · No Comments
Suspense and Sensibility wasn’t without its charms, but I didn’t think it lived up to its predecessor, Pride and Prescience (a surprisingly successful sequel to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy and Elizabeth find themselves in a whodunnit with overtones of Jane Eyre).
Suspense and Sensibility ramps up the silliness considerably. It follows directly after [...]
Tags: b-author · fantasy · historical · s-title