Apr 10
2007
I’m not much of a mystery fan. I’m more of a fantasy/sci-fi kind of guy. But despite the appalling family secrets, ominous settings, and rampant alcoholism in Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls, I still found myself compulsively turning pages. It’s a brilliant book, gloom and all...
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Mar 5
2007
I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Crais’s action/suspense novel The Watchman. Crais’s book is neither deep nor plausible, but it is fast, fun, furious, and capped off with a satisfyingly noisy shoot-‘em-out ending. It doesn't have any of the intellectual ambitions of the last action/suspense novel that we reviewed, but it's much more entertaining...
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Mar 4
2007
California-based suspense novelist Robert Crais is best known as the author of the Elvis Cole detective series, featuring the wisecracking title character and his enigmatic, heavily armed partner,...
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Feb 25
2007
While Dan Simmons is probably best known for his Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi novel Hyperion, we here at Wordcandy prefer his sprawling, Greek-mythology-influenced novel Illium, the subject of one of...
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Feb 12
2007
Richard North Patterson is a writer with a cause. Lots of causes, actually. He graduated from Case Western Reserve Law School in 1971 and served as both an Assistant Attorney General for the sta...
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Jan 24
2007
Guillermo Martinez is an Argentinean mathematician. He teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and is the author of several well-received mysteries, including The Oxford Murders, the topic of o...
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Jan 3
2007
Size 14 Is Not Fat Either is the best series installment Meg Cabot has produced in years. It’s sunny-tempered (well, as sunny-tempered as a story featuring a beheaded cheerleader can be) and witty, and it does a great job of displaying Cabot’s gift for engaging characterization...
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Nov 27
2006
Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries are always clever, but some of the books in the series are more emotionally effective than others. It’s difficult to forget the facts of Austen’s life—she...
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Jul 6
2006
Sexton Blake is actually a character, not an author, and first appeared in 1893 in the boys’ magazine The Halfpenny Marvel. He was the creation of a man named Harry Blythe, who eventually sold th...
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May 26
2006
Margery Allingham was a skillful, stylish mystery novelist who produced the bulk of her books between the first and second World Wars. Most of her novels feature a quiet, unassuming private detec...
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May 26
2006
Mary Roberts Rinehart was a highly successful mystery novelist and playwright in the first half of the twentieth century. (She also wrote the “Tish” books, a comedic series of feminist novels abo...
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May 14
2006
While Mignon Good Eberhart’s name probably rings fewer bells for today’s readers than that of Dorothy Sayers or Margery Allingham, Eberhart spent half of the twentieth century being an extremely p...
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Apr 19
2006
Japanese author Miyuki Miyabe has three books currently translated into English: Crossfire, All She Was Worth, and Shadow Family. Miyabe’s novels are an intriguing mix of horror, mystery, and pol...
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Apr 2
2006
Rex Stout wrote several standalone detective stories, dozens of short stories, and, of course, the Nero Wolfe novels. Stout’s greatest creation, Nero Wolfe is the ultimate armchair detective—a fa...
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Mar 12
2006
Carolyn Keene is the pen name used by the series of authors who have produced the various Nancy Drew books. Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the creations of ...
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Mar 12
2006
Franklin W. Dixon is the pen name used by the series of authors who have produced the various Hardy Boys books. The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the creations...
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Mar 11
2006
Lauren Willig’s The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (and its sequels) feature two ongoing parallel stories: one about a modern-day scholar, and one about the people that she’s researching. T...
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Feb 18
2006
Peter Abrahams has written several intelligent, entertaining mystery/suspense novels for adults, and two phenomenal mysteries for teens, 2005’s Down the Rabbit Hole: An Echo Falls Mystery and its ...
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Feb 18
2006
Elizabeth Peters is one of the three pen names used by the author known as MPM. (She has also written books under her real name, Barbara G. Mertz, and the name Barbara Michaels. However, we are ...
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Jan 28
2006
Most people don’t realize that James M. Cain, the taciturn, womanizing author of such hardboiled pulp classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, originally trained to become ...
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Jan 11
2006
Jennifer Colt is the author of The Butcher of Beverly Hills, an action-packed story about two redheaded twin sisters (one an uptight university grad, the other a lesbian ex-con with a wickedly ben...
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Jan 11
2006
Walter Mosley is the author of the intelligent and entertaining Easy Rawlins mysteries. This series, set in mid-20th-century South Central Los Angeles, blends classic hardboiled pulp style with t...
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Jan 11
2006
John Mortimer is the author of the Horace Rumpole novels, short stories, and plays. Mortimer's Rumpole is a cheerful, obese barrister with a passionate love for cheap wine (Pommeroy's Very Ordina...
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Aug 25
2005
Ngaio Marsh, one of the four “Great Ladies” of English mystery writing, had a career that spanned approximately fifty years, beginning in 1932 and ending with her death in the 1980s. While her my...
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Jul 11
2005
Stephanie Barron is the author of a series of novels featuring Jane Austen as an amateur detective. Ms. Barron's books are structured as Austen's long-lost diaries, recently discovered in an atti...
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Jul 11
2005
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great is an amateur detective with a loyal dog, an assortment of weird friends, and a profound (perhaps existential?) hunger for pancakes. He is also the hero ...
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Jun 24
2005
Agatha Christie is the world's most famous mystery writer. She's right up there with the Bible and Shakespeare in terms of sales, you can find her books in 45 different languages, and her most fa...
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Jun 24
2005
Warning: Damning Confession (for a bibliophile) Straight Ahead: I... I have always felt that Agatha Christie's stories make better TV shows than they do books. I know! I'm sorry! Just typing t...
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Jun 24
2005
English mystery novelist and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers understood that what this world really needed was a crime-solving hero that was equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. She set o...
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Apr 28
2005
My copy of Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Greensleeves is battered, ugly, and features a gigantic stamp on the dust jacket reading "THIS IS NO LONGER THE PROPERTY OF THE SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY"...
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