Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Tomorrow Never Dies  is one of my favorite James Bond films, with plenty of suspense to keep you on the edge of your seat.  Media tycoon Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) has positioned his satellites to provoke a war between Great Britain and China– and his media empire is primed to reap huge financial rewards by [...]

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24

24 is one of the most exciting television shows I’ve ever seen.  It is all about a federal agent named Jack Bauer and the federal agency he works for, CTU– the Counter-Terrorism Unit. They must thwart plots involving various nuclear or biological weapons that pose a serious threat to people in the United States.
The unique format draws [...]

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When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

One theory of time travel is that all moments are happening simultaneously, and we can shortcut from one to the other. In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle called it tessering.
In one of those moments, I have already finished writing this blog post, and I would appreciate it if my future self would tesser herself [...]

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Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev

All the world’s a stage, literally, in this fun romp for stagestruck teens.
ENTER Beatrice (Bertie) Shakespeare Smith, a foundling and a born troublemaker. She has grown up in the Théâtre Illuminata, a fantastical, metafictional theater housing all the Players from all the works of the stage. Bertie gets her clothes from Wardrobe, and her bedroom [...]

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The King’s Coat, by Dewey Lambdin

This is a good, rousing tale of sailing life in 1780. You will learn much about ships and how they work as well as battles of the time and the weapons used. Our “hero,” (and we use the word loosely) is a wild young fellow who suddenly finds himself in a new world. Think Horatio Hornblower, but [...]

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Body Movers by Stephanie Bond

For some reason, which I cannot now recall, I was speaking with one of my colleagues about people who clean up crime scenes. Sadly, this has become a business–cleaning up people’s murders and suicides. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned a fiction series called Body Movers, which I decided to try. The first [...]

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Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks

Ian Fleming’s star rose when John F. Kennedy casually mentioned that he was reading one of the James Bond books.  Bond burned his way through 14 books, all of which became movies, before Fleming’s death in 1964.  Those movies, which departed the published canon in 1982’s Moonraker, have come to define James Bond’s image, despite [...]

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The Demon’s Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Wisecracking brothers with swords and guns, on the run from the demons that killed their father. This could have been a run-of-the-mill teenage urban fantasy with demon hunting and chase scenes, but first-time author Brennan also gives us an intriguing, sardonic narrator who hooked me into a story I didn’t expect.
Sixteen-year-old Nick Ryves is a [...]

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Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

I’m breaking a rule I set for myself with this blog. I didn’t think I would ever blog a sequel. After all, if you liked a book, and a sequel comes out, you are probably already planning to read it. If you didn’t like a book, why would you want to read [...]

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Billy Boyle, by James Benn

If you like your crime fiction written in a fairly straightforward, no-nonsense style, with a lot of action and an appealingly imperfect main character, James Benn’s Billy Boyle series will be a good fit. Billy is a Boston policeman, just having been made a detective, when WWII begins. He is not the brightest star in [...]

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