The Unscratchables, by Cornelius Kane

Cornelius Kane’s crime story is animal noir at its best. No humans live in the metropolis of San Bernardo; the two main populations are cats and dogs, forever at odds. Cats exist in the upper echelons of society, residing in tony Kathattan. The working-class dogs, stuck in their pack mentality, toil down in the squalid [...]

Read Full Post »

The Good Humor Man, by Andrew Fox

Cross Fahrenheit 451 with Soylent Green and you’ve got The Good Humor Man. Although a futuristic tale, the reality of the premise may not be that far off.
In the year 2041, America is trying to recover from GD2 (The Second Great Depression). For the protection of the public, food is strictly regulated by the [...]

Read Full Post »

The Falcon’s Malteser, by Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz may be best known in the book world for his Alex Rider adventures. I, however, first became aware of him through his Diamond Brothers Mystery series. Set in London, the books are narrated by Nick Diamond, kid brother to “detective” Tim Diamond. I put detective in quotes because he is [...]

Read Full Post »

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

There is something a bit meta about blogging about a DVD about blogging, but I’m doing it anyway. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was originally released as a series of three 15 minute webisodes created by Joss Whedon (of Buffy-fame) during the writers’ strike. It has now been released as a DVD and is [...]

Read Full Post »

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

I’ve read a number of books that present themselves as short story collections, but which, when taken as a whole, comprise powerful novels.  I think one reason that this succeeds is that the author can approach the same topic from a number of different angles without losing the narrative thread that ties the whole package [...]

Read Full Post »

High Spirits, by Robertson Davies

Although we generally associate ghost stories with Halloween and October, there is a long tradition in Great Britain of telling ghost stories around the Christmas season. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a classic example, with Scrooge being haunted by spirits who offer him one last chance to see the error of his ways. Robertson [...]

Read Full Post »

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney

Greg Heffley is being forced by his mother to keep a journal (“but if she thinks I’m going to write down my ‘feelings’ in here or whatever, she’s crazy”). Except we really probably ought to call it a diary, since that’s what it says on the cover, despite Greg’s instructions to his mother (“when Mom [...]

Read Full Post »

Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

Can violence be justified? Can we commit acts of righteous vengeance without being poisoned, perverted by our own violence?
These are the questions considered at depth by Joe Abercrombie’s new fantasy standalone novel Best Served Cold. As the novel opens, Monza Murcatto, a mercenary general, and her brother Benna go to a meeting with their employer [...]

Read Full Post »

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

I was sad to hear that the legendary movie producer/director John Hughes passed away last month. He was most famous for his teen movies of the 1980s, including The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but his best comic movie by far is Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It is the travel misadventure movie of [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »