Tag: book-review
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Kathy Reichs’s Déja Dead: A Great Series Begins
This week has been a Faulknerian one for me: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I’ve experienced multiple forms of déja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. So it’s a perfect time to return to the 1997 first novel in Kathy Reichs’s celebrated series of crime novels featuring forensic anthropologist…
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Helen Baxendale in Poirot, Marple, and P.D. James
Most non-UK viewers likely remember actor Helen Baxendale from her unfortunate role as Emily, the Englishwoman so unsuitably affianced to the appallingly selfish and immature Ross in Friends. David Schwimmer is a terrific actor, and I enjoy his portrayal of the worst person in the series: an academic who dates his student (oof–well past the…
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My DNF Pile: Bad Books by Good Writers; and a Happy Free Find by Andrew Taylor
“Bad” is relative, here. Agatha Christie never wrote a truly terrible book. But my commitment to reading Elephants Can Remember was quickly shaken by the prose style, plotting devices, and endless digressions. This is not a very good Christie, at any rate, and since I’m reading it in an ugly Internet Archive version, with a…
