Tag: books

  • Sad Girls: Paula Hawkins’s First Thriller

    I’m re-visiting Paula Hawkins’s 2015 Girl on the Train, which was adapted as a slightly shaky film starring Emily Blunt. Blunt is perfectly cast and holds most of the movie on her very capable shoulders, but the film version exposes a few weaknesses in the novel’s plotting while flattening out Hawkins’s more nuanced characterizations of…

  • Messy Middles: Maria Semple’s Go Gentle and Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct

    “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” Epictetus While I usually finish reading novels before I write about them, I’m in the midst of a Big Edit of my own mystery novel, and that has me thinking about the…

  • Murder on the Orient Express: From Page to Stage to the Screen

    A very young Jessica Chastain with David Morrissey in Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express. My Christie re-read is zooming along this spring, and I’ve enjoyed the novels so much that I’ve added some Agatha Christie-themed sites to a trip next fall that will mostly focus on researching P.D. James. My stops will…