Tag: kathy-reichs
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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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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…
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Food, Feminism, and Mystery Fiction
Beth Kalikoff, writing in 2006, called attention to the plethora of mystery novels, most of which were enduring series, that incorporated food directly into the murder plot and not always because the victim was poisoned. As she described, while noting that only limited critical attention had been paid to date to the phenomenon, mystery novels…
