Tag: reading

  • Alafair Burke: A Crime (Writing) Family

    I’m nearly finished Alafair Burke’s new novel, The Note, which starts a bit slowly but then picks up, in a big way. And since I’ve never written on here about how much I enjoy both Burke’s fiction and (in a more moderate way) the prolific literary output of her father, James Lee Burke, this seems…

  • Con Artists, Scam Artists, Escape Artists: My Zenias and Atwood’s The Robber Bride

    “You might become a detective. You might become a con artist yourself. Or, a blend of the two: you might become a novelist.” Margaret Atwood on writing “The history of the world, my sweet Oh, Mr. Todd, ooh, Mr. Todd What does it tell? Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat” Atwood’s recent…

  • 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…