Quick Book Reviews Blog

The British Isles have often been portrayed, from the North American perspective at least, as having lots of charm and mystery to them, with their inhabitants having so many close similarities and, at the same time, vast cultural differences. It feels like a bizarre place on Earth where all is different and yet the same. American author Bill Bryson had the chance to fully immerse himself in this fantastic world upon moving to Britain in the early 1970s.

The Christmas holidays are a double-edged sword; though some revel in the celebratory occasion they present, others merely see them as a reminder of loneliness and emptiness. In Anne Perry's A Christmas Hope , we are presented with a somewhat paradoxical picture: Claudine Burroughs, a woman who lacks in nothing can't help but see the coming holidays as the latter.

The thriller genre has recently seen a brilliant addition to its already grandiose list of promising authors (promising in terms of what their future will bring, of course) when Eric Rill published his first novel, Pinnacle of Deceit . The main premise of the story is rather simple: there are four men who grew up in an Arizona orphanage, and many years later, they now find themselves as targets of a mysterious and terrifying killer, the unstoppable doom seemingly destined to turn their lives into a living hell.

Shattered teacups can be replaced, broken walls can be repaired, but time can never be rewound: the days, months, and years lost can be replaced by no means known to man. In Getting Life , Michael Morton chronicles the twenty-five years of his life that went down the drain as he spent them behind bars for the murder of his wife, a crime he did not commit.

Big great cities, especially ones revolving around gambling, are almost guaranteed to have some sort of bloody history behind them, with their founding fathers (and/or mothers, of course) being drenched so deep in corruption they revel in it. As you can imagine, the history of Las Vegas is far from being different; gangsters have put in place, managed and controlled (and let's face it, still do) the whole thing around the concept of gambling.

A majority of crime novels these days, taking place in the modern world, allow the protagonists to benefit from a host of different technological innovations which permit them to move their investigations forth. However thrilling it may be to see the sprawling web of technology catch all criminals, nothing can really replace the satisfying and accomplished feeling of pure logical deduction, something offered generally in crime novels taking place in centuries past, as is the case with Baudelaire's Revenge by Bob van Laerhoven, winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize for best crime novel.

The need for self-understanding and a personal identity is something virtually every human on this planet has, but we all go about it in different ways. While some people undertake grandiose journeys around the world, there are others who prefer to delve deep onto odysseys into their own minds. In A Life in Books by Warren Lehrer we are treated to the latter as we are presented the fictitious biography of Bleu Mobley, a man who had a rather interesting life, going from living as a child in a public housing project to becoming a journalist, a professor and a best-selling author, amongst other things.