I have to admit that I probably do not fit into the target audience for Red Mojo Mama. But after I finished it, the more I thought about it, the more I came to like it. The story is about Lydia, known as “Red,”a woman in her late 30s who loses her husband and a beloved […]
I began reading Gae-Lynn Woods’ The Devil of Light in January, at about the same time I started watching True Detective on HBO, the gritty series starring Woodie Harrelson and Matthew MacConaughey, and was immediately struck by the similarities between the two stories. Both stories feature victims of ritual murders, corpses found in bizarre […]
“The guy with the bad attitude has been following me all week.” Seb Kirby gets right into the story in Double Bind. There’s not a wasted word in this book: no background, no world-building, no nonsense. The writing is spare and clean, active yet evocative, told in first-person present tense, which enhances the action and […]
With Reckoning, RS Guthrie takes the fiction writer’s rule book, shreds it in mighty fingers and reassembles it into a new way of engaging audiences. Reckoning is the third of Guthrie’s books to feature Denver Detective Robert Macaulay, also known as Bobby Mac and also known as the heir to the occult power of Clan […]
Independent novel review: Head of Words Sometimes, you see where a novel is going and guess the surprise twist well before getting to it. Sometimes, if the writer is really good, it doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the novel.In the case of Head of Words, I felt like a co-conspirator with author Chris […]
A fun thriller Some books are just plain fun to read — like Frederick Lee Brooke’s Doing Max Vinyl.This is a book that succeeds on several levels. First, it’s a perfectly crafted crime-thriller with a believable, sympathetic protagonist in Annie Ogden and a watertight plot. Second, all the characters are drawn from real life. Third, […]
An independent book review Bruce A. Blake’s first novel is a thoroughly entertaining, as well as thought-provoking and heart-wrenching novel that breaks the author out of obscurity as well as out of several genre conventions.Blake demonstrates from the first sentence that he’s a professional writer, a novelist with chops: “I stood with my back to […]