Bruce Macbain’s Roman Games launches an excellent new Roman mystery series. If you are a fan of Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis, or Roman history in general, you’ll want to pick it up. His detective, Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), a decent, straight-laced senator, teams up with Martial, a poet of racy and scurrilous verses, to untangle a delightfully twisted murder case.
Bless the Bride, the latest in Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy series, sends Molly to New York’s Chinatown in 1903 to sift through layers of crime and a major moral dilemma before she’ll get a chance at the layers of her own wedding cake–or will she?
The Curse-Maker, by Kelli Stanley, set in Bath during the Roman period, blends a twisting, exciting mystery with a vivid Roman setting. Stanley combines her background as a classicist with a passion for noir mystery. The Roman politics and corruption that provide the context of the mystery are compellingly developed and, like many things Roman, echo modern life while retaining their uniquely Latin flavor. click the title to read the full review…
J.J. Murphy’s Murder Your Darlings is a thoroughly delightful read. Part screwball comedy, part literary spoof, this mystery stars Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Robert Benchley and others solving a murder when a prominent drama critic is found stabbed with a fountain pen under the famous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel. Don’t be put off if you’ve never heard of the Algonquin Round Table—Murphy supplies whatever background you need, and you don’t have to have read Parker to catch her rapid fire humor. Fans of Jacqueline Winspear will enjoy this light take on the same period.
Ben Bova stays true to his science fiction roots in this action-packed novel set in the Bronze Age world of the Hittite empire and Troy’s last days. Lukka, a soldier in the emperor’s army, returns home from a lengthy campaign to discover the Hittite capital in flames, his family stolen away by slavers. He follows the trail to Troy only to find that city under siege and the complications growing as he tries to save his family in the midst of yet another city’s demise. Bova reworks the myths surrounding Troy to incorporate Lukka in these legends. He has created… Read More »Review of The Hittite by Ben Bova
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins I was given a copy of these poems by Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room, recently, and they are a delightful companion. As such they cannot rightly ever be stowed in the already read file because I will return as often as my soul needs to. I highly recommend a copy by everyone’s bedside. How can you not love a book of poems in which one can find these two stanzas in a poem called Forgetfulness? The name of the author is the first to go followed… Read More »Poetry
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy SchiffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars “How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?” This, Schiff tells us, is what Cecil B. DeMille asked Claudette Colbert when offering her the movie role of Cleopatra. It’s an indication that with the Egyptian queen, “In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.” Cleopatra’s story was told first by her vanquishers and later by men wildly incapable of facing the reality of a smart, immensely powerful woman. Stacy Schiff, in her superb biography of Cleopatra, does her best to repair… Read More »Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff
In the category of guilty pleasures, I happily place mysteries set in interesting historical settings. I recently picked up The Tomb of Zeus (2007), the first of Barbara Cleverly’s series set in Europe after World War I, featuring Laetitia Talbot, an independent young woman of means with a penchant for archaeology and mysteries. If you enjoy the conventions of the upper class British mystery and archaeological digs, you’ll have fun with this one. For the sake of suspense, Cleverly sometimes holds back information in ways that push credulity a bit, given that some of the key pieces were always in… Read More »Review of Tomb of Zeus
Isabel Allende’s latest novel, Island Beneath the Sea (April 2010), brings us into the 18th century world of slavery and revolution in Saint Domingue, Cuba and New Orleans. It follows the life of Zarité, a nine year old slave girl sold to Toulouse Valmorain, a French plantation owner in Saint Domingue (later Haiti). Allende’s richly drawn world envelops the reader, but even more compelling are the narrative voices telling this complex, interwoven story. The novel shifts between chapters told by Zarité herself in first person and an omniscient voice, which manages to express an ironic distain for the deficiencies and… Read More »Review of Island Beneath the Sea
