This is a massive book — it clocks in at just under 900 pages — but you won’t notice it. It is so absorbing from the outset that you won’t realize you just devoured another 75 pages. On your lunch break. The story is deceptively simple. On the gold coast of New Zealand, a…
You probably know by now that Halloween is my favorite holiday and I celebrate it for weeks. Even when it’s not October, I read ghost stories and gothic novels. But now that the nights are coming on sooner, leaves are crackling underfoot and the air is just a bit cooler, here are some creepy reads…
Bill Dedman has uncovered one of the strangest true stories in the history of American royalty. There were the Vanderbilts, the Stuyvesants, the Rockefellers and then the Clarks. That they are not a household name today is part of the mystery that Dedman seeks to unravel. William A Clark’s story is a quintessential boot-strap tale.…
I am so excited to tell people about this book. It’s witty and campy at the same time. It belongs firmly in the “B” or pulp category — but deliciously so. Reminiscent of the smart, slapstick movie Clue, it is just plain fun. Older (but not elderly) Miss Cornelia is of New York blue-blood stock. She…
The Perils of the Night James Runcie has put a sometimes-reluctant pastor, often-accidental detective Canon Sidney Chambers in 1950s Cambridge. Chambers is a townie, one of the few outsiders tolerated by the establishment. When a thrill-seeker falls to his death while scaling a cathedral tower,…