The blog for book reviews to accompany my history blog which also contains book reviews that deal with history.
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Mystery In The Adonis Valley
The setting for this mystery novel is mysterious in its own right. The Adonis Valley is near to Beirut in the Lebanon and had a collection of crumbling palaces and buildings at the time of the writing of the novel. The Middle East as it is described is not recognizable anymore to us today. It's like a romantic fairy tale, but then it was real. What we have now is decades of proxy wars between the superpowers destroying small countries.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Mystery On Corfu
Corfu has always been the pet theory for Shakespeare aficionados as the setting for the Tempest. There is very little to go by to come up with this theory. The bard was famous for taking a loan from any story he came across. Having certain names crop up in the play and on the island is no great clue. And fiction is fiction, there should be no earthly realm to be found.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Regency Twin Trouble
Identical Twins are predestined for comedy, and Georgette Heyer made excellent use of that literary convention to write this Regency romantic comedy. When the elder twin and head of house disappears, the younger and more responsible one takes over. His moves to reduce risks of exposure just dig him in deeper as his brother stays lost for weeks on end.
Jordan and Travis Smit Twins |
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Mystery in Delphi
Sometimes, mystery novels take you places you didn't think of before. Everyone knows Delphi and its beautiful temples and ruins. There isn't a single scene in this book played out anywhere there. This book takes you out of tourist Delphi to the real Greece hidden just around the corner from the money haunts.
Delphi |
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Who Would Want to go to Dijon?
Who would ever want to go to Dijon? This question and variants thereof is the most asked in this book. But it all starts in London with a kidnapping gone wrong. Flight and chase take the reader through France to Paris and from there to Dijon. No car races and police investigation, I'm afraid, the year is 1780.
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Sunday, November 17, 2013
English Intrigue in Louis XV's France
Dive into Paris and Versailles during the time of King Louis XV. Corruption and
intrigue are ripe. France is an open playing field for the Duke of Avon. the English peer has earned the nickname Satanas from his enemies. Broke as a young man, he had toured Europe as a gamester. He gambled a young Austrian noble out
of his fortune and retired to enjoy a lavish and sumptuous lifestyle.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Duchess of Death
It is always difficult to come second and later. When writing a biography, it makes your job as a writer that much harder and your research must be more thorough than that previously done. Still, the outcome might be a book that contains nothing new over what has already been written. It ends up being a rehash of well known and acclaimed books with no merit of its own.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Poking Fun at Book Critics
Rupert Thomson has written a novel under the title of a memoir. He is out to take book critics for a ride. As far as I was able to find reviews, he was extremely successful even though plot, style, and hyperbole used are a dead give-away. But the book offers much more than schadenfreude at the expense of hapless professional book reviewers.
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