private eyes

Elly Griffiths: The Last Word

by

Harbinder Kaur #4

There is really nothing better than a great cast of characters, and Elly Griffiths always delivers one. In the fourth instalment of her Harbinder Kaur series, The Last Word, Griffiths revisits one of my all time favorite casts in Benedict, Natalka, and Edwin. The trio has been living happily in Shoreham since we last saw them, and Natalka and Edwin have even started their own PI business, while Benedict continues to run his coffee shop, the Shack. Their PI firm generally deals with cheating spouses, but both are excited when a murder accusation falls into their lap. read more

Samantha Jayne Allen: Hard Rain

by

Annie McIntyre #2

While this book centers on Annie McIntyre, a young woman who has moved back home to Garnett, Texas, to work for her grandfather’s P.I. firm, it opens with a truly spectacular flood scene (the “Hard Rain” of the title).  A woman named Bethany is spending the weekend with friends in a rental cabin when the flood sweeps her away, and she’s saved by a man who “looks like Jesus.”  He saves her, and then is swept away himself.  Fearing he’s dead, she hires her old high school buddy Annie to try and find out what happened to him. read more

November Book Club: The Godwulf Manuscript

by

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser celebrates 50 years in 2023, with the 50th birthday book being The Godwulf Manuscript.  Our book club wanted to read a classic this month, and chose Parker over Tey, Sayers, P.D. James and Ross MacDonald (Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair was a close second). Is Spenser a “classic”?  At 50 years on, it’s time to evaluate.  The first review from Kirkus in 1973 said “The publishers make the comparison to Philip Marlowe (author-professor Parker did a dissertation on Chandler-Hammett) but it won’t serve him well — there’s some of the toughness and the terseness but the hat’s much too big for him and it hasn’t got the right slouch.”  Agree? Disagree?  Join us on zoom Sunday, November 13  at 2 p.m.  to join the fray. See how Parker laid out his series with this first novel, and how he set a pattern followed by many, many others, from Harlan Coben to Robert Crais to Dennis Lehane… read more