Category: Books

Photo credit: Destination360 B is for Borneo, the third largest island in the world, located south and east of the Malay Peninsula and southwest of the Philippine Islands. The island is divided among three countries: Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, and is home to one of the oldest rainforests in the world. It's a beautiful land, full of flowers, trees, birds, and mammals, like orangutans and Asian elephants. In Borneo Tom- In Story and Sketch: Love, Travela and Jungle Family in Tropical Asia, Tom McLaughlin does what most of us can only dream of. He drops it all and moves to paradise, taking us along on his adventures. Boreno Tom is not exactly a memoir and it's not exactly a travel book. It's a collection of essays, covering everything from the Festival of the Hungry Ghost in Kuching to experiencing an earthquake in Indonesia. He snorkels with jellyfish, meets orangutans and treks to see a corpse flower. Each story is told with humor...

So, I finally got around to listening to the first of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, Whose Body? As a lover of vintage mysteries, it's really a shame that it's taken me so long to read anything by Sayers, one of the original "Queens of Crime." I think I need to read a couple more, though, to really appreciate the series; this first novel, while enjoyable, wasn't outstanding to me. While this is the first in the series, it's not Wimsey's first case. By the time this one opens, his interest in mysteries is well-known, so it's quite reasonable for Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, to call him on behalf of a Mr. Thipps, as there is a dead body in Mr. Thipps’ bathtub. Lord Peter has a look around and realizes the official police force is on the completely wrong track, as an incompetent Inspector Sugg suspects Mr. Thipps or the housemaid and her boyfriend in spite of the evidence. Meanwhile, Wimsey’s...

It becomes harder for me to review books after I've read several in a series. For regular followers, redescribing the main characters and the style of the book may just be a repeat of what I've said before. That's not so much a problem with Marsh's books, though. Although her detective, Roderick Alleyn, shows up in all of them, they are each very different books, from setting to minor characters to the reasons behind the crimes. In Black as He's Painted, the "Boomer," an old school friend of Alleyn's is now the president/dictator of a fictional emerging African nation, Ng'ombwana, is in London. I forgot why- a meeting of some kind I'm sure. Anyway, he's notoriously difficult to protect, disdaining body guards and local police, seeming to feel more or less untouchable. However, he's got all kinds of enemies, from ex-colonists to new rivals, from dispossessed businessmen to racist crackpots. At a reception at the embassy, an attempt is presumably made on his...

Is it reasonable to apologize to a book? If so, I have to say I'm sorry to A Will to Murder by Hilary Thomson. I'm sorry I almost put you down halfway through, but how was I to know that the second half was going to be so much better than the first? I'm sorry I said you were boring and that I just didn't care about any of the characters, when after the will reading, it all picked up so quickly, from the dead bodies piling up to the humorous bits making me laugh out loud. A Will to Murder started off rather uniquely. James Boyle is an eccentric, wealthy man, who dies, whether from embarassment or a heart attack when rap music blasts from his antique car during a drive through town. Is it a prank gone awry or truly murder? The whole family gathers at Rollingwood estate for the will reading, from close relatives, to his estranged daughter, to...