Category: Books

What happens when a cowboy decides to turn detective? It's 1893 in Montana, and Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer sign on ranch hands at the Bar VR. They're expecting hard work and little pay, but there are a lot of secrets at the ranch, and when more than one body turns up, Old Red, who in reality is only in his late 20s, decides to emulate his hero, Sherlock Holmes, and solve the case. I listened to this on audio. William Duffs was the perfect narrator. It felt like I was sitting around a campfire listening to Big Red tell about their adventures, about sticking by his brother even when he thought it was crazy, about the goings-on at the ranch and the big house, and about the other cowhands, overseers and uppity British owners. The brothers are a great team, opposites who work well together. Gustav, Old Red, is the brains, but he's a quiet fellow and can't read. Otto, Big...

I first visited The Skillet in Koehler's The Ace of Spades. It's a rough, tough, alternate Old West with a steampunk feel. Life is downright miserable for Jake Stryker, an indentured servant (slave) for the powerful, rich local family. His friend is an old Indian and they are surviving, but then a Bad Hand Man comes to town, to play a deadly game of poker with Jake's friend. Jake, the son of a dead gambler, takes the matter into his own hands and his life changes forever. But is it better or worse? The Bad Hand Man is just scary. Jake seems him as Death, as a nightmare come to life. The creature must have been at least seven feel tall, a white skeleton wrapped in a black shroud of a duster lined in faded royal purple. Its long white hair glittered like metallic filaments in the greasy light of the oil lamps strung along the walls. Its desert-blasted eyes looked sick...

This is not the first time I've read Murder on the Orient Express, probably not even the second. I've always been a fan of Agatha Christie and devoured her Poirot books when I was probably in junior high, and have never really stopped reading them. The famous Orient Express is stopped in the middle of the night by a snowstorm and in the morning the millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett is dead in his compartment, stabbed twelve times. One of the passengers must be the murderer. Hercule Poirot, who happens to be on the train, takes control of the investigation, sifting through lies and truths, clues and red herrings, to arrive at the solution. I remembered the ending, which is rather clever, and I do always enjoy Poirot denouncements, the way he takes the smallest clues and using his "little grey cells" solves the crime. This time through the characters caught my attention. Each is their own three-dimensional person, not merely another suspect....

I've mentioned before that my daughter, Amber, who is 11, loves non-fiction, but it can be tough to find books perfect for her. Ghost Liners definitely fit the bill. Robert Ballard is an explorer, an adventurer whose interests lay under the water. Beginning with the famous Titanic, he tells of five great ocean liners that sunk. Amber had actually read an excerpt from the book, the chapter about the Titanic in her reading class last year, and found it fascinating, which is what made us  read the book together. Ballard doesn't just give us a dry history of the ships- when they were built, what happened to make them sink. He makes us see the ships in their glory, know what it felt like in the last minutes of the wreck, and shows us eerie underwater photos of what remains. Some of the stories of rescues and losses are touching, and for each ship Ballard gives us a personal story. The ships that...