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Meeting Harlan Coban’s Myron Bolitar For The First Time
Where has this book been all my life? On the bookshelf of your local store, just waiting to be read. We’ve Only Just Met After All This Time Harlan Coben has been writing professionally since 1990 but he really became famous for the Myron Bolitar series, starting in 1995. I’ve known about Coben for a long time. Multiple best-sellers every time he publishes a book. Multiple adaptations of his stories on TV. And, recently, the professor of a BBC Maestro online class that helps writers craft thrillers. I’m always game to learn—especially from an acknowledged veteran of the genre—so I bought the class. While listening to Coben talk in the…
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Grocery Store Books and My First Stuart Woods Novel
We’re all book nerds here, right? Do you know where all bookstores in your town are located? Do you frequent independent bookstores where the folks see you and greet you by name? When you travel, do you plan on visiting bookstores in other towns? Do you sign up for newsletters from your favorite authors? Do you know publication dates of books by your favorite authors and clear your reading schedule so you’ll be able to start reading the day that book is released? Do you max out your allowable checkouts at your local library? Do you have more books in your house than you’ll ever be able to read in…
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Start Your Summer Reading Season With Tom Straw and Matt Goldman
I walked into Murder by the Book on Wednesday knowing one author. I left knowing two. I’ve enjoyed Tom Straw’s writing before I knew who Tom Straw was. Back in the fall of 2009, the second season of “Castle” premiered on our TV screens, but HEAT WAVE, the first book “written by” Richard Castle, showed up on bookshelves. What was this meta magic? Nearly every fall after 2009, when a new Castle season started there was a Castle book. What made the books great was this: unlike the TV show characters Castle and Beckett, their counterparts, Jameson Rook and Nikki Heat, actually got together. It was the mirror universe of…
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Let Clive Cussler’s The Heist Steal Your Mind and Attention
Clive Cussler knew his readers. The prolific author wrote over sixty books in his lifetime (he died in 2020 at age 88) spread across five main series: Dirk Pitt, Sam and Remi Fargo, the Oregon files, and Kurt Austin. But it is the Isaac Bell series that captured my attention from the jump. The Isaac Bell series features the titular character, the lead detective of the Van Dorn detective agency. As ruggedly handsome as you can imagine, dogged in his determination to find the culprit, and devoted to justice, Bell is the kind of man you want on your side. All of the stories are set in the early 20th…
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Can Anyone Get Away With Murder? Here Are Eight Answers
The last book I read in 2023 was the Christmas novella, The Christmas Guest, by a new-to-me writer, Peter Swanson. I thoroughly enjoyed the holiday-themed story—and the twist—that I wanted to read another novel by the author. So the first book of 2024 I read was another Swanson book. But where to start? How about a novel featuring famous literary murders? Eight Perfect Murders is Swanson’s sixth novel. It stars Malcolm Kershaw, the owner of a mystery bookstore in Boston. In first-person POV, Malcolm tells us the story of how an FBI agent, Gwen Mulvey, comes to ask Malcolm for his insight into a few murders that may or may…
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What’s Scary Is If You Don’t Read Trick or Treat Murder by Leslie Meier
As I wrote last October, if there’s a holiday and you want to read a mystery featuring that holiday, Leslie Meier has you covered. Starting in 1991, Meier has written 36 mysteries starring Lucy Stone, a mom, wife, and citizen of Tinker’s Cove, Maine. The first book I read, Back to School Murder (the 4th overall), Lucy fills in at the local newspaper and that’s what gets the crime on her radar. Trick or Treat Murder (1996) is the third book, but first of her Halloween stories and I reckoned I might as well start there. It’s Almost All a Domestic Story… A series is nothing if you don’t like…
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Intentional Reading
Do you ever feel left out of a conversation? It’s only mid-January and while the year is still brand-new, the old year still has a few remnants lingering. The biggest me for is the various Best Of lists still readily available. I read many of them—books, TV, movies, music—and made an interesting observation about the book ones: I read few of them and could not contribute to the conversation. I’m an avid reader I have anywhere from 2-5 books going on all at once. Well, let me clarify: I’m re-reading Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic in 2023 so I’m only reading a page a day, but it’s still active. I’m…