BOOKLOVES

She is twenty years old. She wears tailored knickerbockers and suspenders and a ribbon in her hair, paints the classroom windows of a school she does not attend, and calls the man who is technically her stepbrother her brother. Everyone who loves her uses the name Anna-Katherine. The name on her birth certificate is Sophia, […]

There is a single sentence about her in five hundred pages. Reginald Johnston, tutor to the last emperor, wrote his memoir in 1934 and mentioned in passing that a Miss Isabel Ingram, the empress’s American friend, sometimes joined their picnics in the garden. That is all. She had spent two years in the Forbidden City, […]

Count the chapters. The first section of this novel runs ten of them, unhurried, long enough to establish six friendships, one recent catastrophe and a venue. The sixth section is a single chapter and it is over in nine pages. Nothing in the text announces this. The reader simply begins to feel the floor tilting, […]

A past obsession turns into a deadly game of cat and mouse between a serial killer and his hero. Killer Looks is an intriguing psychological mystery where every move becomes part of a twisted addictive puzzle. The question isn’t who committed the murders, we already know that. Instead, it is whether detectives can catch him […]

Some books ask you to suspend disbelief. Better Angel asks you to suspend certainty. Caryn Green has written one of the most original speculative novels I’ve encountered in years, though even that label feels too narrow. Blending historical fiction, political commentary, philosophy, and an affectionate character study of Abraham Lincoln, Better Angel becomes something wholly […]

The weekly report is late. It is always late, because Debra in Accounting has never once filed it on time, and the receptionist whose job it is to chase her has learned to build the chase into her Thursday. Then Debra turns up in the boss’s office speaking in a voice that is not hers, […]