Content tagged with “mystery” under “My Library”

“I read this book because I loved Red Storm Rising (which Bond co-wrote) when I was in high school, and was looking for a way to recapture that. The result was mixed. This book was less ‘nation states at war’ and more ‘special forces beats the terrorists.’ The plot was very human-oriented, which…”

“I literally picked up this book because I’ve always been intrigued by The Knowledge, which is the test of city geography that London’s black cab drivers have to pass before they get licensed. It’s considered one of the hardest tests in the world. This book has very little to do with The Knowledge….”

“I had just seen the movie, so I knew what the big plot twist was. In that sense, I was reading it less for the story, and more to get a feel for how Christie wrote. Turns out, she writes well – very clear, with a minimum of fluff. And perhaps unsurprising given the context of her hero, there’s…”

“One of my daughter’s friends left this in my car after she borrowed it to drive to a Pitbull concert in Omaha. So I read it. Five students get mysteriously pranked into serving detention together. One of them dies from an allergic reaction. Who did it? The format of the book is interesting. Each…”

“My neighbor bought me this for my 50th birthday as a joke. Just to spite him, I read it. It’s about what you would expect. It was written in 1962 and it shows. Lots of ‘fellows’ and ‘chums’ and ‘nifty.’ Also, lots of exclamation points and adverbs. No one just ‘runs,’ they always ‘run quickly!’…”

“I’m an old-school James Bond fan. I’ve read every original novel (the Fleming novels), and most the later novels (Gardener, Benson, and some others). I’ll come out and say it: this is the best non-Fleming Bond novel I’ve ever read. It’s divided into two parts. The first is Bond’s mission in a small…”

“Entertaining, but not the best Bond I’ve read. It involves Bond racing at Le Mans, which is new, and there’s a very interesting post-script about how this was Ian Fleming’s idea, and Horowitz used Fleming’s notes for the basis of the first part of the story. The main plot is pretty fantastical. It…”