Content tagged with “mystery”

“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….”

“When I read classics like this, I think to myself, ‘Man, this is so cliched…’ And then I have to remind myself: this is actually the source of the cliche. Put another way: this isn’t cliched, everything else is cliched. This is the story of Sam Spade, private eye of San Francisco in the late 1920s….”

“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…”

“A friend recommended this. It’s technically young adult fiction – the same author wrote The Fault in Our Stars . But I didn’t realize that until I was quite a bit into it. Quentin grew up next door to Margo. They were friends when they were younger. They once discovered a dead body in a park…”

“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…”

“This is technically a young adult book, I believe. It’s from the late 70s, and is fairly well-known. An eccentric millionaire dies, and leaves a game to be played by a group of people who have all moved into a new condominium building next to his mansion. The team that puts the clues together and…”