Epinions Recent Reviews for dickadler

Cooperman's Back -- On Wry!

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 23:02:41 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Howard Engel's latest Benny Cooperman book to appear here was actually written and published in his native Canada in 1990. But that delay turns out to give it a pleasant buzz, a frisson of regret for some of the innocence that has passed out of our lives...

A Beauty From Britain

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:58:18 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - If you haven't yet discovered the wit, taste and layers of Anthony Powell-like family interaction that make Londoner Janet Neel's mysteries such a joy, this is a fine place to start. We hear the titular "Jacobean hymn to the pleasures of death" being...

Lennon, Schmennon

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:54:53 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Although the 1980 death of John Lennon is the geographic center of music publicity pioneer Robert S. Levinson's latest celebrity-themed mystery, at its heart is a far more interesting -- and arguably more influential -- musician, the late Harry Nilsson...

Smokey Rules!

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:51:19 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Kris Nelscott, who writes science fiction under her real name, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, got an Edgar nomination for her first mystery, "A Dangerous Road," set in Memphis in 1968, where she introduced us to a black private investigator named Smokey Dalton...

Black Water Shines!

Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:47:46 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - I hope there's a Barnes & Noble in Heaven, so that Richard Condon can get an early copy of this book, which glows with the same fine blend of irony, imagination and insight he brought to his novels. There's a surprise in the form of a thrill or a wry...

Another Aussie Delight

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 19:05:26 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - The eighth of Patricia Carlon's excellent Australian mysteries to be rescued from oblivion reminds us more than any of its predecessors just how different life was in that country in the 1960s and '70s when they were originally written.

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Out of the Box

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 18:55:11 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Fine new mystery series continue to erupt out of the American West faster than even Tony Hillerman can write gushing jacket blurbs for them. C.J. Box might never have actually been a game warden like his debuting hero Joe Pickett, but as a former ranch...

A Mormon Murder

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 18:50:37 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Anyone who misses those fascinating Moroni Traveler mysteries (now sadly out of print) by Robert S. Irvine about the inner workings of the Mormon Church should rush to read this second in an immensely promising and already vastly satisfying new series...

Death and Texas

Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:29:14 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - When a first-class writer like Rick Riordan tells you who the villain is on page 15 of a 336-page book, either he has suddenly become incredibly lazy or he's setting you up. Luckily, the latter is the excuse here -- and a large part of the fun of this...

Stuffed and mounted

Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:25:26 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - If it takes a village to support an excellent police procedural series, Elizabeth Gunn's fictional one of Rutherford, Minnesota should have a statue to the genre in its town square. Her ensemble of cop characters and her deadly eye for the telling...

The Moor the Merrier

Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:21:34 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - New Orleans in 1835 was, as Barbara Hambly reminds us in astonishing depth of detail in her fifth book about Benjamin January, the most European city in America, home to two rival opera companies. January, a "free man of color" who studied both music and...

Niece Work If You Can Get It

Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:18:02 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - The surprising engine which drives all six of Randye Lordon's books about no-nonsense New York lesbian private detective Sydney Sloane is the easily-derided but absolutely elemental concept of family. Just because Sydney doesn't want children of her own...

Judge Knott Goes To Pot

Sun, 27 May 2001 17:21:50 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler -

Telling us about things we didn’t know and reminding us of facts of life that we might have forgotten are important parts of a writer’s job, and nobody performs those chores better than Margaret Maron. In the early pages of her eighth book about...

A Mystery With Leg!

Sun, 27 May 2001 17:17:50 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Just as Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen appears to have left the Italian crime-fighting scene for good, along comes a writer from Australia to happily jump in and fill the gap with a great deal of style and imagination. Marshall Browne, who won that...

In Arthur's Bosom

Sun, 27 May 2001 17:14:51 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - As a reward for her excellent series about two Brit cops, her publisher has given Deborah Crombie (the pride of the North Texas hill country) an absolutely gorgeous piece of book-making to dress up her seventh outing -- an evocative sepia photograph of...

Please Come To Boston

Sun, 27 May 2001 17:07:31 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - The publicist for Boston Teran's NEVER COUNT OUT THE DEAD calls it "a cross between 'Chinatown' and 'Macbeth,' " and for once the hyperbole is right on the money. Just as the theft of water from the Owens Valley provided the perfect real-life backdrop...

ANOTHER FINE FYFIELD

Tue, 3 Apr 2001 03:15:09 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - London lawyer Frances Fyfield writes two excellent series, but on this occasion she leaves both behind to dabble very successfully in the dark psychological waters usually stirred up by Minette Walters or Ruth Rendell writing under her Barbara Vine...

ORANGE JUICED

Tue, 3 Apr 2001 03:11:20 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Moving from mass market paperback originals into hardcover is a tightrope act for mystery writers: on one side lies a chasm of critical preconceptions ("Can this writer deliver quality goods?"); on the other a yawning gap of commercial expectations ("Is...

CHESTER COMES TO HARLEM

Wed, 21 Mar 2001 19:42:17 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - In 1955, the same year his novel "The Primitive" was published, the 46-year-old Chester Himes landed a job as a night porter at a Horn & Hardart automat in Manhattan. He wasn't slumming or searching for material: despite the fact that he had already...

Mystery of the Year?

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 19:41:21 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Nichelle D. Tramble does so many things so well in her first novel that it's hard to know where to start raving. Her setting -- the scarred streets of Oakland, California in 1989 -- leaps to life with the force of recovered memory: even if you weren't...

Julian Rules!

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 19:34:31 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Audacity can be a welcome ingredient in a mystery, especially when it's coupled with a ferocious literary ability. Jonathan Stone proved he had the latter when he created (and presumably sent to prison for life) a giant, complicated villain called...

Hong Kong Honey

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 19:30:48 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - Lydia Chin (who should be played by the gorgeous and feisty Michelle Yeoh of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" when S.J. Rozan's books about her are filmed) is riding on the subway in Hong Kong and feeling very much at home. "I could have been back in New...

Justice Is Well-Served

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 19:27:13 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - This second book about Nikki Hill, a complex and credible African American woman and prosecutor, is even better than its predecessor, THE TRIALS OF NIKKI HILL, relying less on Christopher Darden's fame as an O.J. Simpson nemesis and more on his bleak...

Insuring Our Pleasure

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 19:21:25 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler - About a third of the way into what is hopefully the start of a new series about a team of San Francisco insurance investigators, Thomas Perry demonstrates his total grip on our attention span by apparently stopping the plot dead and having one of his...

More Insights From A Blind Judge

Sun, 24 Dec 2000 20:09:04 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author dickadler -

Bruce Alexander's books about Sir John Fielding, the blind judge who founded the Bow Street Runners and handed out justice to the London of the late 18th Century, are so impeccably well-researched and carefully written that it's easy to forget how...