12/6/2009
Yellow Submarine and combating Blue Meanies...
For all those who hold the dream of living in a Yellow Submarine and combating Blue Meanies, Chronicle Books has three new stationery products, all of which have illustrations from the animated movie. The first of these...Yellow Submarine notepads...come in four versions, each with a different...
6/16/2008
You waited 2 decades for the new Indiana Jones movie--now, see it twice.
Hmm . . . where to begin. Indiana Jones fans waited almost two decades and heard so many rumors, that many came to doubt they would ever see another film in the series. I finally started to believe in Indy IV when, by chance, I found myself on the film's set while visiting Yale University last...
9/17/2007
Another boffo Robert P. Parker mystery with Jesse Stone and Sonny Randall.
I claim to prefer mysteries where the detective's personal life does not intrude upon the story or at least doesn't get in the way much -- ten people are in a mansion on the moors, one gets poisoned, and Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot sort out the clues and pronounce who the murderer is. Nice...
3/10/2007
Blackie Ryan delves into a 60-year-old tragedy to solve a modern mystery.
When three murdered corpses turn up in St. Lucy's church in Chicago, Cardinal Sean Cronin dispatches his auxiliary bishop, Blackie Ryan, to the old neighborhood to solve the crime. In one of his best Blackie Ryan stories yet, Andrew Greeley weaves together a charismatic Polish monsignor, an...
1/16/2007
Good dialog, but not much action
April Kyle, the madam of a high class house of prostitution in Boston enlists the help of PI Spenser to protect her establishment from thugs hired to disrupt the business. Spenser had known April as a young girl and twice gotten her out of bad scrapes in earlier novels-- Ceremony (1982) and Taming...
1/16/2007
Rumpole back in the Old Bailey in fine form.
Barrister Horace Rumpole, though seemingly close to his demise a couple of books ago, is back in chambers and hale and hearty in this outing, still spouting lines from the Oxford Book of English Verse. Rumpole has been hired to defend a Pakistani doctor who has lived and practiced medicine in...
1/16/2007
Chowder the bulldog finds friends.
Chowder is a bulldog who doesn't fit in with other dogs in the neighborhood. They think he is weird. Actually, the only creatures who don't find Chowder strange are his owners, Madge and Bernie Wubbington. Perhaps we should call them Chowder's human companions. Anyway, Chowder seems happier...
1/16/2007
Rollicking variation of the the nursery rhyme.
The Dish and the Spoon are the main characters in this book which plays wild variations on the old nursery rhyme:Hey, diddle diddle, The cat and the fiddle,The cow jumped over the moon,The little dog laughed to see such sport,And the dish ran away with the spoon.The best word for this story is...
4/2/2006
B&B owner and amateur detective Judith McMonigle returns in the 20th mystery in this series.
A decrepit mansion, a pair of curious (nosy, some would say) cousins, a mysterious package, a body found in the trunk of a car, and a cast of suspicious characters add up to make Mary Daheim's 'This Old Souse' a pleasant diversion for lovers of cozy mysteries. Set in the Pacific Northwest, this is...
3/14/2006
A cozy and well-plotted addition to the Grace & Favor series.
The brother and sister team, Lily and Robert Brewster, return in 'It Had to Be You'. This cozy mystery is set in New York's Hudson Valley in 1933, as President Franklin Roosevelt was beginning to deal with the Great Depression. Lily and Robert, whose family wealth mostly disappeared in the Crash...
