After panning Prior Bad Acts and Adept, I needed to read a good book. I found it in John le Carré's classic cold war spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

George Smiley, quiet, unassuming, pudgy, and easily overlooked, is recently retired from the Service (MI6, the British in­tel­li­gence agency). He is secretly tasked with finding a mole in the highest reaches of the Service, run by Karla, a KGB spymaster. The mole can only be one of the four most senior men. Smiley begins piecing together the evidence from …continue.

Pyramid Scheme is another humorous science fiction novel from the authors of Rats, Bats, and Vats and The Rats, The Bats, & The Ugly.

An alien probe, in the shape of a pyramid, lands in Chicago and starts growing rapidly. It captures some of the people in the vicinity and sends them into an alternate universe, where most of them die within hours. A handful survive and start to thrive. The new universe contains the Greek and Egyptian gods and characters from Greek mythology, including the ever-un­trust­wor­thy Odysseus.

The plot is too …continue.

A ninja with improbable abilities steals an ancient Tibetan artifact in London. David Braun, hunky insurance in­ves­ti­ga­tor cum martial artist, sets out to recover it with the aid of Susan Milton, an American researcher. I can tell you no more, because I could't bring myself to finish it.

It is rare that I abandon a book halfway through once begun, though perhaps I should more often. Adept is ludicrous and clumsily written. I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief.

Karl Dahl is about to go on trial for the obscene murders of a woman and her two young children, and everyone wants to lynch him. Judge Carey Moore rules that Dahl's prior criminal record is in­ad­mis­si­ble. Hours later, she's beaten up in the courthouse parking garage. Is it (a) an enraged member of the public, (b) the family of the murder victims, (c) a hit man sent by her estranged husband, or (d) the sidelined detective driven out of his mind by the horrors of the case? Then Karl Dahl escapes....

The …continue.

Hitchcock Sewell is an undertaker who finds the murdered body of a waitress on the front door of his funeral parlor, one winter's evening during a wake. Hitch and his weath­er­woman girlfriend, Bonnie, become obsessed with finding out who killed the waitress.

This is a fairly amusing comic mystery, with a semi-plausible but twisted plot. Hitch is a sym­pa­thet­ic character, albeit one who drinks too much and whose eye wanders.

Ninth book in the Dresden Files series of urban fantasies.

Harry Dresden is a wizard who consults with the Chicago Police on weird crimes. Molly, the rebellious teenaged daughter of an old friend, leads him to a horror fiction convention where the fans are being attacked by real monsters. Given Harry's smart mouth and talent for drawing trouble upon himself, it's not too long before he's captured by a sadistic villain who tries to auction him to his many enemies on eBay. He escapes but then has to lead a rescue mission …continue.

After reading Doomsday Book, I decided that I wanted to know more about the Black Death. And I learned a great deal from Ziegler's book.

The Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1350. It was hugely traumatic for the people of the time, with their profound ignorance of medicine and science, and it was widely viewed as a punishment from God.

Ziegler spends the first few chapters showing how the plague affected Italy, France, Germany, and other European nations, but most of the book …continue.

This is the tenth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, and it provides much of the basis for the film Master and Commander.

During the War of 1812, Captain Jack Aubrey is sent in pursuit of an American frigate, which has sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific to seize British whalers in the South Seas. Aubrey and his good friend, the surgeon Stephen Maturin, overcome many obstacles during the pursuit: the ship is badly damaged at one point, crew members are murdered, and Aubrey and Maturin …continue.

Rome has never fallen to the barbarians. The eternal city has stood for 27 centuries. Its empire has ebbed and flowed, from weak emperors who submitted to their co-emperors in Con­stan­tino­ple, to mad ones who drain the treasury, to conquerors who spread the might of Rome across the globe.

The premise is in­ter­est­ing, but the execution is weak. The book is written in a Mich­eneresque style: a series of disjointed chapters set decades or centuries apart. The viewpoint characters usually have some connection to the emperor of the time. Reviewing the front matter moments ago, …continue.

In 1912, Henry MacAlpine is a well-known British painter, living in self-imposed exile on a small island off the coast of Brittany. His old friend, William Naysmith, the renowned art critic has come to see him and have his portrait painted. Over the course of several sittings, we come to learn why MacAlpine has left London and why he has lured Naysmith to see him. Naysmith has misused his great influence as an art critic to destroy several painters.

It's extremely rare to see an entire novel written in the …continue.