reviews

The anti-Bond... Author:  Andrew Lownie He may have been one of the more bizarre characters in British history.   And that’s saying something.  If you were to create a fictional character as foul and decadent as Guy Burgess, it’s likely that you’d be accused of excess and exaggeration.  One of the Cambridge Five – a loosely organized gang of Brits who spied for the Soviet Union – Burgess gained notoriety when he disappeared in May 1951.  When he eventually resurfaced in Moscow five years later, it became clear that he’d been spying for the better part of two decades.  Published in [...]

Friends and Enemies Author: Louise Penny In Three Pines the art of life and the shattering surrealism of death are once again comingling. Clara Morrow, village favorite, is finally making her way into the art world with a solo show at the esteemed Musée. But just as her future looks bright, an echo from the past returns, winding up dead among her  garden flowers on the night of her celebrated garden party. Now Chief Inspector Gamache and his haunted assistant Detective Beauvoir are back on the beat to unravel a tale decades in the making. Why has Lillian Dyson, at [...]

Bouquets of Thistle  Author: Vanessa Diffenbaugh The nature of Victoria Jones’ soul is to communicate with flowers. Thistles for misanthropy. Peonies for anger. Basil for hate. Victoria never knew her parents and has spent her short life hustled from one failed foster home to another, only ever getting close one time, the last time, to being someone’s real daughter. After that it was group homes, fires dancing on the foot of her bed her final I-hate-you before she escapes the disappointed grasp of her social services worker and takes on a semi-feral life. Victoria is hard, but not, oddly, as [...]