reviews

Tornadoes, Hidden Wills, and Treachery Author: Connie Feddersen Book two in the Amanda Hazard cozy mystery series starts as any good cozy should: with a darkening storm, an isolated farm, and a dead body. It begins when Amanda comes to visit her cantankerous client, the isolated and generally disliked, Elmer Jolly. Already her not-so-great for the rural wilds of Oklahoma car is having issues with the pitted country backwoods roads. And there is no help out here. With lowering storm clouds, all she has seen is one speeding pickup truck, and little to no shelter.  When she gets to Jolly’s [...]

How to Make a Sensationalistic Case Boring Author: Cara Robertson Having just finished Sarah Schmidt’s See What I Have Done, a fictitious imaging of that humid summer’s day in 1892 when Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally axed to death, I decided I wanted to know a bit more about the real, non-fictitious murder. This was my first dip into the world of true crime non-fiction and there were a LOT of books on Lizzie’s life and the events that led up to the eventual, seemingly surprising “not guilty” verdict. With its high ratings, relative newness, and easy availability, the audio [...]

Frontier on fire... Author:  Timothy Egan The new frontier was open for business.  As white Americans spread west across North America, sweeping aside any inhabitants who got in their way, it became clear that there were vast natural resources to be had. In the late 1800s, those with even a smattering of prescience realized that the plundering was just getting started.  Something would have to be done to make use of Nature’s abundance in a rational manner.  Maybe more than anyone, President Theodore Roosevelt was instrumental in promoting this view, but it wasn’t until 1910 following an unprecedentedly massive forest [...]