reviews

Sci-Fi Meets Horror Meets Medical Thriller Author: Scott Sigler Merging the pretentions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a modern medical thriller, Infected showcases graphic body gore against paranoia, government level conspiracy, and a mystery plague. Dew Phillips, hardened CIA operative with a personal revenge motive, is helping to keep the bizarre new plague hush-hush while searching for a live subject. Again and again, he arrives just at the violent end, finding raving victims, tortured bodies, insanely suicidal murderers, and disturbed clues scrawled in fresh viscera. The infected themselves, after provoking death rather than capture, quickly dissolve into a [...]

Keeping Up with the Joneses in Modern India Author: Diksha Basu The Windfall, originally a Book of the Month pick in 2017, tells the story of an average, well-to-do Indian family who come into a sudden windfall and nearly crash under the social pressures of their new status. It’s a “keeping up with the Jones” type of story with a little humor, a lot of bite, and an undertone of sadness. Mr. Jha has worked hard to build his unique services website idea, managing to hold onto a shabby apartment in an average Delhi suburb and send his son, Rupak, [...]

Green thumb giant... Author:  Jack Nisbet I haven’t performed exhaustive research, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and make the observation that there aren’t a lot of high schools in the United States named for botanists.   But then there aren’t a lot of botanists as impressive as David Douglas, the early 19th century Scottish botanist and namesake for David Douglas High School** in Portland, Oregon.  Award winning writer and naturalist Jack Nisbet tells his remarkable story in The Collector. The young Mr. Douglas. Commissioned by the London Horticultural Society, Douglas traveled much of North [...]