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Showing posts from July, 2014

The Silkworm (A Cormoran Strike Novel) / Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

The big scuttlebutt in the publishing world last summer was the debut of crime writer Robert Galbraith, who, it was discovered in pretty short order, was none other than Harry Potter’s creator J.K. Rowling.  Of course after the true identity of the author was revealed sales skyrocketed, but the attention, it turned out, was warranted. In the first novel in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling , Galbraith/Rowling introduced the reader to a London-based detective by the name of Cormoran Strike, an ex-soldier from the war in Afghanistan, illegitimate son of a famous British rocker.  The Silkworm starts its narrative thread several months after the events in Cuckoo , in which Strike embarrassed the metropolitan police force by more or less independently solving a high-profile case involving a young Kate Moss-type character.  This time the story centers on the grisly murder of a midlist author, which grabs the tabloid headlines and captures the imagination of the capital. ...

The Hit / David Baldacci

David Baldacci is one of those authors who’s always on our bestseller shelf, and seems to crank out a new title every six months, so I thought I’d check out something light and give him a try for the July 4th long weekend.  The Hit is a Washington-based thriller with CIA operatives and CIA operatives-gone-rogue spilling brains all over our nation’s capital. It’s certainly a page-turner and if you like thrillers in the style of Robert Ludlum, Baldacci is for you. The government assassins don’t reveal much about their identities, that’s their modus operandi, but it makes for somewhat wooden characters… but then I suppose you’re not supposed to feel warm and fuzzy about guns for hire.