Month: August 2022
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“Magpie Murders” by Anthony Horowitz
A charming 1950 English village Saxby-on-Avon is the setting of Anthony Horowitz’s whodunit “Magpie Murders.” It’s a little bit of Sherlock Holmes, a nod to Agatha Christie, and perhaps a tad of “Midsummer Murders” (the analogy mentioned in the book.) This story within a story has a book editor, Susan Ryeland, trying to solve an…
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“Elizabeth Finch” by Julian Barnes
“She stood before us, without notes, books, or nerves.” This is the first sentence of Julian Barnes’s new novel and the introduction of Elizabeth Finch, a writer and an adult education teacher. Her favorite student, the novel’s narrator Neal, tells us: “She was, quite simply, the most grown-up person I have met in my life.…
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“The Guest List” by Lucy Foley
If only a person’s evil deeds could be seen in a portrait, as in the case of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose picture looks worse and worse following the moral decline of Dorian… But in Lucy Foley’s mystery, “The Guest List,” when the man with no ethical rules, Will Slater, looks in the mirror, his…
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“Why Read” by Will Self
Why read? Reading is such a personal, unique experience for humans. And we vary significantly in what we decide to read. The new collection of essays by Will Self will undoubtedly make a reader reflect on the reading process – that is, on absorbing the text created by another human being, based on that person’s…
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“The Maid” by Nita Prose
Molly works as a maid in the Regency Grand, a five-star hotel. In her words, this is the work she was born to do. Every morning she puts on her maid uniform and gets her trolley. “There’s nothing quite like a perfectly stocked maid’s trolley early in the morning. It is, in my humble opinion,…
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“Two Nights in Lisbon” by Chris Pavone
Ariel Pryce is an attractive woman in her mid-forties, recently married to a much younger man, John, who suggested she accompany him on his business trip to Lisbon. After their first passionate night in a Lisbon hotel, Ariel wakes up and discovers her husband is gone. Stranded in a foreign country, she proves quick-thinking and…
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