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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