crime/detective

See What I Have Done: Sarah Schmidt’s Fictional Take On The Controversial Murder

27th June 2017 by Gemma 2 Comments

See What I Have Done Sarah Schmidt

See What I Have Done is the debut novel of Australian author Sarah Schmidt about the famous axe murders in 1892 at Massachusetts, USA. It was famously thought to have been committed by the victims’ daughter, Lizzie Borden. Lizzie was acquitted but remains to be the prime suspect even after her death — everyone is convinced she was the murderer, and it remains a subject of speculation more than a century after the events.

Sarah was inspired to tell write a book about this more than a decade ago from a pamphlet she found at a secondhand bookshop. …

Top Ten Tuesday: 2016 Releases I Meant To Read (But Didn’t Get To)

10th January 2017 by Gemma 4 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. More information, plus future topics can be found on this page. This week was ‘2016 Releases I Meant To Read’.

I thought I’d do these prompts at least once (or twice?) a month since I seem to fare better at having one on instagram. Maybe it’ll make me a more regular blogger!

So I kept my ears quite close to the ground last year when it came to new book releases, and I have more than a handful of books published in 2016. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how to balance reading with bookstagram and blogging, so I didn’t manage to read most of them (although I’m sure most readers always feel they haven’t read as much as they would have wanted in a year). I have to re-think my book purchases for this year, which is a post for another day!

Anyway, here are some of the books that were published in 2016, and I will hopefully get to tick them off the TBR list before the end of this year. …

On The Nightstand: Maestra

27th May 2016 by Gemma 1 Comment

Maestra is billed as the “most shocking thriller of the year”, which I thought was a bit early to say considering it came out very early this year in March. Although who am I to say, since The Girl on the Train came out in January 2015 and still seems to be doing relatively well in the market? Maestra did get picked up for a movie much quicker than The Girl on the Train did, and it will be an easier sell — the book does contain sex, money, and murder, and isn’t that easily marketable?

Originally released in the UK by independent publisher Zaffre (an imprint of Bonnier Publishing), Maestra is written by L. S. Hilton, an Oxford graduate of English who also studied Art History in Florence and Paris. From my Google research, I can deduce that she is more widely known for her historical fiction and biographies which are published as being written by Lisa Hilton. Her Maestra pseudonym was taken under the advisement of its publisher, to separate her historical reputation from this erotic thriller¹.

I have not read her other books, but again, we can surmise that the woman has had practise in the art of writing with the seven or so previously published books in her list of works. I point this out because Maestra will be and is already often compared to the infamous Fifty Shades of Grey because of its erotic content, but I find this a disservice to the book …

From the Publisher’s Desk: Dandy Gilver & the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

19th May 2016 by Gemma Leave a Comment

Dandy Gilver & the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom is a book of the mystery genre, written by Catriona McPherson. Set in Glasgow in 1932, Dandy and her detective partner Alec Osborne are immersed in the world of competitive ballroom dancing as they uncover secrets, deal with rivalries, and, of course, death threats.

Firstly — I must admit that I have not heard of Dandy Gilver prior to getting this paperback*. As it turns out, this is the tenth book in the series, with another one coming out July of this year in the UK. So while I am ignorant of these books until recently, they are undoubtedly popular.

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Book Club Read: I Am Pilgrim

4th September 2015 by Gemma Leave a Comment

I came upon this book via one of the girls from book club, when we were on a crime/thriller spree earlier this year. It was published two summers ago in 2013, and a year later, its movie rights were bought by MGM. The author, Terry Hayes, used to be a journalist (a foreign correspondent in the US for the Sydney Morning Herald who covered the Nixon/Watergate scandal) but his writing skills have been more recently used for screenwriting (although by recent, I meant late 90s to early 2000). His latest venture has been the book I Am Pilgrim, and I reckon he’s probably also involved in the screenwriting process for the movie.

The book’s opening scene starts with quite a big splash — a crime scene in central New York, a ‘remarkable murder’ as described by the main protagonist in first person POV. From there everything just runs, trickles of information coming out about the mystery, about our main man and his past adventures, about another man miles away in the Middle East and his own journey, and how they come together as opposing sides in the fight of “good vs evil”.

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