Book Review: City of Omens by Dan Werb
By Larry Clow
June 21, 2019For decades, American hungers sustained Tijuana. In this scientific detective story, a public health expert reveals what happens when a border city’s lifeline is brutally severed.
Larry Clow
Larry Clow is a writer and editor and frequent nerd trivia champion. He is working on his first book, People You May Know, about adoption and social media. He’s written for newspapers and magazines throughout New England for 15 years and is always ready to be the cleric in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Find him online at larryclow.com.
Book Review: Joe Country by Mick Herron
By Larry Clow
June 13, 2019Joe Country by Mick Herron is the sixth book in the Slough House espionage series. Though home to MI5’s least wanted, Slough House—the setting for Mick Herron’s ongoing series about unlikely spymaster Jackson Lamb and his menagerie of disgraced agents—is not without its secrets. In Herron’s sixth novel in the… Read more
Book Review: Those People by Louise Candlish
By Larry Clow
June 12, 2019From Louise Candlish, author of the international bestseller Our House, Those People is a story of domestic suspense that asks, “Could you hate your neighbor enough to plot to kill him?” There are bad neighbors—people who, say, let their dogs use your front yard as a toilet or start their… Read more
The Edgar Awards Revisited: Forfeit by Dick Francis (Best Novel; 1970)
By Larry Clow
April 26, 2019When he released Forfeit in 1969, Dick Francis was already a legend, at least among racing fans in England. As a jockey, Francis won more than 350 races between 1946 and 1957 and was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s personal jockey from 1953 to 1957. His triumphs on the track… Read more
Book Review: The Unquiet Heart by Kaite Welsh
By Larry Clow
April 5, 2019The Unquiet Heart is Kaite Welsh’s sequel to the acclaimed The Wages of Sin―and once again set in moody fin de siecle Edinburgh―Sarah Gilchrist finds herself trying to prove her fiancé’s innocence in the midst of his murder trial. The second entry in Kaite Welsh’s Sarah Gilchrist series finds the amateur… Read more
Book Review: Hollywood Godfather by Gianni Russo
By Larry Clow
April 1, 2019Hollywood Godfather is Gianni Russo’s glamorous over-the-top reflection on his time—both real-life and on-screen—spent with the Italian mob in the 1980s. Gianni Russo’s memoir, Hollywood Godfather, opens with a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s the mid-1980s and Russo is the owner of an… Read more
Book Review: Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee
By Larry Clow
March 14, 2019Smoke and Ashes is the third novel in Abir Mukherjee’s prize-winning Sam Wyndham series in which Wyndham continues to battle his opium addition, sparked by a WWI injury, as he investigates two murders, both involving similarly mutilated bodies. Unfortunately, Wyndham has a dilemma: one of the bodies is discovered in… Read more
Book Review: The Devil Aspect by Craig Russell
By Larry Clow
March 6, 2019Craig Russell’s new historical thriller The Devil Aspect centers around an asylum for the criminally insane in Prague, 1935. As a new serial killer emerges in the city, a young psychiatrist works with the asylum’s serial killer-patients to research whether they exhibit an archetype of evil called “The Devil Aspect.” Dread hangs… Read more
Book Review: Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks
By Larry Clow
February 6, 2019Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks tells the unsettling story of Swine Hill, a dying American town plagued by ghosts both real and imagined. Micah Dean Hicks’ debut novel is, like the pig men that populate its pages, a strange, discomforting hybrid. It’s an allegorical autopsy… Read more
Book Review: The Plotters by Un-su Kim
By Larry Clow
January 30, 2019The Plotters by Un-su Kim is a fantastical crime novel set in an alternate Seoul where assassination guilds compete for market dominance. In Un-su Kim’s The Plotters, the assassins who stalk the shadowy streets of Seoul’s underworld are working stiffs. Killing others for fun and profit is a living—better than… Read more