Malice Domestic, an annual convention held in Washington, D.C., honoring the best of the traditional/cozy mystery genre, has announced the nominees for 2017's Agatha Awards. Loosely defined as “mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence,” the Agatha Award salutes the books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie. This year,…
The 2017 Left Coast Crime “Lefty” Awards nominations are up! The Lefty Awards are fan-based, chosen by registered members of the Left Coast Crime convention. Nominations for awards to be presented at each annual convention are made by people registered for that convention and also the immediately prior convention. The 27th annual LCC convention, Left Coast Crime…
2016 was a MONSTER year for books! From a new John Hart to Louise Penny's 12th Inspector Gamache novel, we've had plenty to read and plenty more still on our TBR list. With 2017 right around the corner, we present our picks for the best books of 2016:
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the last book in the Inspector Gamache series to date. It is the very satisfying culmination of several important series plot points, including the very puzzling question of why Three Pines—the peaceful, if occasionally murder-prone, village that provides safe harbor throughout most of the books—cannot be found on any…
Those of you who have been following this column will know that I was not particularly happy with the ending of the previous book in the series. I was very much looking to this one to assuage my fears as to whether Louise Penny was an author I could implicitly trust with the difficult, moral…
I think this is the first time that I have vehemently disagreed with the direction an Inspector Gamache novel took. I mean, even in my disbelief at the ending of The Brutal Telling, I felt confident in Louise Penny’s storytelling skills that it would all eventually make sense (and it did in the novel that…
This was the first book I ever read in the Inspector Gamache series—back when it first came out—and, boy, was that a mistake! I only realized this upon reading the preceding eight novels, then re-reading this one. I missed so much by starting here first! Back when How the Light Gets In first came out,…
The bad news is that we hear virtually nothing of the village of Three Pines and its inhabitants in this 8th installment of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. The good news is that Ms. Penny has instead decided to tackle one of the greatest mysteries in music history! Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his second-in-command,…
I was an information technology major in college, and in one exam, we were asked to write a program involving the colors black and white. Having an artistic bent, I named it Chiaroscuro, to the bemusement of my lecturer (and several of my classmates, who reacted in much the same way Inspector Beauvoir does to…
One of my favorite things in life is saying “I told you so,” so if you read my review of The Brutal Telling, you’ll understand why my satisfaction with Bury Your Dead goes beyond an appreciation of the elegant storytelling and excellent plot. It’s so very nice, six books into Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series,…
