Links to book reviews.
In my parents’ attic there’s a black and white photo of my maternal grandparents, Inabel and Carl, from the days when they were “courting.” It was taken in the mid 1920s a few years before the Dust Bowl nearly destroyed the agriculture and prairies of… Read More »Writer’s Club Review – Lucky Strikes, by Louis Bayard
GUILTY MINDS by Joseph Finder While Sweet Smell of Success is a widely heralded as a 1957 film noir, its plot description on your Netflix envelope won’t mention murder or blackmail or any other characteristics associated with the genre. In fact it sounds almost tame… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – Guilty Minds, by Joseph Finder
Most of us regular guys and gals are a lot alike. We go to work and take orders from someone above us five days a week. We’re anchored to our residences by the mortgages or rent we have to pay every month. We don’t… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – MAKE ME, by Lee Child
Narratives are powerful. They’re the reason why Donald Trump, with his Make America Great Again slogan, will win a disturbingly large share of the popular vote in the presidential election. They’re the fuel that turbo-charged headlines about an exotic dancer who was supposedly… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – THE WAYS OF THE DEAD, by Neely Tucker, and THE FALL, by John Lescroart
I subscribed to the print edition of Entertainment Weekly for years, and always flipped to the book reviews written by Gillian Flynn first. That’s one reason why her name was familiar to me long before the astounding success of Gone Girl. The other reason… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – SHARP OBJECTS and DARK PLACES, by Gillian Flynn
A couple of decades ago an editor at one of the big publishing houses talked with me about the proliferation of “woman-in-jeopardy” plots filling the drug store bookshelves and occasionally making their way onto bestseller lists. She was cranky about the lookalike plots incorporating stalking… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – FIND HER, and many other books by Lisa Gardner
Crazy Love You by Lisa Unger “Worldbuilding” is a term that typically describes the process of creating the richly detailed alternate realities we find in works ranging from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones to the Harry Potter series. These settings are overtly… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – CRAZY LOVE YOU by Lisa Unger
HIT AND RUN, by Doug Johnstone A driving factor of successful storytelling is your true belief, as the writer, in the story you’re telling. Meaning, you often feel as if you’re reporting it as opposed to creating it, because there’s absolutely no doubt that it’s… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – HIT AND RUN BY DOUG JOHNSTONE
THE KIND WORTH KILLING By Peter Swanson I went through a bad spell at my day job a few years ago. It began in March. I was working for a woman who had been a friend for over three years.She’d always had a reputation for… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – THE KIND WORTH KILLING by Peter Swanson
ROGUE MISSION by Jeffrey S. Stephens Thriller writers can evoke different kinds of fear. There’s that boogeyman kind of fear you feel as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs heads down the stairs to the basement where Jame Gumb is waiting to cut… Read More »WRITER’S CLUB REVIEW – ROGUE MISSION by Jeffrey S. Stephens