The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon

Any book that starts with fork-stabbed poodle-death is story that must be read, if only to give it the chance to redeem itself, which this one does, and much, much more. With the creation of 15-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone—self-proclaimed poodle murder-solver, who uses an emoji chart to translate human emotion and quadratic equations to […]
Case Histories: A Novel (Jackson Brodie, 1), by Kate Atkinson

You know something is about to go horribly wrong from the first line of this crime fiction book, even though the line reads innocuously enough—“How lucky were they?”—which is a tribute to Atkinson’s deft skill. I won’t spoil this intricately-weaved set of stories except to say that style-wise, Atkinson does something in the books that […]