Ordinary Bear, by C.B. Bernard
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I was driving somewhere about three years ago (it was Target, who am I kidding, it’s always Target) when traffic came to a sudden stop. Something was blocking the road about fifty feet ahead of me, causing cars to make a wide arc into oncoming traffic, which had also stopped. When it was my time […]
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto
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What to read when… …your boyfriend’s moved in and you’re trying really hard to be normal about it. It had been 13 years since a man lived in my house, and for all the ways his nearness turned me into a warm gooey brownie inside, his permanent presence in my previously unmanned house baked me […]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
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Any book that opens with fork-stabbed poodle-death is story that must be read, if only to give the author the chance to redeem himself, which Haddon 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
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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 […]