Ruth Rendell’s mysteries have a strong psychological foundation, and Road Rage, like most of her books, at least the many that I’ve read, has an edginess, an uneasiness, that violence is just around the next corner. Here, she serves up a tale of an extraordinary scheme, inspired by good intentions, that goes tragically wrong. Continue reading »
Aspiring writers are told so often about grabbing the reader right off the bat that it has become axiomatic. P.D. James provides the perfect illustration in A Taste for Death:
The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared. Continue reading »
You can count on Jonathan Kellerman to serve up a well-plotted mystery, with a disparate cast of intriguing, usually troubled characters, a fast pace and a logical conclusion. Any reader of mysteries probably knows that Kellerman has written enough mysteries/thrillers/psychological novels that he should be able to write them in his sleep. Or from a formula. Or maybe hire a co-writer. All of the above have been done by authors who have large readerships. Sometimes those do get to feeling a bit formulaic to me. Continue reading »
