The Rabbit's Paw Book Reviews

  This is an historical novel set in Philadelphia before The Civil War. It is well researched, and involved some fascinating and appalling history concerning Pennsylvania and slavery which I’d never encountered in history class ( I am from Pennsylvania).  The characters in the story describe diverse experiences. For instance, there’s Nell, a young woman born into a wealthy Black family in Philadelphia, Charlotte (or Carrie), a woman who escaped a Southern plantation with her father, and James, Charlotte’s father, a talented woodworker who is passing as a rising businessman in the white community. Charlotte is posing as her father’s domestic servant, a role James keeps her tethered to to keep her safe, which unfortunately does not keep her happy. And finally, there is Evie, a close friend Charlotte left behind so unceremoniously when she ran away, and who just happens to suddenly appear in Philadelphia, but not as a free woman.  I’m impressed that the author took on the ha...

The Midnight Puzzle, by Gigi Pandian, is a creative mystery novel centered around some very unusual personalities that almost give this story the feel of being a fantasy. But then, these characters are stage magicians who live and breathe their craft in various ways.  Since this was my first Secret Staircase Mystery, I was unfamiliar with these personalities, so  it did feel that there were a lot of characters and backstories to keep track of. For instance, Tempest Raj, the protagonist, has had her stage career ruined by a tragic accident, but it was never clear to me exactly what occurred. I felt the same way about the fates of her mother and aunt. Actually, there were several  stories tucked into this book, perhaps too many to fully describe.  In the end, motives might have been revealed, but many details were not.  Tempest’s mentor, Nicodemus, is a fascinating character, and the concept of a construction company with the mission of bringing a bit of...

This novel, which is both historical fiction and thriller, was an entertaining and somewhat informative read for me. It begins in Cuba, in the year 1933. This scenario did confuse me at first, since I had not realized that Winston Churchill had a writing career, and actually observed the Cuban War of Independence, as a journalist. This was before he became the British Prime Minister in 1940.  The character development of Walter Thompson, who served as Churchill’s heroic bodyguard, was particularly engaging. In this story, Thompson tracks and chases would-be assassin Marcus Riley, an Irishman who wants revenge for the mistreatment of his people. Riley’s plans to kill the future prime minister involve several other men from different backgrounds, all demonstrating the various reasons why Churchill was not very popular. The plot of this story was suitably intricate, but I did find the pacing to be uneven. For instance, Marcus Reilly is center stage during the beginning of the book, ma...

Michael Cunningham’s latest gem, Day , is a beautifully crafted peek into one family’s complex relationships with each other, and the complicated inner lives of its individual members.  It is told in three days: April 5, 2019, April 5, 2020, and April 5, 2021.  The fulcrum of this family is Robbie, who is, at the start of this novel, living in an upstairs annex of the apartment of his sister and her family. Sister Isabel and Robbie have always had an unusually close relationship.  In addition, Robbie has also grown close to Dan, Isabel’s husband and their two children, Nathan and Violet.  As much as Robbie enjoys living with his sister’s family, and they enjoy him, Isabel and Dan’s children are getting too old to share a room, and they are becoming cramped. Robbie needs to give them back their space. While Robbie is going about doing his work as a teacher, looking for an apartment, and going through his things, we quickly learn his backstory, and the fact that he and...

West Heart Kill is a hunting camp, decades old, run and operated by a group of families who have made this quiet, remote place in the woods their private getaway from their ordinary lives. There is just one road into West Heart Kill, so during and after a damaging storm, it would seem to be a perfect place to stage a locked room mystery. (By the way, the word kill is a dutch term for a body of water.) This particular mystery was written in a way I’ve never encountered before. It’s a high concept sort of mystery novel, mixing points of view and passing around the narration baton. It’s also a meta novel, with the author letting us into some of the process. Reader is also a character. For me, unfortunately, this creative style obscured the mystery. The character development in many mysteries  isn’t deep, but when the writer leaves the story to wander down another path for a bit, it can make it hard for Reader to focus on the facts about the West Heart Kill denizens. In addition, these...

Many thanks to Raven Street Publishing and Netgalley for introducing me to Robert Bryndza. This thriller was just that, and kept my rapt attention most of the time. Maggie and Will are middle-aged professionals living the affluent life of their dreams: Maggie is a trauma surgeon, and Will has left medicine to pursue architecture, his passion. The author quickly paints a picture of a happy life together, until Will is carried into the trauma unit where his wife Maggie is working, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Maggie has a very hard time accepting the idea that Will has killed himself. She saw no signs of depression, no sign of anything amiss.  In the following days and weeks, as Maggie tries to come to grips with her new life, she travels to the vacation home they built on an island in Croatia. This is when things get scary and creepy. Once there, Maggie will discover more about a part of Will’s life he never shared with her, while alive. However, it turns out that ...

This is more than a story about a mystery. It’s a beautifully written depiction of life at a small boarding school, a microcosm in the woods. What happened there, amongst the students, was not beautiful, but the way Bodie Kane looks back on some important events, as an adult, is well expressed. Much of the novel is written to someone offstage, a character the reader will learn much more about along the way. Bodie, a successful podcaster, has returned to the Granby School, the boarding school where she spent her vulnerable teen-aged years, for a few weeks to teach a class. When she asks her students to choose a topic to investigate for their own podcast projects, one of them expresses the interest  to delve into a murder that happened at the school while Bodie was a student there, decades ago. It’s a crime for which a man named Omar is serving time, and also a controversial subject matter, since there are many people who believe the investigation was flawed, and conspiracy theories ...