Jen Miller

It’s November, which means it’s time for a new Michael Connelly book!

If you’re new here, I embarked on a project a few years ago to read all of Connelly’s works, most of them focused on his main character, Harry Bosch, a now retired LAPD detective. Resurrection Walk is about him and his half brother, Mickey Haller, the so-called Lincoln Lawyer (and even though it’s billed as a Lincoln Lawyer novel, it’s a pretty even split).

They’ve teamed up for two reasons: first, Bosch needed health insurance and to enroll in a clinical trial to treat his cancer, which Haller could provide. And second, the book opens with Haller having a conviction overturned. His client does what he calls a “Resurrection Walk” out of jail (hence the title of the book). Bosch’s job is to sort through all the requests Haller subsequently got from inmates after, to see if there was any promise in those pleas for help, in sort of a two-man Innocence Project.

Bosch finds one: a woman who was sent to jail for killing her husband, who was in the LAPD. But the facts don’t add up. I won’t say more because the plot spoilers happen early, but it’s […]

Another book from another country, though not in the language of that country: I bought The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan at the San Francisco Book Company, an English language bookstore in Paris.

The Queen of Dirt Island focuses on one family of women, starting with the birth of Saoirse. Her mother got pregnant out of wedlock, for which she is spurned by her family, even though she married the father — who was killed the day of Saoirse’s birth. His mother moves in, and the story of these women go from there, as told in short bites which each “chapter” between a page and a half to two pages long.

My takeaway was much like that of The Guest by Emma Cline: I didn’t get why I was reading about this family. I didn’t find myself caring about them (either liking them or not, because a novel can certainly be about not liking the characters). Their story wasn’t telling or related a bigger one than “being a woman is hard,” but one told by a man. I also didn’t like how he wrote one of the few women in this story who did not have children, […]

I left on this trip with only one book — gasp I know! But that’s because I knew I would want to pick up something along my travels to read. That ended up being Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed, the third in the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries series. And while my last book had nothing to do with England, this book is about as English as it gets.

It’s about a group of senior citizens in a retirement home — the Thursday Murder Club — and the latest murder they’re trying to solve: that of a young female journalist whose car was pushed off a cliff just as she was about to break a big story. It involves getting into the weeds of local British television, including the pecking order of news readers and presenters (of which Osman is one in real life), and also wound back to the murder from the previous book.

Osman fixed a problem he had with that last one, The Man Who Died Twice. You really needed to remember what happened in the first book (called The Thursday Murder Club) to understand the second, which was annoying. The Bullet That Missed doesn’t have […]

The latest in our series of Savage Run by C.J. Box. Did it occur to me that it was a bit odd that I brought a book about a Wyoming game warden to read in England? Yes. However, I also read Regency romance novels in my home in New Jersey so is it all that different?

Anyway – this is the second in Box’s Joe Pickett series about, yes, a Wyoming game warden. Like Open Season (which I did read while out west this summer), which I read earlier this year, it’s about the tension between environmentalists and people who use the land for profit, sport or both. It opens with an exploding cow. Yes, an exploding cow.

As the book progresses, we follow the two men responsible for the exploding cow, and murders of high profile people working in the environmental movement. Pickett gets involved because he investigates the cow incident, eventually puts together that these murders are connected.

It’s a quick read, and one that kept me engaged, which is why I brought it with me, to read on the flight, and then on the London Underground while zipping around London. It was the perfect book for it.

Also a […]

It is time, once again (and if you’ve been here a while, you know what I’m going to stay) for me to continue on my quest to read every book about Italy written in the English language.

Now up: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. The novel opens on a small, remote Italian town where Pasquale, who has named the hotel he inherited The Adequate View, welcomes a dazzling stranger: Dee Moray, an American actress sent from the set of Cleopatra to recover from whatever is making her sick.

When the book started here, I was excited to dig in. I have long said someone should make a biopic about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton swanning around Rome during their budding love affair. Even if the book wasn’t about exactly that, it was Italy! In the 1962! Let’s go!

But then the action skips suddenly to modern day (the book was published in 2012) Hollywood to Claire, an unhappy production assistant with a porn-addicted boyfriend. Over the course of the novel, these two stories are awkwardly knit together.

Some of the turns the plot takes along the way are so predictable I rolled my eyes, and others so outlandish that I did the same […]

In The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman, twin sisters Ladies Augusta and Julia Colebrook are in a unique position. They are 42 years old, and unmarried, but have their own money. Like other women their age in Regency London, they don’t have a lot of power, but unlike other “spinsters,” they are not 100% beholden to male relatives or partners.

So what do they do? Become vigilantes, of a sort, and help women and girls in need by doing things like getting back letters a man is using to blackmail his former lover, escape abusive husbands, rescue children from being forced into sex work, and infiltrating a women’s mental institution that is using its patients for profit.

The story is told from Lady Augusta’s point of view, and when she decides this is what she’s going to do, she thinks, “For myself, I no longer believed that this world was mere preparation for the next. This was all the life I would have, and I had to do as much with it as possible.”

While it’s set in Regency London, as many of the historical romances I read are, it’s not a romance. Instead, it’s billed as a “feminist […]