Browsing Area Book of the Week, January 28, 2013.

A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake.  Library Call Number:PR6102.L347D37 2012.

         Coroner Titus Cragg is called from breakfast by a servant boy from Garlick Hall-- home of the prestigious county squire—with ghastly news.  The squire’s wife, Dolores Brockletower, has been found in the woods with her throat savagely slashed.  So begins an English mystery in the time of King George II.  Relying on wits and the help of his friend, the learned doctor Luke Fidelis, Cragg needs to quickly unravel the roots of the murder.  Was it the work of anatomists, who ply their trade illegally?  Could it have been the result of those jealous of the squire, or the lady, or those in line to inherit the land and Hall of the Brockletowers? Was it, as some of the common people believe, an act of Woodoo?  For Dolores was not of English lands, being a West Indies planter’s daughter brought home by the squire in his sailing days. 
          An historical mystery with lots of the flavor of the age, Blake’s book is a surprising juxtaposition of the old and new and the result is a satisfying jump into the 18^th century.

Library Video of the Week, October 8, 2012

To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, directed by Howard Hawks. (1945.) Written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

            A film most notable for being the first screen appearance of Bogart and Bacall as a duo, this pick from the Library’s classic collection features great dialog and undeniable sparks from the stars.  Bogart plays essentially the same character he played in Casablanca—the expatriate American who doesn’t want to get involved in the World War but finds himself drawn into a fight between the Free French of Caribbean Martinique and the Nazi collaborators of Vichy France who run the island.   Unlike Casablanca, this time Bogart gets the girl.  Spare in settings, the action and characters carry what is arguably one of the Bogart/Bacall team’s best movies.
           If you haven’t seen it for awhile, or if you’ve never sen it, add it to you watch list.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, September 10, 2012.

 

The Holy Thief by William Ryan.  Library Call Number: PR6118.Y37H65 2010.

          In 1936 Moscow, Captain Alexei Korolev of the Moscow Militia must investigate the mutilation killing of a young American nun in a deconsecrated church.  Because the woman is a foreigner, the case attracts the attention of the NKVD—Stalin’s dreaded secret police—and soon Korolev finds himself reluctantly patnered with an NKVD investigator named Colonel Gregorin.  Stalin has begun the great purges and one denunciation from any source can lead a person to be disappeared to a gulag, never to return.  It’s a bad time to be an honest cop in a city full of politics, intrigue and suspicion. 
          A well-reviewed first novel, with similarities to the best of Martin Cruz Smith's more contemporary Russian Inspector, Arkady Renko, or Philip Kerr's German Bernie Guenther.