Category: Fiction

Sleight is disorienting at first: entering the world of the book means picking up its vocabulary, the vocabulary of an imagined form of art called sleight that’s part acrobatics, part dance, but something else entirely. One character, early in the book, says sleight is “beyond anything it may have come from. Or out of”: she…

At one point in this book, the fourth of Charles Finch’s mysteries featuring amateur detective Charles Lenox, one character brings another a stack of magazines full of crime stories. “It’s what I always read when I’m sick,” he says; “Somehow having a fever makes them even more exciting.” (271) This is about how I feel…

It’s Christmas, 1866, and Charles Lenox, amateur detective, is enjoying the holiday with his brother, his brother’s wife and children, and his own betrothed, Lady Jane Grey. But the next day, Lenox reads in the papers of two murders: Winston Carruthers, a journalist/newspaper editor for a conservative paper, has been killed, as has Simon Pierce,…

The September Society is the sequel to A Beautiful Blue Death, which I wrote about here; like the first book, it’s set in Victorian England and features a wealthy amateur detective, Charles Lenox. Also like the first one, it’s sometimes a little clunky and over-explanatory—I’m thinking particularly of an aside on the Reform Act of…

Casanova’s 1780 novella is, according to the flap copy, a “thinly-veiled autobiographical work,” and tells the story of a duel that took place in 1766 between Casanova and a member of the Polish court. Having left Venice at the age of twenty-eight, fleeing the law, “the Venetian” at the center of The Duel has made…

Tricks is a book of first encounters: twenty-five hook-ups from 1978, from spring through fall. In his introduction, Roland Barthes calls a trick “the encounter which takes place only once: more than cruising, less than love: an intensity, which passes without regret” (x). The encounter may actually recur; some of these tricks may become more…

Oh, Flavia. Flavia de Luce, heroine of this book and of three others by Bradley, is the best eleven-year-old sleuth/narrator ever. When the book opens, she’s dreaming about ice-skating in an indoor rink at Buckshaw of her own making. (In the dream, she’s flooded the portrait gallery, which is in the unheated wing of the…

Saturday Keith (his parents’ seventh son, named after the day of his birth) is a poet, but he’s feeling glum after some less-than-flattering reviews of his latest book. He’s quit his job at a shipping/exports company, and ends up getting set up as manager of a fancy pub/inn owned by the mother of one of…

In Howards End is on the Landing, Susan Hill mentions The Mysterious Affair at Styles as part of a list of books with good titles, and it reminded me that I haven’t read much by Agatha Christie. Before this, I’d only read Murder on the Orient Express, and I liked detective Hercule Poirot in that…

New York, 1873: We meet a man who performs as Prospero the Enchanter; he meets his five-year-old daughter, Celia. London, 1874: Prospero the Enchanter performs: the theater is crowded and hot, the women in the audience fan themselves. Another night, another illusionist. Except not exactly, because Prospero’s magic is real: “At one point in the…