Taiwanese author Chang Kou-Li delivers an action thriller this week. With its North American debut, The Sniper, is available now from House of Anansi Press, features a translation by Roddy Flagg and reads like the best of Hong Kong cinema. There are action beats, police investigations, involving characters and a weaving story that takes you…
Category: The Book Shelf
Star Trek: The Fearful Summons (1995) – Denny Martin Flinn
Space, the final frontier… I take up the journey with Kirk and company again this week, and was delighted in how most of The Fearful Summons read. It’s a fast read, and has the pacing of a screenplay, and even reading it, you can tell what things would be edited out of the film, or…
Battlestar Galactica 4: The Young Warriors (1980) – Robert Thurston and Glen A. Larson
Robert Thurston delivers a full length novel based on a single episode of Battlestar Galactica. His previous novels had encompassed double episodes, but despite that, Thurston delivers a strong story, that takes the episode The Young Lords, and layers out and tells almost a completely different story, while still giving us the same basic tale….
Partners in Crime (1929) – Agatha Christie
Tommy and Tuppence, who quickly became one of my favourite creations of Agatha Christie, first introduced in The Secret Adversary, are back in this collection of short stories, that are interconnected, as the married couple take on a number of cases. A Fairy in the Flat opens the book and reveals that Tommy is working…
Fortune (2020) -Ian Hamilton
I discovered the writings of Ian Hamilton in April 2015. Before that, I had seen his books in a variety of bookstores and I kind of innately knew that I was going to read them sooner or later. So when I came across the first six books in one go, I picked them up in…
Never Send Flowers (1993) – John Gardner
James Bond is back, and while I’ve enjoyed Gardner’s efforts with Ian Fleming’s 007, with the minor exception of The Man From Barbarossa, this entry, his thirteenth (of sixteen) feels like a real stumble. It seems to want to be more in line with the cinematic 007, but without a solid story, or set pieces…
Battlestar Galactica 3: The Tombs of Kobol (1979) – Robert Thurston, and Glen A. Larson
The journey towards the mythical planet known as Earth continues for the lone battlestar, Galactica, and the ragtag fleet of humanity that it escorts, in Thurston’s next novel which adapts the epic two-parter The Lost Planet of the Gods, which was the first pair of episodes following the series three hour opener, Saga of a…
The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) – Agatha Christie
The Seven Dials Mystery is a delightful romp.It takes us back to Chimneys, reacquaints us with Superintendent Battle, as well as Lady Eileen, better known to her friends as Bundle, as she and her friends get caught up in mystery, murder, romance and adventure. While Chimneys is occupied by another family, whose renting it for…
Star Wars: Jedi Search (1994) – Kevin J. Anderson
Kevin J. Anderson launches his Jedi Academy trilogy this week as I travel back to 1994, and the original Star Wars Expanded Universe. I’m exploring each book by publication date, and there were a couple of things I loved right off the bat, which I either didn’t notice the first time I read it (I…
Death is Forever (1992) – John Gardner
After The Man From Barbarossa, I was nervous about digging into another Gardner 007 novel, but this time, the author returns to the Fleming roots of the character and storytelling style, and in Death is Forever, James Bond is back in action. Gardner’s twelfth novel featuring the secret agent is a fast-moving tale that takes…
Battlestar Galactica 2: The Cylon Death Machine (1979) – Robert Thurston and Glen A. Larson
Robert Thurston delivers another adaptation from Glen A. Larson’s classic science fiction series, Battlestar Galactica. This time it’s the huge two part episode called Gun On Ice Planet Zero. Much like the adaptation of the original series launch, Saga of a Star World, Thurston’s novel has a number of differences from the episodes (and wasn’t…
The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) – Agatha Christie
Before Hercule Poirot took the Orient Express, he found himself on the Blue Train, sans Hastings, in a mystery that has a murder, missing jewels, stagecraft, thieves, divorces, a love story, rich Americans, and devious criminals. While not quite the romp of Poirot’s previous tales, this story was fun, and while most of the clues…
