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TCO Reviews: Thief Liar Lady by D. L. Soria
The Summer of Scandal continues, and in this review we’re taking the downstairs to the top of the house. I love a good fairy tale retelling, and I love a good con, so I was extremely excited to get a gift copy of Thief Liar Lady to read. (Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine!) The story…
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The Housekeepers: Exploring the systems that keep rich people misbehaving
We’ll keep the Summer of Scandal going by breaking down the systems that enable Rich People to act up. There are certain levels of excess that can only happen when people are paid to make them so. When these systems work smoothly, they’re almost invisible – it can just seem like the wealthy have charmed…
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TCO Reviews: A Most Agreeable Murder
I was lucky enough to find not just books but ARCS for my Summer of Scandal! For this week’s edition of “rich people behaving badly”, we’re rewinding to the Regency era with A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales. (Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the gift copy!) I was so excited to sit…
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What Money Can Buy: Bad Summer People
I’m back! Sorry for the long hiatus – I was in the midst of training and all of my fiction reading turned into case materials. But after a month of deep-diving into business problems, we are BACK with room to think more deeply about literary ones. And first on the list is Bad Summer People…
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Exploring voice and tension in Murder Your Employer
Growing up, A Series of Unfortunate Events was probably my second-favorite series. Every time a new entry came out, I’d try to get my hands on a copy at our Costco run, racing through the pages to see if I could finish even before we made it through the store. It was great to find…
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TCO Reviews: The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
Between my epistolary reading challenge and my love for books, I’ve been reading a lot of “books about books” lately. (So much so that I’ve added a new tag just to track all my metafictional adventures.) It should come as no surprise, then, that I’ve been excited to read Meg Shaffer’s The Wishing Game since…
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The Three Dahlias: an adventure for Golden Age mystery-lovers
I have this hypothesis that many modern “mystery” novels are actually adventures with a mystery skin on top. It may just be that I have a stricter definition of “mystery” than others, but in my opinion, a true mystery must be clued up by the author. An adventure, on the other hand, can involve as…
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TCO Reviews: The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
There is nothing more tantalizing to a reader than a book about a library. The setting – shelves on shelves of endless books, towering to the ceiling – is like a dream come true. If you throw a little adventure and fantasy to the mix, as Mark Lawrence promises in The Book that Wouldn’t Burn,…
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Interior Chinatown as a dreamy introspective epistolary
This epistolary challenge has led me to really push my reading boundaries, even within a genre I love. I kicked the year off with Piranesi, a haunting and creative story told through journal entries – and a long-overdue read. And this month, I’ve had the pleasure to read Interior Chinatown, a novel written as a…
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Amina al-Sirafi: an adventurous portrait of motherhood
I’ve been reading a lot of mystery lately, so I was very excited to pick up a copy of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi and really lose myself in fantasy for a while. Going into the book, I expected a story different from others I’m used to reading (I don’t read a lot of pirate…