The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Lately I’d been going through a bit of a reading slump.  I picked up and put down a number of novels before deciding on King’s latest short story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.  While I skipped Uncle Stevie’s most recent release, “Finder’s Keepers” – I wasn’t big on its predecessor Mr. Mercedes – I…

Number Two

Picking up where he left off with 2013’s Anchorboy, Onrait brings us the aptly titled Number Two, a book with more essays about bathroom misadventures, travelling to an Olympics host city and the wonders of being a Canadian ex-pat living in the U.S. Did anyone ask to hear about Jay’s masturbation stories (the very first…

Made To Kill

Following a failed government-funded program that involved rolling out a fleet of robots to do dangerous jobs, Raymond Electronica is the last metal man standing.  Fronting as a private detective, Raymond keeps himself busy working as a hitman.  Up to now, all of his jobs have come through his companion computer Ada, a large boxy…

The Prophet

I’ve always been a fan of football movies.  Which is strange considering I don’t particularly care much for the sport itself.  Watching it live, I find it slow, boring and I only vaguely understand the rules enough to get by.  However, if told right and paced correctly in a story, there’s a special sort of…

The Girl in the Spider’s Web

The whole story behind the creation and release of The Girl in the Spider’s Web is actually somewhat disgusting.  Series’ creator Stieg Larsson unexpectedly died from a heart attack in 2004, a year before the first novel in the Millennium trilogy was to be published.  In the years that followed, the books enjoyed tremendous, widespread…

The Double

A friend of a friend, Grace Kinkaid, comes to Spero with a job: steal back a painting that a con-man recently walked off with.  Having disappeared from her life as mysteriously as he appeared, Grace needs to know who he is and if he’s pulling the same tricks with others.  Can Spero track down the…

The Power of the Dog

Beginning in the late seventies and stretching over a near thirty year period, Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog follows organized crime and the devastation left in its wake. In The Power of the Dog, Winslow heavily features the Mexican drug war, but he also tackles the mob in New York City, prostitution in…