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Devil's Bridge

Fairstein, Linda
Coop is having a bad day. Her computer is hacked, a spy is discovered in the office, and she gets kidnapped. I learned about the Little Red Lighthouse in this story, very interesting.

Read:

6/2016

Entombed

Fairstein, Linda
I like a mystery that learns me some new things. I learned a bit about Edgar Allan Poe, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Bronx (Hey, the Bronx is UP!) in this story.

Words I Had To Look Up:

harebag cops (pg. 297) -- A bag for putting dead rabbit into? A picture at a Hash-related blog: http://pwoodford.net/hashblog/?p=1357

Quote:

...backset of the RMP... -- (pg. 2) Just what RMP (Radio Motor Patrol car) stands for is not explained until page 207!

Quote:

This is a gorge you're looking at (pg. 161) -- Near as I can figure, the highest point around here is 50 feet high. Quibbler as I am, that's not much of a gorge to me.

Read:

2/2009

Hell Gate

Fairstein, Linda
Alex investigates white-slavery when a boatload of Ukrainians end up on the shore.

As usual, interesting history stuff, including the High Bridge over the Harlem River.

Words I Had To Look Up:

on the hustings (pg. 248)-- The activities involved in political campaigning.

Read:

7/2010

Killer Heat

Fairstein, Linda
It's HOT in New York, but that's not what is killing young women. Fortunately, Alex Cooper is on the job. Not so much interesting historical detail in this one, but there is some.

Read:

7/2009

Lethal Legacy

Fairstein, Linda
Several really rich collectors searching for a missing map worth zillions of dollars. As usual, the poor worker bees get murdered.

A TON of interesting historical stuff about New York and the New York Public Library is in here. I learned a bunch of stuff. Many of the locations can be viewed in Google Street View.

In an email query to the NYPL I found out that the call numbers in the research libraries are unique for each item, pretty much, and so the question on page 144, "So how does the clerk know which copy of Alice In Wonderland to fetch?", probably could have been answered by "The call number from the catalog".

Words I Had To Look Up:

deaccession (pg. 82) -- To sell or otherwise dispose of an item in a collection.
welsh (pg. 117) -- To avoid payment.
faites comme chez vous (pg. 121) -- Make yourself at home.
puttanesca sauce (pg. 123) -- The word puttanesca is derived from puttana, a colloquial term for 'prostitute.'
exsanguination (pg. 127) -- To be drained of blood.
hondel (pg. 221) -- Yiddish, to bargain.
À tout a l'heure, ma princesse (pg. 265) -- See you soon, my princess.
profiterole (pg. 275) -- A cream puff.
whole magilla (pg. 357) -- Derived from the Hebrew word Megillah, a word for scroll, it now means "the whole thing, all that can be expected".

Quote::

"You can't close the public library."
"faster than you can say Dewey decimal system, lady."

Read:

3/2009

Silent Mercy

Fairstein, Linda
Alex and the group investigate a headless and burned corpse at Harlem's Mount Neboh Baptist Church.

Words I Had To Look Up:

ratiocination (pg. 287) -- The process of exact thinking.
buried the lede (pg. 338) -- The introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story.
Penikese Island (pg. 340) -- Looked it up on Google Maps to see what it looks like.

Odd Stuff::

On page 349 Mike says, "You got a gun I can borrow for an hour or two?"
On page 359 Mike draws his Glock.

On page 358 Alex is wearing moccasins. Moccasins?

Read:

7/2011

The Bone Vault

Fairstein, Linda
Murder at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York. Very interesting.

Words I Had To Look Up:

faience carving of the Sphinx (pg. 75) A type of tin-glazed earthenware ceramic.

Quote:

I've used by undergraduate degree in library science to get a position here. (pg. 211) At the British Museum? What is her graduate degree in? What is the point of an undergraduate degree in library science, anyway?

Read:

7/2009

The Kills

Fairstein, Linda
Alex prosecutes a rape, which ends up connected with the murder of an old woman who was King Farouk's girlfriend back in the day, and a gold coin which is either worth millions, or twenty bucks.

Read:

11/2010

The Tomorrow Code

Falkner, Brian
Three New Zealand teens try to stop the destruction of mankind by a rather vengeful Mother Nature. Some unbelievable situations, but I enjoyed the story very much, even the puzzles.

Read:

10/2009

Our Towns

Fallows, James
Written with his wife Deborah Fallows, this is a "100,000-mile journey into the heart of America", in their Cirrus airplane. Very interesting.

Read:

2/2019

Earthman On Venus

Farley, Ralph Milne
Original title was "The Radio Man". A radio engineer "sends" himself to Venus by accident, where he finds it populated by intelligent giant ants and, going by the cover art, busty blondes with tiny wings and antennae. Actually a good story, even though it was written back in 1924.

Quote:

"The food chosen for the production of the higher classes of ant-men consists of condemned criminals. This was where I came in."

Read:

6/2022

Islands Of The Blessed

Farmer, Nancy
Sequel to Land of the Silver Apples and Sea Of Trolls. Jack and Thorgil end up at Bard School, but not until the end of the book. Before that there is a bunch of rescuing and subdoing of scary creatures and such.

Read:

4/2010

Land Of The Silver Apples

Farmer, Nancy
Sequel to Sea Of Trolls. Jack heads underground to rescue Lucy, who has been washed away by...well, it's just complicated. Good read. A map would have been nice, maybe.

Read:

9/2007

The House Of The Scorpion

Farmer, Nancy
Future tale of the clone of a drug lord. Very good!

Read:

10/2003

The Lord Of Opium

Farmer, Nancy
Follows The House Of The Scorpion. I enjoyed it, and it sums everything up nicely without having to go into a third volume. Or a fourth (I'm looking at YOU, Paolini!)

Read:

11/2013

The Sea Of Trolls

Farmer, Nancy
Apprentice bard Jack is kidnapped by berserkers and hauled off to Norway, along with his little sister Lucy. Good story.

Read:

9/2007

Fabulous riverboat

Farmer, Philip Jose
Ive been hearing about this series for years, found this in a free box at the library, so read it. Mark Twain builds a riverboat on Riverworld. Pretty good, guess Ill read the first book and the next, too.

Read:

5/2006

Dancing At The Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir

Feder, Tyler
This is one of several books I bought about death while in a melancholy mood one day. It's pretty good, a thirty-ish woman tells about her mother dying of cancer ten years before, and how she has dealt with it. Some useful information, and I learned about Jewish customs too.

Read:

10/2020

Consider the evidence

Fenner, Phyllis R., ed.
Ten mystery stories by various authors. The Night Of The Twister, by James Michael Ullman, blew me away.

Read:

5/2007

Read Again::

6/2016

So Big

Ferber, Edna
Selina is the daughter of a gambler. When her father is killed she becomes a school teacher in rural Illinois and eventually marries a poor farmer. By dint of hard work, perseverance, and a bit of luck, she becomes successful. But her son, nicknamed "So Big", does not appreciate what she values about life. Won a Pulitzer prize and made into two movies. It took about a hundred pages to capture my interest, but I enjoyed reading it.

Some notes I made:

Various kinds of horse-drawn vehicles mentioned on page 195:

brougham A light, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage
surrey (with a fringe!) A horse-drawn, four-wheeled, two-seated pleasure carriage with an open spindle seat.
two-wheeled cart It's a two-wheeled cart, for cryin' out loud!
victoria The victoria was an elegant French carriage.
pony cart Seems to be a smaller cart. Can have two or four wheels.
tally-ho (coach and four) A four-in-hand (the Tally-ho was the name of a coach that once plied between London and Birmingham)

A Chronology And An Observation

Dirk was nine when his father died. see page 133. I figure this was 1900.
Selina and Dirk ride in a red automobile back to the farm after the trip to Chicago to sell vegetables after the father died. See page 162. Again, I figure this was 1900.
Dirk starts college in 1909. See page 179. He is eighteen or nineteen, by my figuring.
Dirk graduates college in 1913 when he is twenty-two years old. See page 199.

There were only 2,475 automobiles built in the United States during 1899-1901. It seems fortuitous that Selina and Dirk got to in that red automobile.<

Words I Had To Look Up:

matutinal bathing (pg. 36) -- Pertaining to or occurring in the morning.
none too knowledgeous herself (pg. 53) -- I think it means "knowledgeable".
always a dado of washing (pg. 118) -- Cannot find a suitible definition.
the Cinderellas and the Smikes of this temple (pg. 180) -- A charactor in Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby.
bosky paths (pg. 205) -- Covered with or consisting of bushes or thickets.
Do you suppose they will ever get rid of this terrible Rush Street bridge? (pg. 210) -- Yes, around 1920 they tore the sucker down!
Their eyes were wide apart, empty, knowledgeous.. (pg. 239) -- There is that word again! Still not much on the web!
their names were burbankian monstrosities...hence Loretta, Imogene, Nadine (pg. 241) -- I get the Luther Burbank reference, but not how it applies to these particular names. Marjon, from parents Mary and John, that I understand. I wonder what the author would think of the girl's name Howard Allen O'Brien?
with pompons on them (pg. 255) -- Yes, that IS how it is spelled.
meet the gamin of the rumpled smock (pg. 259) -- An often homeless boy who roams about the streets; an urchin.
Sairey Gamipish ladies smelling unpleasantly of peppermint and perspiration and poverty (pg. 267) -- Sairey Gamp is a charactor in Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit.

Read:

9/2009

Quotes:

Sped by one of those over-dramatic ladies who, armed with horsewhip or pistol in tardy defence of their honour, ... it had been meant for a well-known newspaper publisher usually mentioned ... as a bonvivant. The lady's leaden remonstrance was to have been proof of the fact that he had been more vivacious than bon. (pg. 19)

and a cubby-hole for the Jap. (pg. 242) -- nice.

20 books displayed
[Abadzis - Aiken] [Aiken - Allinghamc] [Alvarez - Angelou] [Anthony - Atkins] [Atkinson - Backman] [Backman - Balliett] [Balliett - Barnard] [Barnard - Barnes] [Barnhill - Barr] [Barr - Beanton] [Bear - Beaton] [Beaton - Beaton] [Beaton - Berendt] [Berger - Block] [Block - Block] [Block - Bonham] [Bonner - Boyle] [Brackenbury - Bruchac] [Brucker - Bujold] [Bujold - Bujold] [Bujold - Cannell] [Cannell - Card] [Card - Caunitz] [Caunitz - Charles] [Chavarria - Clancy] [Clancy - Coben] [Coben - Coleman] [Colfer - Collins] [Collins - Connelly] [Connelly - Connelly] [Connelly - Cook] [Cooper - Cornish] [Cornwell - Crais] [Crais - Crew] [Crew - Crusie] [Crusie - Cussler] [Cussler - Davidson] [Davidson - Dickinson] [Dickson - Dorsey] [Dorsey - Dorsey] [Dorsey - Duane] [Duane - Elkins] [Elkins - Evanovich] [Evanovich - Fairstein] [Fairstein - Ferber] [Ferris - Flanagan] [Flanagan - Flint] [Flint - Fournier] [Fournier - Francis] [Francis - Francis] [Francis - Freedman] [Freedman - Gaiman] [Gaiman - Geist] [Geist - Goldman] [Goldstone - Gramazio] [Granger - Graves] [Gray - Griffin] [Grimes - Grimes] [Grisham - Haddix] [Haddix - Hall] [Hall - Hallinan] [Hallinan - Harrison] [Hart - Heinlein] [Heinlein - Heley] [Heley - Henry] [Henry - Hess] [Hess - Hiaasen] [Hiaasen - Hines] [Hirahara - Holman] [Holmes - Howe] [Howe - Iversen] [Ives - Johansen] [Johansen - Kaminsky] [Kaminsky - Karr] [Karst - Kienzle] [Kienzle - Kingsolver] [Kinney - Korman] [Korman - L'Amour] [L'Engle - latham] [Laughlin - Leckie] [Leckie - Leonard] [Leonard - Lewis] [Lewis - Little] [Lobel - Lowry] [Lowry - Lynn] [M.W. - Maguire] [Maguire - Marsh] [Marshall - Mass] [Mass - McBain] [McBain - McCrumb] [McCrumb - Mcmanus] [Mcmanus - Miéville] [Mikaelsen - Moon] [Moon - Morden] [Moriarty - Muller] [Mulligan - Nimmo] [Nimmo - Norton] [Norton - O'Brian] [O'Brian - O'Nan] [O'Nan - Palmer] [Palmer - Paretsky] [Pargin - Parker] [Parker - Parker] [Parker - Patterson] [Patterson - Pears] [Pears - Perry] [Perry - Platt] [Pohl - Poyer] [Poyer - Pratchett] [Pratchett - Pratchett] [Pratchett - Pronzini] [Pronzini - Queenan] [Quinn - Raskin] [Rawlings - Reynolds] [Reynolds - Roanhorse] [Roberts - Rose] [Rose - Russell] [Russell - Sacks] [Sagan - Scalzi] [Scalzi - Scithers] [Scott - Scottoline] [Scottoline - Sheinkin] [Shelton - Silverberg] [Simak - Smith] [Smith - Spinelli] [Spinelli - Steinbeck] [Steinberg - Stracher] [Strahan - Stross] [Stross - Tapply] [Tapply - Thurber] [Thuy - Turtledove] [Turtledove - Van Draanen] [Van Draanen - Varley] [Veglahn - Watson] [Watson - Weir] [Weir - Werlin] [West - Westlake] [Westlake - Wiles] [Wiles - Wister] [Wodehouse - Woodruff] [Woods - Zevin] [Zevin - Zusak] 

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