Books I've Read
Books Listed by Author
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Ex Libris
Charming essays on books, her parents, husband, children and their relationships with books.
Read:
10/2003
Deadstick
Owen Keane investigates a plane crash that happened 40 years ago. 1'st in series. Pretty good, the guy knows how to use a library!
Read:
4/2001
The Ordained
Owen Keane goest to Rapture to help a friend with a disappearance.
Read:
5/2001
Holy Guacamole!
A food writer in El Paso gets involved in yet another murder-to-be-solved, the death of an opera director. She teams up with a tough-as-nails retired lady police officer to solved the case. Lots of recipes!
Read:
1/2012
Bad Blood
Long standing grievances among sandhogs in New York, more or less, lead to murder.
Words I Had To Look Up:
Redwelds (pg. 3) -- A type of expandable file-folder.
bacalitos (pg. 165) -- Bacalaítos are salt cod fritters filled with minced cod fish and garnished with cilantro, tomatoes and onions.
Agita (pg. 214) -- Heartburn, acid indigestion, an upset stomach.Read:
12/2011
Cold Hit
Alex investigates the murder of an art dealer, Denise Caxton. Interesting historical stuff about the High Line railroad in New York. Check out this informational website http://www.thehighline.org/. I read the large print edition.
Words I Had To Look Up:
...in his atelier (pg. 291) -- an artist's or designer's studio or workroom.
Quote:
Like my pal Scanlon says, 'The camel shits. The caravan moves on.' (pg. 221) -- That's life!
Quote:
"the lid on the gas tank was controlled by the door locks. To fill it with gas, you had to unlock the car doors. (pg. 257 -- Rich art dealer, can't afford to have someone hook up a separate switch for the gas filler lid?
Read:
8/2009
Death Dance
Alex and the crew investigate a murder at the Met.
Quote:
"What the drop?"..."Thirty feet, easy." (pg. 53)
...slamming into the the fan casing at about a hundred twenty miles an hour. (pg. 88) -- I couldn't believe a body would accelerate that quickly in so short a distance, but I did the math, and it seems to be correct. Huh.
Quote:
"Looks like about fifty-five volts of electricity ran up the side of the...manhole cover... More than enough to kill you." (pg.92)
"...Usually it's only twenty or thirty volts, enough to give you a good scare..." (pg. 93) -- Hey, it's the amperage, not the voltage!
Read:
2/2009
Devil's Bridge
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
20 books displayed
[Fadiman - Farmer] [Farmer - Flanagan] [Flanagan - Flint] [Flint - Foster] [Foster - Francis] [Francis - Francis] [Francis - Francis] [Francis - Funke] [Funke - Fussell]