A Librarian on Elm Street

 I absolutely loved this book! I've spent the last eight years working my way through Connelly's body of work as I find them in different libraries as audiobooks which is especially fun with the Bosch series since Titus Welliver, who plays Bosch on the great Amazon Prime series, reads the latest books. As a result of my method, I haven't had access to his earlier books on audio since they're harder to find or more likely to have been damaged by the sands of time. But when Fair Warning was released this past year, I didn't want to read it before I read the other McEvoy novels, so here we are.  Just damn. This is Connelly's best book. McEvoy is an engaging and empathetic character, you're hooked right into the plot quickly and emotionally. The twists and turns are spectacular. The basic set up is that Jack McEvoy is a reporter whose twin brother, a police detective, kills himself. The more McEvoy looks at the suicide though, the more things seem to not add up....

 Horrorstor, horrorstor, where for art tho  horrorstor?  But I digress. Horrorstor is a story about a group of store employees who stay past closing time at an ersatz-IKEA to get to the bottom of some strange happenings around their store before a team from Corporate show up to shut them down. Personally, although I liked the book well enough, I felt that it was kind of all over the place for a relatively short book. I was really into the first half of the book, thought it was building well, getting us introduced to the setting and the characters, keeping us in suspense about the nature of the strange goings-on, and then everything get cranked from a three to an eight in three pages and the intensity skyrockets. Pretty quickly over the next couple chapters the main character becomes separated from the others, and for me the book becomes less interesting. It's still a fun read, and some of the scenes in the book are truly horrifying. One of my favorite things is the inclus...

There are some classic books I avoid for a variety of reasons. Some I avoid due to my assumption that the story has been told to death in multiple different ways and there's no reason to read the original. Some I avoid to give myself a good read or watch to look forward to in later life. I have to apologize to Ira Levin's memory that I included Rosemary's Baby in the first category and not the second. I finally decided to read it, and it is absolutely amazing.  I started reading it not knowing what it was, thinking it was just a spooky story about witches and the Anti-Christ and what-not....I was wrong. This is probably the most blatantly Feminist book I've ever read other than something by Margaret Atwood. Rosemary's Baby can be read entirely as an allegory for women being subjugated and gaslight into subservience and exploitation by their partners and society as a whole! And despite that, simply reading it on the surface level of conspiracies and doubts and secret...