Month: January 2021

Agatha Christie is an author known around the world and back. Even if you haven’t read one of her mystery novels, you likely can name a few: Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile, etc. She is the world’s best-selling fiction writer of all time, having sold over 2 billion copies of her books. But the queen of writing mysteries also lived through a strange mystery herself that left the police and the public baffled. In December 1926, Christie went missing only to resurface 11 days later, claiming amnesia during her time away. Marie Benedict attempts to give a new perspective on these events in her novel, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. And it does not disappoint…

In Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, time bends in a plethora of different forms. So many, in fact, the reader begins to wonder which dimension they live in themselves. The novel fleshes out the various dreams that Albert Einstein experienced as he was creating his theory of relativity in 1905. Rather than follow the traditional rules of storytelling, Lightman gives more page space to the dreams than he does to Einstein. In fact, Einstein becomes an afterthought between what begins to look more like a short story collection than a novel. In one chapter, you will observe a reality where time moves backward, beginning with the future and ending with the past, and in another, the world’s cities experience time at their own individual pace…

A few days short of the fifteen-year anniversary marking the death of their son and brother, each member of the Echota family struggles to find strength and happiness in the present. Ray-Ray Echota was killed in a police shooting. He was only 15 years old. Much has changed since Ray-Ray’s death; his parents, Maria and Ernest, feel helpless to Ernest’s worsening Alzheimer’s until they begin to foster a young boy named Wyatt whose mannerisms remind them of their lost son; Ray-Ray’s younger brother, Edgar, is controlled by his drug addiction and struggles to find the strength to return home for help; and older sister, Sonja, gets herself in trouble when a romantic obsession goes too far. While the Echota family members deal with very different issues, their pain and feelings of isolation stem from the crushing event that…

Most people imagine Sherlock Holmes, arguably the greatest detective to ever live in the mystery genre, with his pipe, his deerstalker, and eyes that see everything. A man with a reputation that reaches far beyond England, living independently with his trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson. But, what if Sherlock were a woman? What obstacles or alterations to the original narrative would occur? Sherry Thomas answers these questions in A Study in Scarlet Women (2016), the first book in the Lady Sherlock series.

High Society views Charlotte Holmes as the oddest of four Holmes daughters. She adores puzzles, often finds polite conversation unnecessary, and most peculiar of all: she never wants to marry. When her father, Sir Henry, reneges on his promise to fund her education, Charlotte begins to learn…