Blog Posts by David

"The Faculty Club" by Danny Tobey
Atria, 307 pp., $25
Reviewed by David Marshall James


The eyecatching dust jacket of Dallas attorney Danny Tobey's first novel proclaims it "a thriller."

There's plenty of truth in labeling there, for Tobey takes the old saw about a kingmaking secret society at an Ivy League university and gives it enough fresh zip and zing to grab the reader's attention in the first chapter and grip it until the last.

Tobey, who was graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law, ought to know his way around the creaking varnished floors and carved stone cloisters of a mega-endowed, 350-year-old bastion of academia.

He is also close enough, agewise, to his own law-school experience to convince the reader of youthful protagonist Jeremy Davis's yearning to overreach his modest Texas roots.

Indeed, Jeremy yearns for far more than a grade-A transcript when he becomes a contender for a legendary group of scholars and politicoes whose precise goals play second fiddle,

"The Unbelievers" by Alastair Sim
Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, 335 pp., $25.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Scottish author and academician Alastair Sim has launched what looks to be a lengthy career in writing novels, with this mystery set primarily in Edinburgh, 1865, as well as other Scottish locales.

The city-- once dubbed "Auld Reekie"-- has already become the smoke-choked child of the Industrial Revolution. Because of the ubiquitous consumption of coal, within a few years all new edifices, no matter how grand or glorious, might as well have been sloshed with tar.

With so much avarice attendant to such economic expansion, with so much exploitation of an ever-enlarging working class, it's as if a visible disease has settled over the landscape.

Even in the Highlands, the crofters have been evicted-- often burned out of their homes-- to clear the path for massive grazing, given the newfound capacity for large-scale livestock slaughtering and shipment to

"The Emerald Cat Killer"
by Richard A. Lupoff
Minotaur, 260 pp., $25.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


If Hobart Lindsey is something of a nerd, then he is endearingly and most competently so-- much to the betterment of his profession as an insurance investigator.

The boss expects him to be thorough-- to cross all those "i's" and dot all those "t's," while being ever-mindful of the "p's" and "q's"-- and Lindsey is nothing but, all the way down to his pocket organizer and company pens.

Somewhere in the black-and-white mists of his past, he must have seen "Double Indemnity," then followed up on the resulting dream of looking and sounding like the young Fred MacMurray while aspiring to the dedicated tenacity of Edward G. Robinson, insurance investigator extraordinaire, right down to the stub of his smoldering stogie.

The film-noir scent of Robinson's stogie descends on this yarn of assorted and sordid Bay Area characters like a Frisco fog rolling in at dusk.

Indeed, Lindsey

"Tell-All" by Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday, 179 pp., $24.95
Reviewed by David Marshall James


At times, Chuck Palahniuk's eleventh novel reads like a lost short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

At other times, it reads like a lost fragment of Truman Capote's "Answered Prayers."

At still others, it reads like a prurient expose-within-an-expose; there's one herein appropriately titled "Love Slave."

Then again, Palahniuk channels more sources than a NASA-sized satellite dish, including the constant barrage of names he drops, all of which precede 1960 in celebrity-hood.

Time is a bit fuzzy herein, so don't sweat it. On one page you're in the heyday of the radio drama; a few pages later, you're watching television.

The tale of an aging star bolstered by an unwaveringly devoted, do-it-all employee has been told before, but never like this.

The author owes more than a bow to two films of 1950: "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve," the latter he duly

"Murder on the Bride's Side" by Tracy Kiely
Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, 291 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Anyone who's immersed in all things Jane Austen has got to love a wedding, right?

Especially when her own paramour-- and likely candidate for marriage-- has flown in from the opposite coast to twirl her around the dance floor at the reception.

Right?

Let's not forget the setting-- a plantation house on the James River, outside of Richmond, Virginia-- the American equivalent of an English country estate.

Furthermore, Elizabeth Parker (the young protagonist introduced in Tracy Kiely's first mystery novel, "Murder at Longbourn," which transpires at a Cape Cod bed & breakfast owned by Elizabeth's great-aunt, Winnie) is serving as the sole bridal attendant, in a flattering yellow dress, thank you.

However, all is not as it seems in the manor house. Too many married couples living under the same roof, for one thing. That never bodes

"Royal Blood" by Rhys Bowen
Berkley Prime Crime, 305 pp., $24.95
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Just because someone is close to the British throne doesn't necessarily mean Bob's their uncle.

Just look at Sarah Ferguson-- not that she was ever in line, as it were, although Prince Andrew is fourth.

Lady Georgie is a bit farther down the rung, being thirty-fourth, but she's living in a different era. There's a Depression-- make that the last big Depression.

Georgie is eking by on toast, beans, and precious little coal in the grate, at the grace and favor of her older brother, Binky, who inherited the family dukedom and married an arriviste who wants Georgie off their backs and onto someone else's.

Why, she's received a proposal from well-fixed Prince Siegfried of Romania, but Georgie can't abide his codfish lips; moreover, he's more a candidate for a prince himself.

Well, buck up and do the Royal Family proud, sister-in-law Fig proclaims. Just lie back and think of England

"The Last Talk with Lola Faye"
by Thomas H. Cook
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/An Otto Penzler Book
275 pp., $25
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Veteran author-- and Edgar Award winner-- Thomas H. Cook brings two unlikely characters together on a rainy-turning-to-snowy evening in a St. Louis, Missouri, hotel bar, and the ephiphanies commence dropping like freshly formed ice crystals.

Cook's protagonist is a somewhat failed author/professor-- "somewhat" in the sense that his career has attained stasis, and his marriage is a failure of his inability to communicate.

Lucas Paige may have obtained an Ivy League-minted Ph.D., and he is producing historically-based nonfiction, but those books are not the studies that he once hoped he would deliver, tributes to all the ordinary folk who built America, furrow by furrow, brick by brick, by the sweat of their brows.

Rather, he has lapsed into the overtrod, "what if" genre-- and even his freshman students at the college where he's stuck post

"The I Hate to Cook Book" by Peg Bracken
Grand Central, 207 pp., $22.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Although this 50th anniversary edition of Peg Bracken's bestseller has been updated by her daughter, Jo, references to a bygone day abound.

For instance, a candy bar can be had for a nickel. A "good bakery cake" can be purchased for not much more than one dollar, and a bottle of Sauterne is only going to set you back about the same!

Yet, aside from the probability that you're never going to prep a lamb chop or veal (as our foremothers did during a more carnivorous era), time has done little to alter the usefulness of this volume.

Indeed, it's retro-delish, right down to the pen-and-ink drawings by Hilary Knight, illustrator of the "Eloise" books.

Peg Bracken's intended to free up wives (and now, doubtless, husbands-- well, anyone as far as that goes) from being tied down to the kitchen for excessive periods of time. After all, why toil hours fixing a meal that your family is