RaveAirMail\"In the series’s seventh installment, the team find themselves at loose ends at the beginning of the pandemic. (Setting Past Lying during the coronavirus was a gutsy move, since the conventional wisdom is that pandemic books don’t sell. Luckily, the Scottish Queen of Crime ignored this) ... McDermid has a high old time satirizing Scotland’s crime-fiction scene, portraying it as a misogynist hive of gossip, backbiting, and awards envy ... McDermid outdoes herself with the thorny, semi-meta plot; even the book within a book, a device that can be tedious, is irresistible. Trying to figure out who’s playing whom while relishing McDermid’s behind-the-scenes take on Tartan Noir should keep readers up past their bedtimes.\
Jonathan Santlofer
PositiveAir MailSantlofer, an artist himself, knowledgeably guides the reader through the significant art treasures of Florence and Paris (where Perrone, oddly for an art historian, has never been), with plenty of action to goose the plot along lest the tone get too elevated. But his most striking achievement is capturing the divine and dangerous addiction that collecting art for art’s sake can become. Buyer and thief alike, beware.
Megan Abbott
RaveAir MailMegan Abbott, unparalleled anatomist of the harm girls do to themselves and each other in pursuit of a physical ideal, has turned her unsparing gaze...to ballet ... unsettling ... How the Durants handle the reckoning they’ve deferred until reality almost blows their house down makes for a shattering, mesmerizing novel that transcends genre.
