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Recent Reviews
Maxim Loskutoff
Positive The Star Tribune The undying allure of the West and that attraction\'s lethal impact on the wilderness is a pervasive theme for writer Maxim Loskutoff ... In Loskutoff\'s hands, the Unabomber, as Kaczynski came to be known, is real but also a symbol of the ultimate outsider in a state, Montana, that\'s full of them.
Emiko Jean
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune The narrative quickens once the need to backfill diminishes. It twists, turns and deepens as Jean uses the thriller as a vehicle to reflect on the state of women and how they are treated in the workplace, by the people who say they love them and by men ... A decidedly assured debut in the genre.
Jane Smiley
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune The best part is being privy to Jodie\'s creative process ... The end seems so unexpected it\'s hard not to feel cheated.
Scarlett Thomas
Rave The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Such dark, twisted, pervy fun that it might dent the psyche ... To be sure, The Sleepwalkers skirts the unsavory, but Thomas isn\'t going for subtlety. Hers is a Grand Guignol sensibility that any White Lotus fan will get — and applaud.
Scott Guild
Positive The Star Tribune \"In Plastic, the collision of figurines and the apocalypse is timely, coming as it does on the heels of \'Barbenheimer.\' It\'s a weird, sometimes puzzling and complicated book, to be sure, but an affecting one with way more depth and humanity than its title would let on.
Val McDermid
Positive The Star Tribune \"...takes time to get going, mostly because the characters aren\'t allowed to be in the same room together. Much of the early action is through phone calls, virtual meetings, FaceTime. The pace quickens as Pirie and crew adhere to lockdown rules but find ways to do their jobs. The twists and turns are satisfying, especially the meta quality of a crime writer writing about crime writers and the book-within-a-book structure.If nothing else, Past Lying is worth a read for the Scottish slang.\
Jeanette Winterson
Positive The Star Tribune So, do you believe in ghosts? Winterson isn\'t out to convince anybody, but she does include her own experiences with the supernatural ... Unsurprisingly, grief and loss resonate throughout the rest of the ghost stories, which are mostly the traditional variety ... On my scare-o-meter, the highest level of which is being too frightened to reach around a door frame to flip on a light switch for fear of being grabbed and dragged to hell or something equally horrific, Night Side of the River doesn\'t quite cut it, but that\'s a high bar, to be sure. Instead, Winterson\'s ghost stories do something much worse/better: They will haunt you.
Jo Nesbo, trans. by Neil Smith
Pan The Star Tribune \"Mostly, it seems clumsy and overstuffed ... The structure is clever-ish. The The Snowman author wants to make a bigger point about writers and writing, but it is muddled by a first section that goes on too long, undercutting a third section that\'s supposed to tie it all together. (To reveal more would be a huge spoiler.) Bottom line, what promised to be scary isn\'t. Stephen King doesn\'t have a thing to worry about.\
Julius Taranto
Rave The Star Tribune Not daunting ... A comic tale ... Taranto also mines character names for humor and their aptronymic qualities, letting his inner Charles Dickens loose ... Taranto sometimes teeters on a polemic tightrope, but he avoids losing his balance as he keeps his eye on the prize.
Caroline O'Donoghue
Rave The Star Tribune I didn\'t just read Caroline O\'Donoghue\'s latest novel, The Rachel Incident. I pigged out on it ... The plot might sound trite, even a tad icky, but all is not what it seems. Twists await. Some of them rely maybe too heavily on coincidence but they still manage to surprise. And what could have been lightweight is enriched by placing events against a backdrop of the recession of the early 2000s ... The framing device is sometimes clunky; a mature Rachel relates events from 10 or so years down the road, butting into the narrative when least expected or needed, apparently for the purpose of foreshadowing. But none of this stopped me from simply wanting to know what was going to happen and enjoying the heck out of this novel. I gobbled it down.
Michael Finkel
Rave The Star Tribune There are no traces of Finkel until the end, where he details his reporting. His colorful presence is missed. That doesn\'t mean The Art Thief is any less engrossing ... Finkel controls the pace effortlessly, broadening and narrowing focus from the day-to-day of the thieves to the intricate plotting of their thefts and a history of art crime, as well as who steals and why. That combined with mounting dread for the artworks\' fate makes for a heart-pounding read.
Lisa Belkin
Rave The Star Tribune Was it necessary for Belkin to take such a huge leap backward? Maybe not, but who cares as she expertly unravels the yarn — three yarns, really — inch by twisted inch, pulling the reader in as she reveals unexpected, fly-on-the-wall details. (Deep dives into records and talks with living relatives helped fill in gaps.) Then, just as expertly, she knits all that unraveled yarn back together, propelling the reader to that July night ... A truly great read.
Jim Popkin
Positive The Minneapolis Star-Tribune A portrait emerges of a complicated, narcissistic, tightly wound woman who excelled at her day job ... Such a buttoned-down subject could have proved boring, but the ins and outs of spycraft... and the interagency fighting that surrounded the Montes espionage case are fascinating and sometimes humorous reading.
Dani Shapiro
Rave The Star Tribune How the accident happens (vividly detailed and choreographed by Shapiro) and how it is handled (never to be spoken of again) will haunt the survivors, and those pulled into the accident\'s orbit, for the rest of the book ... She is obviously interested in what people fail to say in Signal Fires, but the novel explores so much more — big picture stuff, like time and how it\'s experienced ... The author is adept, however, at juxtaposing the magical (not magical realism) and the modern, showing how locations can be the same and not the same, and that a place can be right for some and not for others but that life can still turn out all right ... Shapiro goes deep in but it pays off. Her crisp prose propels the reader onward: I wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters and I was simultaneously fascinated by the metaphysics. It\'s definitely a novel worth your time — whatever your sense of that is.
William Kent Krueger
Positive The Star Tribune Krueger wastes no time plunging into the action, using present tense to maintain immediacy and ratcheting up the tension through interspersed points of view in short, taut chapters ... Krueger has exhibited a mastery and control that can\'t be denied.
Benjamin Myers
Rave Star Tribune It\'s 1989 and they\'ve planned all winter for this, their \'summer of glory\'...Redbone is the mastermind behind crop circle design; Calvert is the reconnaissance man...He makes forays into the countryside to find the perfect location, one that provides cover as the two of them tramp through the fields and a viewing spot from which to see their handiwork...The Perfect Golden Circle has much to say about art, but it also has an allegorical feel...An elderly woman Calvert and Redbone meet one dark night in a field and then help search for her lost dog has overtones of Queen Elizabeth II...A drunk aristocrat, described as having a face \'like that of a child\'s drawing — two eyes, a nose and a mouth drawn onto a pink balloon,\' mistakes Redbone as the estate\'s gamekeeper, emphasizing the incompetency of the nobility...And the unwashed masses are represented by the people who illegally dump garbage in fields or those who come to look at the crop circles and damage the crop...So the novel is political, too, but its success rides on the backs of Redbone and Calvert...They are as mysterious — to themselves and to each other, at times — as the crop circles are to the public, but their oddball friendship and wide-ranging conversations slowly reveal who they are, much like the designs they flatten into fields...They can\'t be appreciated until seen in their entirety.
Julie Klam
Rave The Star Tribune ... detail, along with plenty of self-deprecating humor...makes Klam\'s \'true story of a family fiction\' so relatable and such an enjoyable read ... an engrossing search for truth and how learning that truth might affect identity, a crucial aspect for Klam and one she touches on over and over again ... a serious quest, but Klam\'s touch is light ... Some truly astonishing discoveries about the sisters await the reader, but the book flirts with the possibility of disappointment, that the lack of information and \"brick walls\" that Klam runs into will translate into a book that just peters out, leaving these fascinating people lost to history. As the conclusion nears, regret is palpable. Instead, a wave of good fortune saves the day ... Klam might not have gotten the moon, but she did capture the stars.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg
Positive The Star Tribune Rodenberg doesn\'t keep to her own story. She intersperses third-person accounts of her mother\'s life in Kentucky and her father\'s before he went to Vietnam, including pages—perhaps too many—of letters he wrote to his parents while he was stationed there. The change in perspective is jarring, heightening the surreal aspects of the book and emphasizing its Southern gothic aesthetic. Ultimately, though, the alternating chapters provide context and feed Rodenberg\'s overarching theme about how stories repeat in families ... Kin begs comparison to Tara Westover\'s 2018 memoir, Educated. Westover\'s work is much more optimistic, however ... Even though Rodenberg strives for a tidy ending for herself, obstacles keep popping up. And why shouldn\'t they? Life isn\'t neat, and she leans into that, digging deep with dense but readable prose and providing compelling insights.