BOOK REVIEW: I’ve heard nothing but good things about David McCullough, but The Wright Brothers was my first experience reading his books. I can see why he’s so popular: he doesn’t waste any time getting to the meat of his biographies, and the writing reads like a novel. The challenge here is that the climax of the book–the first flight at Kitty Hawk–comes only 70 pages into the book. I thought I’d be bored with the rest of it, but found it just as compelling as the parts leading up to that historic day. A wonderful and informative read. Five Stars.

BOOK REVIEW: House of Echoes is a first novel by Brendan Duffy, and the plot sounds promising. A man and his family inherit an old house with a sordid past in the woods of upstate New York. Things quickly begin to get weird. His son has conversations with some guy in the woods, mutilated corpses of animals begin piling up at an alarming rate, and before long, the whole book devolves into something akin to The Village of the Damned. The challenge with any psychological thriller or horror novel is not to have the book become too ridiculous. This one pushed the limits of my patience just a little too far, I’m afraid. But a promising first book nonetheless. Three Stars.

BOOK REVIEW: Thank God for Joseph Finder. Whenever I think I’ll have to survive another summer without a decent thriller, he’s usually there to help me out. His latest novel, The Fixer, finds a man who discovers piles of cash hidden in his lawyer-father’s old house. Where that money came from is the question that propels the plot like a rocket and nearly gets Our Hero killed any number of times. Finder has moved from international espionage plots to stories involving the guy next door–and the really bad  things that can happen to him. This book isn’t up to Paranoia standards–that book is still my favorite–but this is one of his best efforts nonetheless. Four Stars.