Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

Catilina’s Riddle by Steven Saylor (Paperbackswap)
Saylor ( Arms of Nemesis ) has written another gripping and entertaining historical whodunit. Narrator Gordianus, disillusioned by the corruption of Rome circa 63 B.C., has fled the city with his family to live on a farm in the Etruscan countryside. But this bucolic life is disrupted by the machinations and murderous plots of two politicians: Roman consul Cicero, Gordianus’s longtime patron; and populist senator Catalina, Cicero’s political rival and a candidate to replace him in the annual elections for consul. Claiming that Catalina plans an uprising if he loses the race, Cicero asks Gordianus to keep a watchful eye on the radical. Although he distrusts both men, Gordianus is forced into the center of the power struggle when his six-year-old daughter Diana finds a headless corpse in their stable. Shrewdly depicting deadly political maneuverings, this addictive mystery also displays the author’s firm grasp of history and human character.

The Blue Star by Tony Early (Review copy from publisher)
The small dramas of teenage love get caught in the crosswinds of a war in this sequel to the 2001 bestseller Jim the Boy. It’s late summer 1941, and Jim Glass, now a high school senior, has an earnest, unshakable passion for classmate Chrissie Steppe. But as straightforward as his feelings are, the circumstances of his nascent romance are complex: Chrissie’s family is indebted to their landlord, whose sailor son Bucky claimed Chrissie as his girl before shipping out to serve on the USS California at Pearl Harbor. Throughout Jim’s fraught final year at school, he relies on the advice of his uncles, but after Pearl Harbor is bombed, they can’t protect him from the war’s toll. Questions of patriotism, sexuality and poverty weave their way into a narrative that’s deceptive in its simplicity: the growing pains that Jim and his friends experience pack a startling emotional punch.

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