Her entry begins:It's part Brideshead Revisited, part Maurice and part Downton Abbey. Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger’s Child is a perfect study of Englishness, social codes, and changing cultural and sexual attitudes (the book begins in 1913 and ends in the 80s). Each scene covers a limited amount of time in rich detail, hinting at what has gone on before and inviting us to wonder at what will come. Hollinghurst describes a room, or a person's thoughts, over pages, where another writer would use a paragraph (but it's never dull! Proust to me is; perhaps it's time I try reading him again). The minute I finished The Stranger’s Child, I felt like reading it again, which is much to be said for a book that's over 560 pages long. My only gripe: are all English men secretly...[read on]About Murder in the Rue Dumas, from Publishers Weekly:
Longworth’s entertaining second mystery set in Aix-en-Provence (after 2011’s Death at the Château Bremont) plunges magistrate Antoine Verlaque and his law professor girlfriend,Learn more about the book and author at M. L. Longworth's website and blog.Marine Bonnet, into the world of academe following a murder. Someone has battered in the head of Dr. Georges Moutte, the chair of the theology department at the University d’Aix, who was about to retire. The body was found by two students who broke into Moutte’s office to learn if either of them had won a prestigious fellowship, but who left the scene without reporting the murder in order to conceal their own breaking and entering. Apart from probing the rivalries among the university’s faculty, Verlaque also looks into the possibility that the killer was an art thief. Fans of European sleuths with a taste for good food such as Martin Walker’s Bruno (Bruno, Chief of Police) will have fun.
The Page 69 Test: Murder in the Rue Dumas.
Writers Read: M. L. Longworth.
--Marshal Zeringue
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