The Art of Detection
By Laurie King
Bantam
San Francisco police detective Kate Martinelli calls it the case of the dead Sherlockian, the apparent murder of a rich man so obsessed with Sherlock Holmes that he had two floors of his house made into a replica of Holmes' Baker Street digs. The first 100 pages of King's novel proceed as a police investigation would, slowly, with Martinelli sorting through the superfluous details, but the case becomes more tantalizing when she stumbles on a possible motive for Philip Gilbert's death: He had just purchased, secretly and for a song, a previously undiscovered story that might have been written by Arthur Conan Doyle during a visit to San Francisco in the 1920s. If the manuscript is genuine, an expert tells Martinelli, it will "change the face of the Holmesian scholarship" and be worth a fortune. We get to read the mysterious tale along with Martinelli (it's narrated by Holmes himself), and while King does take liberties with the detective and his fanatical
followers, it's all in the name of a good story.
A Student of Living Things
By Susan Richards Shreve
Viking
Shreve's new novel is set in a vaguely described, post-Sept. 11 time period marked by acts of domestic terrorism. It begins when we learn that a law student and political activist named Steven Frayn was assassinated two years earlier on the steps of a university library in Washington DC, while his younger sister, Claire, stood nearby. No sooner does Claire, Shreve's narrator, tell us this than she shifts gears and spends 60 pages describing her odd and disconnected family, a section so full of digression that many readers will be tempted to jump ship. They shouldn't, because the story becomes suspenseful with the turn of a page when Claire finally describes the day of Steven's death and its aftermath. On her first trip back to the library where he died, she's approached by a mysterious man who says he was Steven's friend and might know who killed him. He asks the grieving Claire to help lure the murderer into a trap and she, happy to have "a flesh-and-blood enemy," agrees. It's a story of menace and vulnerability that starts badly but in the end is hard to put down.
I Had the Right to Remain Silent ... But I Didn't Have the Ability
By Ron White
Dutton
We have a teenage boy in the house who has all but memorized, and recites without provocation, the script of Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie. We also know people who are erudite and impeccably mannered, yet after a few drinks have been known to adopt competing drawls and swap good ol' boy jokes as if to the trailer park born. This is why we have more than a passing familiarity with Ron White, and why we are adding his book to this column so soon after it arrived at our door. It's easy to read. The type is big, there are lots of illustrations by
cartoonist Matthew Shultz and some pages contain very few lines. But we all know that blue-collar humor is not rocket science. It's unabashedly crass, smells like beer and Cheetos (which White likes to ingest while he sits naked in his bean-bag chair) and caters to our interest in liquor, sex and bodily
functions (human or canine, either will do). Is this book funny? Not as funny as when White delivers his material in person, but have a beer first and you might not know the difference.
The Boy Who Loved Words
By Roni Schotter
Schwartz & Wade
Lickety-split. Is that really a word? It must be, if it's in the collection of Selig, the boy at the heart of this book for kids. He has acquired other words that seem just as unlikely. Chockablock. Djinn. Jibber-jabber (we had to look in three dictionaries before we found that one). Others are familiar but a bit eccentric (tintinnabulating,
amphora), and still others seem ordinary enough until you think about them and it dawns on you how beguiling they are. Dusk. Rhapsody. Scrumptious. There's a story in these pages, something about Selig running away from home in search of life's meaning and finding it when he inadvertently helps a poet finish his latest verse. But the book's plot is not nearly as important as its suggestion that children should think about words, about how they were invented, how their sounds reflect their meanings, and how well they conjure up the feelings or images that they represent, how well they do their job. There's a glossary of Selig's words at the end. Illustrations are by Giselle Potter. Recommended for ages four to eight.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and