Chet and Bernie mysteries by Spenser Quinn

One of the most pleasant discoveries I made last year was the mystery series featuring Chet the dog and Bernie Little of the Little Detective Agency, set in modern day California. Bernie is an Iraq vet, a divorced dad whose soft-hearted personality makes him sometimes reluctant to collect his fees. Chet is a former police [...]

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Coming up on Vulpes Libris …

If there’s a common theme running through this week’s offerings, it’s that all the featured books are entertaining best-sellers – from Spencer Quinn’s quirky dog-as-detective to Dorothy L Sayer’s iconic Lord Peter Wimsey via the Shopaholic series and Lisa Jewell.  Just the stuff for a British winter as January becomes February and the Met Office [...]

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The Ballad of the Loathsome Worm: not the year of this dragon?

When Jackie proposed a Dragon week for the Chinese New Year, it gave me a severe attack of ‘earworm’ (appropriately enough). A ballad about a peculiarly English dragon started going through my head, and I couldn’t get rid of it. The subject of the ballad is a young hero who is turned into a horrible [...]

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Forging Dragons by John Howe

To me, drawings are exciting. I prefer Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings to his paintings and I’m pleased when I spot an outline beneath any artist’s finished painting. That’s one of the reasons why I was thrilled to find John Howe’s book on the shelf of a nearby book store, it has his extremely detailed preliminary [...]

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Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

Reading this book was such an overwhelming experience that I’m finding it hard to write about it. This is not to say it was bad, quite the contrary, it was excellent. I knew a little bit about the Great Leap Forward before, but this novel humanized it to the point where I was left sobbing. [...]

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Coming Up:Chinese New Year

Monday, January 23rd is the Chinese Lunar New Year and we at Vulpes Libris are having a week long celebration. Since it’s the Year of the Dragon, we are having a mix of various dragon items as well as a novel about China. We’re not promising firecrackers, but we do hope to set the proper [...]

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A Round-Heeled Woman/Unaccompanied Women by Jane Juska

When a woman reaches A Certain Age, society tends to  expect her to take up knitting/join a book group/learn flower arranging/become a crazy cat lady/all of the foregoing. When Jane Juska retired from her job as an English teacher she decided that what she really wanted was some human contact – of the physical, male, [...]

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All the best things are worth waiting for …

The only New Year Resolution that I stood any chance of keeping was that I was going to write my reviews BEFORE they were actually due.  So, halo shining brightly, I wrote my review of Jane Juska’s “A Round Heeled Woman” and “Unaccompanied Women” last night.  This morning, I transferred it to my USB stick [...]

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A Proper Family Christmas by Jane Gordon-Cumming: a rollercoaster of a celebration with a great deal of chat

William really isn’t into Christmas – all that jingly tinselly presenty stuff makes him feel queasy. He’d like to spend it alone in his vast old house with his cat. But Haseley House could be a gold-mine in the right hands – and William’s relatives want to make sure it does end up in the [...]

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Imagined Lives: portraits of unknown people – exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 3 December 2011 – 22 July 2012.

Just after Christmas, for a winter treat, I went to a tiny exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery called Imagined Lives: Portraits of Unknown People, the idea for which intrigued me very much. The exhibition consisted of 14 portraits from the 16th and 17th centuries that had lost their identities – the people they were [...]

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