Red Wolf's Room

  After reading Footsteps in the Dark , I tried to find more obscure female mystery writers that are not quite so well known and found The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham. What interested me was the dinner party that turns into murder. It reminded me of the Hercules Poirot mystery Lord Edgeware Dies and Clue .  Unfortunately, the murder gets upstaged for the second half of the book by another crime, and the solution to the first mystery was unnecessarily dragged out for me. I lost interest in the last third of the book and just wanted it to end. The book is written in true Roaring Twenties lingo, so there were quite a few times where I couldn't understand what the characters were saying, even with context.  In the reviews I read before picking up this book, I learned that Albert Campion is Margery Allingham's detective, but his debut novel (this book) does not have him as the protagonist and frankly, he's not even a detective. He is strangely almost always upbe

Photo by Donny Jiang on Unsplash As you may or may not know, Nancy Drew is still a popular heroine today. People continue to rewrite her story and modernize it to appeal to a new audience. However, those of us who have read the classic yellow hardback series know how Nancy and her origin was more or less written (several of the original stories from the 30s were rewritten a few times over the decades, so the yellow hardbacks we have today are not 100% original).  I am an avid Nancy Drew fan and reviewed the 2002 Disney movie of Nancy Drew where she's in college. This new 2019 iteration of the sleuth has Nancy hanging out with her friends Bess and George in one of the lower high school levels. We learn early on that Nancy used to see them only during summers. NOTE: This post contains spoilers for this movie (obvi) and HeR Interactive's games  The Ghost of Thornton Hall  and Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake . Opening credits still from  Nancy Drew: The Hidden Staircase Synopsis Nancy Dr

  Thanks to Sia for giving me ideas while writing this post.    -- Spoilers -- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson left me feeling unsettled, much like The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. Real-life mystery-thrillers seem to have that effect on me. I think it was worse in this book because when I was halfway through, I had the brilliant idea to look at the sequel excerpt because I wanted to see what the next mystery would be. However, I spoiled myself for one of this book’s culprits. I didn’t expect Book 2 to continue from Book 1. I expected it to start anew like the other books (not just mysteries) I’ve read and later down the line mention Book 1’s culprits. So knowing whom I thought was the only culprit, I reflected on Pip’s investigation thus far and was upset that we had had only one conversation with Mr. Ward and nothing was given away. We also had one or two quick encounters where Pip runs into him and asks him a question or two. It wasn’t hard to realize that he