Symphony Road by Gabriel Valjan

Gabriel Valjan’s first Shane Cleary mystery, Dirty Old Town, impressed me. He took an idealistic ex-cop turned PI, put him in Boston where he struggles to make a living while dealing with cops who hate him for his integrity and his willingness to testify against...

The Knife Slipped by Erle Stanley Gardner, writing as A.A. Fair

What do you read when you can’t concentrate? How about a forgotten classic? I’ll admit my definition of a classic may be different, but I find that an unpublished Cool and Lam mystery qualifies. The background for Erle Stanley Gardner’s The...

Pistols and Petticoats by Erika Janik

The subtitle of Erika Janik’s nonfiction book, Pistols and Petticoats, is “175 Years of Lady Detectives in Fact and Fiction”. Although the two subjects should fit together perfectly, they didn’t seem to flow as well as they should have in the...