Sunny's bookshelf
Sunny's bookshelf photo by Judy Solomon

Online book reviews since 2011, the very best in reviewing – connecting good readers with equally good writers

Mystery

Art
Ann Ronald

The Art Thief

Noah Charney founded and now directs an international think tank on art crime. The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) aids police and

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Farm

I read this entire novel in a single day. The Farm, by Tom Rob Smith, is a fascinating psychological mystery thriller that both puzzles and intrigues

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Accident

Wow! Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, Chris Pavone’s new novel, The Accident, just keeps coming at the reader, not like a runaway freight train

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Children’s early and middle readers
Joanne Mallari

When Did You See Her Last?

When Did You See Her Last? All the Wrong Questions To stop publishing Lemony Snicket—now that would be an unfortunate event. Fortunately, Little, Brown and

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Thief

Whenever I read a book in translation, I always wonder whether I’m reading exactly what the author intended. Or is the translator getting in the

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

Ghostman

Roger Hobbs almost explodes onto the thriller scene in his debut novel Ghostman. We may never know the Ghostman’s identity but the Ghostman is a character

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Mystery
Ann Ronald

A Beautiful Place to Die

A Beautiful Place to Die brings to life a 1950s South Africa, when new apartheid laws have just been enacted and when justice is in

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

Pirate King

Pirate King is Laurie R. King’s eleventh Sherlock Holmes novel, starring Mary Russell. My Bantam trade paperback copy of the book contains a special treat—the

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Boy in the Suitcase

Let me begin this review with a glittering generality. I find contemporary Scandinavian murder mysteries to be graphic, violent, unsettling, and almost off-putting. I try

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Fiction
Sunny Solomon

The Technologists

For those of you who like your reading beefy, in other words more than four hundred pages, and likewise find Matthew Pearl’s take on mystery

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Mystery
Ann Ronald

Blood of the Prodigal

If you have seen many of my “Bookin’ with Sunny” reviews, you’ll know I prefer books that not only are delightful to read but that

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Historical Fiction
Sunny Solomon

Malice of Fortune

I think Michael Ennis is in love with Italy. Not the Italy of today’s grand sweep from the Alps down to the tip of the

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

Eye of the Raven

Duncan McCallum, one of two major characters in Eliot Pattison’s pre-American Revolutionary War novel, Eye of the Raven, is a Scotsman whose Highland clan was

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

Bloodmoney

David Ignatius writes novels about what he knows best. As a Wall Street Journal reporter for ten years, he covered the Department of Justice, the

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

River of Darkness

I recently reviewed Louise Penny’s Armand Gamaché mystery novel, A Trick of the Light, for ‘Bookin’ with Sunny.’ Because it was the seventh in a series

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