2024 Year In Review: Award Winners
Discover the year’s best books and award winners for 2024, focusing on the major literary and crime writing awards.
Book Reviews
2024 Year In Review: SMSA’s Top 10 Mysteries
Mystery & Crime lovers abound at SMSA, so we have highlighted the top books from that genre this year. Which have you read? We hope…
2024 Year In Review: SMSA’s Top 10 Books
Have you managed to read all of SMSA’s most popular books? Discover our Top 10 most borrowed titles for 2024, in our Year in Review…
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
This book constitutes one of the finest readings I have had in the last months, and which I cannot but strongly recommend. Set in Penang,…
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Utopic or dystopic? This foreboding depiction of humanity’s potential future emphasizes the bliss in ignorance, and crafts an eerily appealing society where everybody is happy…
The Black Friar by S. G. MacLean
It is not often one finds a mystery or crime fiction plot so well woven, so well plotted that one almost forgets about the meticulous…
A Refiner’s Fire by Donna Leon
When is a National Hero not a Hero? That is the question to be pondered in this, the 34th instalment in the Commissario Brunetti mystery…
The Seeker by S. G. MacLean
This historical crime fiction novel is set in the time and place of London, England, 1654, in the first year of Oliver Cromwell’s rule as…
Highgate Rise by Anne Perry
Highgate Rise is the eleventh novel in a series of thirty two, featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. Thomas Pitt, the son of a former gamekeeper,…
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
If this is an example of the YA/adult cosy fantasy genre, let there be more! It was a real pleasure to find a well plotted…
The Aspern Papers by Henry James
This is a novella by Henry James, based loosely on letters kept by Claire Clairmont from the poet Percey Bysshe Shelley. The setting of the…
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
The Ministry of Time is about controlled time travel with an historical aspect. It also displays manipulation and intrigue with a touch of romance, all…