It took suspense, history, time travel, mystery, spies, romance—elements I love when they're whipped up in cross-genre—and turned them into something completely different from anything I've ever read.
We get social commentary from two unique characters in the near future that's right on target for the present, with nothing formulaic about either of them: a brilliant half-English, half-Cambodian young woman of the mid-twenty-first century and a real-life doomed nineteenth-century Arctic explorer brought forward in time.
And there's nothing formulaic or second-hand about what either of them thinks, thank goodness. A bonus for me, it's also a book about friendship. Everything that happens is unexpected, and nothing is what it seems in this one-of-a-kind love story that made me laugh and cry and think.
A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
I'm always ready for the next book in this series about two delightful and very different women who run a quirky marriage bureau in London shortly after the end of World War II as soon as I finish reading the one before.
Gwen and Iris are both originals, and their friendship as well as their tendency to stumble into murder, not to mention their ingenious methods of matching up intractable lonely hearts, has me rooting for them all the way.
Like all the others, this book was so much fun I hated to see it end.
In post-WWII London, the matchmakers of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau are involved in yet another murder.
In the immediate post-war days of London, two unlikely partners have undertaken an even more unlikely, if necessary, business venture-The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. The two partners are Miss Iris Sparks, a woman with a dangerous-and never discussed-past in British intelligence and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, a genteel war widow with a young son entangled in a complicated aristocratic family. Looking to throw a New Year's Eve soiree for their clients, Sparks and Bainbridge scout an empty building-only to find a body contained in…
This is the first of the 14-book Brock and Kolla police procedural series. The truth is that I read the fourteenth first and immediately went back and read this one and then the rest of the first thirteen.
Brock is an experienced old London police detective, and Kathy Kolla a very intelligent up-and-coming one. What I love about this series is—everything! It stands firmly on all three legs of a great story: character, plot, and writing.It has what I love in a police procedural: a well developed police team, complicated cases to solve, and in-depth characters in the cases—in every book in the series.
Brock and Kolla are mavericks, in trouble with either the authorities or the crooks at every turn and choosing to put themselves at risk rather than compromise their integrity or their pursuit of the truth. I love 'em!
This first book in the Brock and Kolla Mystery series was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association's John Creasey Award for best first mystery and met with wide acclaim. It introduced the team of Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla, with Kathy a neophyte to Scotland Yard. And her first case was one for the books. Meredith Winterbottom, a great-granddaughter of Karl Marx and a longtime resident of Jerusalem Lane a Dickensian section of London inhabited by Eastern European immigrants is found dead in her apartment. Along with her two sisters and other Lane residents, she…
On Christmas Day, Bruce Kohler wakes up in detox on the Bowery in New York City. He knows it’s time to change his life, but how can he stay sober without dying of boredom?
When homeless alcoholics start to die unexpectedly, Bruce is surprised to find he cares enough to want to find out why. Most of them had been down and out for many years, but Bruce’s friend Guff was different: a cynical aristocrat with a trust fund and some secrets.
Two old friends give Bruce a second chance and agree to help him with his investigation: his best friend, Jimmy, a computer genius and history buff who’s been in AA for years, and Jimmy’s girlfriend Barbara, a counselor who sometimes crosses the line between helping and codependency.
Barbara works a night shift at the detox and confronts a counselor who might still be dealing drugs. Bruce gets a job temping for Guff’s arrogant nephew. Between the three of them, suspects start piling up. The trail leads back to the detox. Or does it?
In Death Will Get You Sober, Bruce discovers that the church basements of AA are a small world in the big city of New York. As he grapples with staying sober, he finds that not drinking is only the beginning of coming back to life---a life he finds he wants to keep when it’s threatened by a killer.
Debut author Elizabeth Zelvin has used her expertise as an addiction councilor to pen a riveting mystery filled with memorable, realistic characters who are as flawed as they are heroic.
