I’m reviewing Stephen Spotswood’s faux-Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin novels, Murder Crossed Her Mind (2023) and Dead in the Frame (2025) because (MINOR SPOILER: Spotswood ends Murder Crossed Her Mind with a cliffhanger).

Defense Attorney Forest Whitsun, hires Pentecost and Parker to find his former associate, Vera Bodine, who worked as a secretary for a law firm. Vera Bodine had a photographic memory that made her invaluable to the lawyers in the law firm where Witsun once worked. Whitsun and Bodine became friends and when Bodine retired, Whitsun would visit her and bring her food. Later, Bodine was approached by the FBI to help them find Nazis in the New York City area during World War II.

Whitsun discovered that Vera Bodine–who rarely left her apartment–was missing. He doesn’t have time to search for her with his heavy work schedule so he hires Pentecost and Parker.

Things get complicated fast. Will Parker is ambushed under the boardwalk. Pentecost is threatened by the psychopathic millionaire, Jessup Quincannon. Some issues get solutions, some don’t. GRADE: B+

Just published Dead in the Frame picks up where Murder Crossed Her Mind ended: with the arrest of Lillian Pentecost. Pentecost is sent to the New York Women’s House of Detention–a brutal prison–while Will Parker tries to make sense of the framing of her boss.

Having read all five books in the Pentecost/Parker series, I would award MOST COMPLICATED PLOT to Dead in the Frame. There is the key murder that has put Pentecost behind bars, but then there are peripheral deaths that are part of the twisty scheme to have Lillian Pentecost convicted of murder.

Will Parker narrates much of the book, but every so often, Spotswood provides a chapter of Pentecost’s prison journal with its dismal aspects of vengeful prison guards, terrible food, and rats.

I must confess, I did not have Dead in the Frame figured out. I unravelled some of the tangled plot, but the big Reveal came as a surprise. The Pentecost/Parker mysteries have been the highlight of my 2025 reading. Don’t miss this series! GRADE: A

The Kansas City Chiefs are going for a “Three-peat”–winning three straight Super Bowls–while the Philadelphia Eagles are going for revenge for their defeat in Super Bowl LVII. The Chiefs are 2-point favorites. Diane and I will be eagerly watching the Super Bowl commercials. Which team will you be rooting for?

I’ve watched several Spider-Man animated series over the years so I was in the target market for this new retro-Spider-Man series on Disney+. Peter Parker is voiced by Hudson Thames and the teenager is tormented by teen-age angst. He’s in love with his former baby-sitter…who shows no interest in his affections. Parker is always late to class and yearns to study robotics.

While there are variations from the classic Spider-Man origin story, the bite from a radioactive spider stays the same. Parker must adjust to his new super-powers while protecting his secret identity. And, hopefully, he’ll get a less kludgy Spider-Man suit (above).

Disney+ will release new episodes on Wednesdays and this season, consisting of 10 episodes, will explore a reality where Norman Osborn becomes Peter’s mentor instead of Tony Stark. Are you a fan of Spider-Man? GRADE: Incomplete (but trending towards a B)

Donald E. Westlake’s The Actor (aka, Memory) follows actor Paul Cole who sustains a concussion and ends up in a hospital. The brain injury affects Cole’s memory. He struggles to remember his pre-concussion Life and has to deal with an iffy short-term memory, too.

Memory is Westlake’s last novel and a departure from the crime novels he’s most celebrated for. The actor, whose memory problems steal the joys of his Life, lurches from one pitfall to another. His friends try to help Cole, but even they get frustrated by his inability to remember recent incidents. Cole’s inability to remember wrecks his hopes of returning to acting. But…what other jobs could he do? How can he cope with daily Life if he can’t recall what that Life consists of?

Westlake wrote Memory in the ‘60s, but couldn’t get it published. Westlake then focused on being a successful genre writer. Memory ended up in a desk drawer and where it languished, even after Westlake achieved success. Westlake’s friend Lawrence Block read Memory shortly after it was written and considered it a great book. After Westlake’s death in 2008, Block asked Westlake’s widow to look for a copy of Memory in Westlake’s files.  Abby Adams Westlake found it, and Block helped get it published. GRADE: B

Memory is being filmed as a major motion picture starring Andre Holland (Moonlight) and Gemma Chan (Crazy Rich Asians) directed by Duke Johnson from a screenplay he co-wrote with Stephen Cooney. The movie has a planned 2025 release date.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I thought this 80s Love Songs compilation would bring some romantic thoughts into your minds. I always liked Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.” Marvin Gaye’s classic “Sexual Healing” and “Slow Hand” amp up the mood.

But there are a couple of clunkers here. Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and Leo Sayer’s “More Than I Can Say” are weak links.

Do you remember these love songs from the 1980s? GRADE: B

Track Listing:

		Title/Composer	Performer	Time
	1	Take My Breath Away	Berlin	04:19
	2	No One Is to Blame	Howard Jones	03:36
	3	More Than I Can Say	Leo Sayer	03:04
	4	Sukiyaki	A Taste of Honey	03:37
	5	Lessons in Love	Level 42	04:34
	6	It Might Be You	Stephen Bishop	04:27
	7	Sexual Healing	Marvin Gaye	04:51
	8	Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now Albert Hammond / Diane Warren	Starship	04:22
	9	Slow Hand	The Pointer Sisters	04:52
	10	Celebration Joanna Clifford Adams / Robert “Kool” Bell / Ronald Bell / James L. Bonnefond / George “Funky” Brown / Claydes Smith / James “J.T.” Taylor / Curtis “Fitz” Williams	Kool & the Gang	03:33

For a quick and mostly accurate summary of 20th Century Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s MASTERPIECES: THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE CENTURY does a nice job. Yes, not all these stories are masterpieces–but they are very good. My major quibble is the lack of inclusion of Jack Vance stories.

The section on “THE NEW WAVE” brings back a lot of memories because those years were heavy SF reading times for me. Those stories and those writers redefined the SF genre.

The impact of “THE MEDIA GENERATION” stories is more questionable. William Gibson and Michael Swanwick have had an impact. George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings” sent reverberations throughout the SF world in 1979. But Martin’s biggest impact was Game of Thrones.

Do you remember these stories? Any favorites here? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION — 1

The Golden Age

• “Call me Joe” by Poul Anderson (1957) — 7
• “All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein (1958) — 36
• “Tunesmith” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1957) — 47
• “A Saucer of Loneliness” by Theodore Sturgeon (1953) — 80
• “Robot Dreams” by Isaac Asimov (1986) — 91
• “Devolution” by Edmond Hamilton (1936) — 97
• “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke (1953) — 110
• “A Work of Art” by James Blish (1956) — 116
• “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” by Ray Bradbury (1949) — 130

The New Wave

• “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison (1965) — 145
• “Eurema’s Dam” by R.A. Lafferty (1972) — 156
• “Passengers” by Robert Silverberg (1968) — 166
• “The Tunnel under the World” by Frederik Pohl (1955) — 177
• “Who Can Replace a Man?” by Brian W. Aldiss (1958) — 203
• “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1973) — 212
• “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven (1973) — 218

The Media Generation

• “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin (1979) — 243
• “The Road Not Taken” by Harry Turtledove (1985) — 276
• “Dogfight” by William Gibson and Michael Swanwick (1985) — 297
• “Face Value” by Karen Joy Fowler (1986) — 316
• “Pots” by C. J. Cherryh (1985) — 327
• “Snow” by John Crowley (1985) — 351
• “Rat” by James Patrick Kelly (1986) — 364
• “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bisson (1990) — 375
• “A Clean Escape” by John Kessel (1986) — 384
• Tourists” by Lisa Goldstein (1985) — 396
• “One” by George Alec Effinger (1995) — 408

The Wild Robot came and went here in September 2024. But it did well worldwide. The Wild Robot grossed $325 million worldwide at the box office, making it the sixth-highest grossing animated film of 2024.

A storm causes a Universal Dynamics cargo ship to lose ROZZUM service robots, which wash up on an isolated island. ROZZUM Unit 7134 (aka, Roz) attempts to find a purpose and ends up trying to raise a gosling. Lupita Nyong’o voices Roz as she frequently overrides her programming to accomplish her task. Roz makes friends with a snarky fox, Fink, voiced by Pedro Pascal. Together, Roz and Fink help the gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor) learn to swim and fly.

I liked Catherine O’Hara as Pinktail, a maternal Virginia opossum who gives Roz some advice on raising Brightbill, Bill Nighy as Longneck, an elderly barnacle goose who helps Roz understand teaching Brightbill how to fly, and Mark Hamill as Thorn, a grizzly bear and the island’s most feared predator.

I’m a fan of robots so The Wild Robot entertained me. I suspect many of you would enjoy it, too. GRADE: B+

Edwin Frank is the editorial director of New York Review of Books and founder of the NYRB Classics series. Instead of titling his book Stranger Than Fiction, Frank could have called it The Best Novels of the 20th Century because that’s pretty much what his book is all about.

Frank starts his review of great books of the past century by going back in time to 1864 because Frank claims “It is the beginning of 1864. Fyodor Dostoevsky is in Moscow writing the first twentieth-century novel.” (p. 3) From there, Frank takes a mostly chronological approach to the books he considers great and most influential.

While I’m not a big fan of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, I agree with Frank that Wells helps to create “genre fiction” with more successful novels like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.

I struggled with chapters like “A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro” because I’m not familiar with those writers. But I had no problem grasping Frank’s analysis of “What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses.”

Here is a list of many of the novels Edwin Frank writes about in Stranger Than Fiction:

Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

The Immortalist by Andre Gide 

The Other Side by Alfred Kubin

Amerika by Franz Kafka 

Colette’s Claudine at School

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Three Lives by Gertrude Stein

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Ulysses by James Joyce

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway 

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil 

Confesssions of Zeno by Italo Svevo

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence 

The End by Hans Erich Nossack

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Artemisia by Anna Banti

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpenter 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

How many of these books have you read? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction — xi

1. Prologue: the ellipsis: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground — 3
2. Part I. Breaking the vessels. 1. The vivisector: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau — 29
3. 2. The abyss: André Gide’s The Immoralist — 46
4. 3. Shutter time: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side and Franz Kafka’s Amerika — 62
5. 4. Youth and age: Collette’s Claudine at School and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim — 79
6. 5. The American sentence: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives — 101
7. 6. A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro — 116
8. 7. Hippe’s pencil: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — 142
9. 8. What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses — 160
10. Part II. A scattering of sparks. 9. For there she was: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dolloway — 191
11. 10. Nick stands up: Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time — 211
12. 11. Critic as creator: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities — 226
13. 12. The human and the inhuman: Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight — 241
14. 13. The exception: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow — 255
15. 14. The end: Hans Erich Nossack’s The End and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — 280
16. Part III. The withdrawal. 15. Don’t cry: Anna Banti’s Artemesia and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — 301
17. 16. Reflections on damaged life: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps — 317
18. 17. The whole story of America: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — 334
19. 18. Boom: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — 351
20. 19. Into the abyss: Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual — 363
21. 20. Being historical: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Elsa Morante’s History — 377
22. 21. The enigma of arrival: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival — 394
23. Epilogue: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz — 411
24. Appendix. Other lives of the twentieth-century novel — 421
25. Notes — 425
26. Bibliography — 429
27. Acknowledgements — 437
28. Index — 439

Its 1947 and pulp magazines are still selling on newsstands. Pentecost and Parker are approached by Holly Quick, a woman who writes stories for the pulp magazines under a variety of pseudonyms. Quick claims that three murders have been committed, based on stories she wrote.

Will Parker and Lillian Pentecost take the case and discover a trail that leads to the Black Museum Club, a group of rich and powerful people obsessed with murder and those who commit it.

The search for the psychopath who bases murders on Holly Quick’s stories is tangled up in the world of art collectors, publications, and the staging of elaborate murders. GRADE: B

“Ruby Donner was a circus woman. She was gracious and and kind and sometimes mean and always a little sad. She was a fearless as a daredevil, and stronger than any man here who swung a sledge. She was a stubborn as me on my worst days, and as cunning as me on my best. She knew who she was, and she never applied for it. She was the best of us. She was a circus woman through and through. And I’ll miss her something fierce.” (p. 118)

Murder Under Her Skin (2021) is the second book in the Pentecost and Parker series (you can read my review of the first book in the series, Fortune Favors the Dead here). Willowjean “Will” Parker is Archie Goodwin transformed into a feisty twenty-something female assistant to Lillian Pentecost, Nero Wolfe morphed into an elderly lady with multiple sclerosis.

Will Parker spent five years with a traveling circus before she left it for New York City and her surprising recruitment by Ms. Pantecost. Parker and Pentecost are contacted by the head of the circus, Big Bob Halloway, to investigate the murder of Ruby Donner, The Amazing Tattooed Woman, who was stabbed in the back. Valentin Kalishenko, Will Parker’s mentor who taught her how to throw knives in a circus act, is being charged with the murder.

It’s 1946. Parker and Pentecost travel to Stoppard, Virginia where the circus is stalled because of the murder. Stoppard also happens to be the town where Ruby Donner grew up and fled. Secrets of Ruby’s past come to light. Was the murderer a member of the local Blood of the Lamb Church who considered Ruby a “Jezebel”? Or was there someone in the circus who had a motive to murder Ruby?

I enjoyed reading about Park and Pentecost sifting through the lies and red herrings to finally discover the truth about Ruby’s killer. Murder Under Her Skin captures the thrills of a circus and contrasts it with the deep secrets of a small town. Another clever, entertaining mystery! GRADE: A