Southern Noir: Crooked Man & Palm Beach Poison – reviews by CJ Verburg

Crooked Man (Tubby Dubonnet, #1)Crooked Man by Tony Dunbar
This is the second Tubby Dubonnet novel I’ve read, & I plan to keep going. The New Orleans setting is great fun, & the characters & plot have an appealing whiff of Elmore Leonard — that blend of suspense, sardonic humor, & gritty charm. Crooked Man features a bunch of crooked men, some lurking in the shadows & some fairly open about it, plus an up-against-it woman who doesn’t realize how strong she is until push comes to shove.

Palm Beach Poison (A Charlie Crawford Mystery, #2)Palm Beach Poison by Tom Turner
Well paced & written enough to pique my interest for about half the book. But it’s clear from the start who’s behind the first nasty deaths, & then who’s pulling the strings, so the only suspense becomes, What horrible fate will strike somebody next?

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My Family & Other Animals by Gerald Durrell – Review by CJ Verburg

My Family and Other Animals (Corfu Trilogy, #1)My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Of all the books I can imagine which mainly comprise richly descriptive recollections of the insects, plants, and other diverse critters discovered on a Mediterranean island by a ten-year-old boy, Gerald Durrell’s is undoubtedly the most compelling. That said, when I realized I’d only read 120+ of 614 pages, I was distracted by an impulse to reread his brother Larry’s Alexandria Quartet instead.

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