Coming at you faster than a stretchy missile off of a young boy’s outstretched finger(s), it’s Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe’s The Rubber Band! What is it? Why, it’s a classic mystery of the old school, with armchair detection aplenty, two-fisted shoe-leather gumshoeing (?), gals, dames, dudes, orchids, bankers, and crime cases no cop could ever […]

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Picked out and up at a literal airport bookstore, it’s the greatest fight we’ve ever had: J.A. Jance’s Duel to the Death: An Ali Reynolds Mystery. Will this supposed thriller bring the techno-chills, delivering A.I.-derived Bitcoin by Bluetooth? Or will we spend most of our time at the DMV? (Sorry for the short notes this […]

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One journal you won’t want to take a bullet for, it’s Nicholas Sparks’ rain-drenched kayak epic The Notebook! The gothic tale of a war veteran alone in his ancient house, yearning for the rekindling of a long-gone love affair, crossed with an empowering journey of a young woman fighting to make her own choices and […]

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Swords? More than a couple. Sorcery? Some, but not so much that you’d get upset about it. Sandals? Probably not, but we can’t swear that weren’t any in … The Wurms of Blearmouth. Probably the highest quantity (and quality!) of funny voices in any episode ever, and DEFINITELY the longest list of purportedly funny names […]

Read more "134 — The Wurms of Blearmouth, A Malazan Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach"

Just in time for J.W.’s birthday, we crack the spine on Tamra Baumann’s Plotting for Murder. Full disclosure: this breaks a few of our rules, in that we (a) mainly focus on bad books and (2) rarely read anything that wasn’t published by a major house, but sometimes we just want to read something we […]

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This episode, we ask you all to take us down to Raccoon City, where the herbs are green and the ammo’s scanty — Take. Us. Home. We sneak into a supposedly disused mansion to investigate a branded spinoff and read Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy, by S.D. Perry, a (completely rad) novelization of the first […]

Read more "132 — Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy"

Just in time for Mother’s Day, or maybe early for Halloween, it’s just flat-out time to get extremely spooky, so we’re bringing you the PG-est horror out there, slithering like a fat white worm and jutting upsettingly from a long-dug grave, Eric Morse’s epoch-defining Friday the 13th: Mother’s Day. Grab your backpack and get ready […]

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A book that will leave you sleepy, but a podcast episode that will leave you … in stitches, it’s Robin Cook’s quasi-classic Coma, a medical thriller more frightening than anything except a hospital bill. A thick slice of 70s anxiety, where women in the workplace crash up against the commodification of, uh, organ “donations” and […]

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