January 4, 2012 Michael Sims’s new collection of Victorian detective stories, The Dead Witness, is a cornucopia of dastardly delights and surprises. Watching the characters patiently unravel knots and ingeniously solve puzzles provides the delight. The surprises are the depth and breadth of variety represented in Sims’s overview of the genre. Humor and pathos, moralism and mercy, parody and tragedy, horror and retribution—the full spectrum of the human psyche is on display in this collection. The international cast of characters features authors and protagonists alike from England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. They include a mild-mannered Catholic priest and a tough-talking Virginian, a folksy Canadian tracker and a wide-eyed teenaged boy, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, a blind man, a Musketeer, a bumbler, a dilettante, and, of course, that curiously observant Englishman with a penchant for violins and opium.

September 27, 2011 Like a crumb trail through a deep, dark forest, skillfully sprinkled clues keep the reader enthralled as Alex Bledsoe spins an eerie tale in The Hum and the Shiver. Both romantic and harsh, the novel is about the strength of family ties and the power of music, as well as the coarseness and brutality of evil men. Balanced on the thin edge between dreams and reality, The Hum and the Shiver captures the subtle magic of childhood’s landscape, the pull of desire against destiny, and the way life can turn in an instant, suddenly revealing that pivotal moment no one ever sees coming.