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B is for Burglar (Kinsey Millhone, #2)

Sue Grafton

8.1 (8 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Although business has been slow lately for P.I. Kinsey Millhone, she's reluctant to take on the case...

Kinsey Millhone 1980s

The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah: The Autobiography

Benjamin Zephaniah

10.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the...

Autobiography

David McK (3728 KP) rated Crackdown in Books

Jan 18, 2026

The third of Bernard Cornwell's 5 so-called 'Sailing Thrillers' (comprising 'Wildtrack', 'Sea Lord', this one, 'Stormchild' and 'Scoundrel'), none of which ever really resonated as much with me - or, presumably, the author himself since the last of these was written in 1992! - as his more famous Sharpe series about a British soldier during the Napoleonic Wars, or the Uhtred of Bebbanburg (also sometimes called The Saxon Stories) series, set in and around the time of Alfred the Great.

As with all the other sailing thrillers by the author, this is far more contemporaneous set: here, we're in the late 1980s, early 90s (I believe this was written in 1990), with this being set in and around the Bahamas where - like nearly all of Cornwell's other characters in just about any of his books - the main protagonist is an outcast of sorts: here, by their own choice, turning their back on their rich and famous father to spend their time sailing instead.

Hired by a rich senator for a convalescent cruise for said senator's drug-addict children, what starts out as a simple job soon turns anything but when Nick Breakspear and his small crew run foul of drug smugglers, leading to an action-packed finale - it's just a pity it took so long to actually get there, I felt!

Kudos

Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated A Kind of Freedom: A Novel in Books

Nov 6, 2017 (Updated Nov 6, 2017)

A book rooted in hope and endurance

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's beautiful debut novel explores four generations of a family, from the time of segregation to mass incarceration.

In A Kind of Freedom, Sexton pursues a family’s history in a downward spiral, with three alternating plot lines that echo one another along the way. It begins with the budding love of Evelyn, brought up in New Orleans and the daughter of a Creole mother and black doctor father. She is courted by Renard, a poor man who works menial jobs to get by but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship reveals the strictures of a class- and colour-driven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.

The second generation is about Jackie, a single mother in 1980s New Orleans who is in love with her child’s father but afraid he will succumb to his crack addiction.

Eventually, we get to know Jackie’s son, T.C., in 2010, a young man at a turning point in his life. Through T.C.'s eyes, Sexton portrays a post-Katrina New Orleans where the smell of mold still lingers and opportunities for fast cash in the streets abound, as do the chances of getting shot or arrested.

It's an unflinching portrayal, slightly detached and not overbearing in its rhetoric. It shows where links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. A moving read.