Four more ten-word reviews, along with a belated credit.

As I wrote the batch of ten-word reviews I featured in a recent post, I had a nagging sense that I had seen someone taking that exact approach to reviewing recently. I didn’t remember where, though, so I credited the closest model I could recall, Michael Atkinson’s money-shot movie reviews.

On reading my post, Ed Park, proprietor of, among other blogs, the revealingly named Ten Word Reviews, demonstrated his magnanimity: rather than taking me to task for stealing his idea, he invited me to join the Ten Word Reviews roster! So, with apologies to Ed for forgetting his influence in the first place, I’ve gladly joined that blog and will be posting occasional review of non-book items.

Books, however, being this blog’s bailiwick, one more brief batch of ten-word reviews is in order, this one picking up recently read books that I inexplicably left out of the earlier roundup.

John Mortimer, The Second Rumpole Omnibus (1987)

Rumpole’s curmudgeonly arrogance tends to charm or irritate. I’m charmed.

Donald E. Westlake, The Hot Rock (1972)

Magnet for haplessness Dortmunder steals one diamond six *#@#^&* times!

Richard Stark, Flashfire (2001)

Parker's in Palm Beach. He ain’t there for the sun.

Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, Daredevil: The Devil Inside and Out, Volume 1 (2006)

Who knows Matt Murdock is Daredevil? Everyone! Which is bad.