What a pleasure THE UPRIGHT PIANO PLAYER by David Abbott is to read! The publisher compares this to books by Ian McEwan, which I love, but I doubted this book could be that good before I read it. I can tell you, though: yes, Abbott’s style is similar to McEwan’s. And THE UPRIGHT PIANO PLAYER is even better. Honest.

THE UPRIGHT PIANO PLAYER begins with a tragedy. But, although you can then expect description of a man broken by heartache, you will want to keep reading. This is how Abbott is like McEwan. Their writing, alone, warrants the read.

But beautiful writing does not necessarily make a page turner. And this book is.

The second part of THE UPRIGHT PIANO PLAYER begins before the tragedy occurred, when Henry Cage, a divorced man living alone, is retiring from a company he built. He had been forced out, and now he is lonely. Through frequent flashbacks, you will learn why this is so.

Then Henry is a retired man taking a long walk home from a friend’s new year’s eve celebration. The crowds on the streets are great, and he is accidentally shoved into man with a violent history. The man learns who Henry is and where he lives and subsequently stalks Henry, vandalizing his home on several occasions.

During this time Henry learns that his ex-wife, who he threw out because his pride was hurt, who still loves him, will die soon of incurable cancer. And the way he learns this is part of the story, too: Henry received a letter from his son, who he also had not seen or heard from since the divorce, who he had rejected long before the son rejected Henry. And while he is later on his way to see his son, he discovers that he also has a grandchild.

Henry made his bed but now is not the same Henry and doesn’t want to sleep in it. I didn’t want him to, either; I rooted for Henry.

Pay attention to the quotation that precedes the story: "The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have improved." This is Henry’s problem.

I have a short list of authors whose books I’m sure will be good enough to preorder even before they’re published. David Abbot has been added to my list. I hear he’s writing another, and I’ll preorder it as soon as possible. But “as soon as possible” may be when amazon.uk has it because I might not be able to wait until it is available in the United States.

THE LACE READER by Brunonia Barry begins with the narrator, Towner Whitney, calling herself a liar and warning the reader to suspect everything she says. So you have to wonder as the book progresses if any of her first-person accounts are true. But, at times, the book does switch its point of view with the accounts told in third person and from another perspective.

The setting is Salem, Massachusetts. Towner has been gone for the last 15 years but has retuned to Salem because her great aunt was missing. Turns out, though, she’s there for her great aunt’s funeral.

Now come pages and pages of character description, each reminding Towner of her history with them: her twin sister, who committed suicide and the mysterious reason; her mother, who doesn’t go to the funeral because she’s so solitary and the mysterious reason she gave up Towner’s twin; the circle of lace makers, abused women who her mother leads; a policeman who’s interested in Towner and usually has a hard time coming up with the right words; her brother and his fiancé; her uncle who makes her sick and the mysterious reason; and the rest of the mixture of Christians and Calvinists and witches who inhabit the town.

In keeping with the notorious locale, Towner’s family all have some degree of paranormal ability, at least according to Towner. She reads minds whether she wants to or not. She mostly doesn’t want to. But there it is anyway.

This is a relatively short book, but more than 70 pages of it are character introductions. Little by little, Towner is reminded of the history she tried to forget by escaping to California 15 years ago.

Later, though, THE LACE MAKER finally gets interesting, then un-put-downable. Mysteries are upon mysteries are upon mysteries, the biggest one being Towner, herself. Another big one is the reason Towner’s twin committed suicide. And there are the mysteries of why Towner’s mother won’t leave the island and why she gave up Towner’s twin. Or is Towner misunderstanding? And did Towner’s uncle kill her great aunt? And what went on between him and Towner’s twin? Or was that just Towner’s imagination? And what went on between Jack and Towner’s twin and between Jack and Towner?

There are so many more questions, and they’ll keep catching you up. But you have to be careful when you try to figure the mysteries; remember, Towner is a liar (and, as you will come to see, somewhat crazy) and the policeman’s opinions are partly based on Towner’s writings.

While I like Nancy Pearl’s “Rule of 50” (read to the bottom of page 50 and then give up if the book still isn’t good), I obviously read further, and it turned out to be the right move. Although Berry’s writing style, divulging facts in a scattered manner, slowly and little by little, was sometimes hard to follow, it also perpetuated mystery and finally sucked me in.

It seemed to me that when the story confused me, when I wasn’t sure whether it was in the past or present, Massachusetts or California, Towner, herself, was confused.

Although Barry tried to wrap up the story in the end, she still left some unanswered questions.

The first 70 pages rated two stars; the rest rated four. So I guess that makes three.

On the basis of its high ratings and, finally, of seeing it billed as one of the best of 2009 on amazon.com, I purchased THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE by Alan Bradley. I'm sure now that Bradley must be a very nice and well-liked person. How else could his ratings be so high?

I expected a mystery. But enthralling, which it was called, it was not. Rather, it was meandering.

A dead bird shows up on the doorstep. What does this mean? Who is it meant for?

A man is murdered in the backyard. Who is it? Why was he murdered and by whom?

What do these two incidents have to do with each other?

So, yes, there's the mystery. But the book meanders, says so much of little consequence, it put me to sleep.

Harlan Coben's first book, PLAY DEAD, had been out of print. It's reissued in paperback now.

A gorgeous model marries a Boston Celtics basketball player who disappears and is supposedly found dead. But something's going on that's fishy-fishy.

And so the reader is taken for a ride as everyone seems suspect of something. And another basketball player shows up whose moves on the court are mighty suspect.

Coben prefaces this book with a plea for readers who haven't read his other, later books: please don't read this one first, he says,

So I was all set to dislike PLAY DEAD. But I didn't. It kept me up reading until late at night, and that's a good book, I think.

I looked for something to be wrong, and here were my problems with it:

The awful brother
The end

If you like Coben's books, you will this one, too. Don't be put off by his preface.

Short and simple: Dan Mercer is set up; he is lured to the home of a troubled teenager only to be accused of pedophilia. Although a judge throws out the case in court, the accusation, alone, has ruined Mercer's life. Or so it seems.

And, although they are all now in their 40s, it seems that Mercer’s old college roommates are similarly accused of crimes they did not commit, each similarly ruined as a result.

Wendy, a TV news reporter, tries to get to the bottom of this. She’s the person who caught Mercer in the act, but now she’s not certain that she really caught him in the act.

As usual with Harlan Coben’s books, CAUGHT is full of twists and turns that I just condensed to three little paragraphs. It’s really not short and simple. It’s about blame and revenge and forgiveness. It’s up-to-date, involving the Internet, Google, Facebook, GPS, etc., unlike so many other authors’ thrillers that have only begun mentioning cell phones. It is honestly a book you won’t want to put down.

My only criticism of CAUGHT is when Coben describes one of the former roommates, Phil. He has been laid off his job and has been unemployed for a long time but not for lack of trying. Each morning he dresses in a suit and tie and sits at a restaurant perusing the classified ads in the newspaper. There’s my problem. It’s obviously been a long time since Harlan Coben has had to search for a job.

Harlan: a college graduate no longer searches a newspaper’s classified ads for a job. Harlan: consider rewriting that paragraph in later printings so that Phil brings his laptop to a restaurant where he can get on the Internet and search for a job.

In spite of that one gaffe, if you haven’t read a Coben book before, CAUGHT might be a good one to start with.

Michael Connelly's latest book, THE SCARECROW, involves a soon-to-be-laid-off long-time LA Times reporter Jack McEvoy, who decides to "go out with a bang" by writing an investigative story about a black boy from South LA who may be wrongfully accused of murder. McEvoy finds a heck of a lot more than he thought he would as a high-tech company and some techno savvy employees there try to thwart his investigation. As a result, although the kid from South LA gets out of jail, McEvoy and his gorgeous (of course) FBI girlfriend nearly lose their lives every few pages.

THE SCARECROW may sound corny, but it really is a fun read. I hadn't read a Connelly novel before and wasn't expecting much but was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed it.

If you haven't read Connelly before but enjoy authors such as Harlan Coben, Lisa Scottoline, Stephen White, or Lee Child, you'll like THE SCARECROW. You'll probably want to read some of Connelly's others, too. I do.

Comment: I was pleased that Connelly didn't strive to be politically correct in his book. I know many authors would have described some of these characters differently so they didn't offend anyone.

Comment: The beginning of the book has a reporter with less experience than McEvoy who will take his place because she makes a lot less money. But she does have news writing experience between undergrad and grad school with a newspaper in Florida. And she does have a masters degree in journalism. Yet she has to ask McEvoy what it means to put "30" at the end of an article.

Give me a break! You can't take a single college journalism class and not know what that means!

Irritation: McEvoy is smart and performs as a smart person would--except when he is around his FBI agent girlfriend. She is unbelievably all-knowing. Whenever they're together, she bosses McEvoy around, and he meekly takes direction from her, suddenly out of his own ideas and dependent on her brains.

Because I read an uncorrected advance proof, I noticed many editorial and typographical errors. It would be interesting to see if these were all caught in the final published copy, especially one of my pet peeves: misuse of "ensure," "assure," and "insure."

Not worried about identity theft? Read THE BROKEN WINDOW by Jeffrey Deaver. You will be.

A serial killer has gone undetected because he has been able to pin the crime on some innocent person each time. The killer “knows everything” about his murder victims and so is able to get close to them and then plant evidence that proves the guilt of innocent people because the killer "knows everything" about them, too.

But how does he do it? How is he able to know everything about these people? Where does he get this information? And who could have access to it?

Enter Lincoln Rhyme, a recurrent character in many of Jeffrey Deaver’s novels, and his partner, Amelia Sachs. They get involved when Rhyme’s cousin is arrested for a murder and soon find that the real killer has access to both the cousin's and the murder victim's personal data. That's when they learn about data mining. In the process, so does the reader.

Data miners store personal data about everyone all the time--everything they do. Rhyme and Sachs learn that this is the only way the killer could “know everything.” So they investigate a large data miner and speak with the few people who can access all the data. The reader realizes that these people must be suspects.

But which one is it?

Whoever it is accesses Rhyme’ and Sachs’ personal data now, too, and can even use data mining “predictive software” to know their next move.

If you like thrillers/mysteries and have never tried Deaver, as I hadn’t, this would be a good book to start with. The privacy issues it deals with will really scare you and make you wonder how much of it is real. Deaver lists several Web sites where you can get further information.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a story within a story. One is the clever telling of the other.

At a café in Pakistan, a Pakistani man tells his story to an American man. The men are strangers. We learn about the Pakistani man through his narrative. The American remains a mystery man throughout. In paragraphs between parts of the Pakistani man’s story are hints about the American man, the purpose of his encounter with the Pakistani man, and perhaps even the Pakistani man’s purpose in telling his story.

In this short novel, the Pakistani man tells of coming to America to attend Princeton and then work for high wages at a New York company. He falls in love with an American who’s in love with a dead person. But she’s rich and gets him into all the right places. He’s living the high life.

Then, surprise, he decides on 9/11 that he’s disillusioned with America. He now sees America as that big, bad, obnoxiously rich and power-hungry nation that waves its flag as if it can’t get over itself and is stuck in some black-and-white movie. He smiles at the sight of the destruction of the Twin Towers.

I wouldn’t have bothered reading more. But I had read so many reviews of The Reluctant Fundamentalist that were favorable and praised its suspense. I figured something must be about to happen that would justify all this, and it was such a short book I stuck with it.

The Pakistani man continues to describe his disillusionment with America and his doomed love affair. He goes on to explain why he is back in Pakistan and what he is doing there. I guess the reviewers referred to the mystery American when they mentioned suspense.

The Pakistani man speaks of the necessity of knowing history but obviously knows little history himself. He complains more than once about the awful Americans invading Afghanistan for no reason and of Pakistan helping America but the Americans refusing to take their side when they go to war with India. He, of course, doesn't mention the Taliban in Afghanistan and their promise of another 9/11. He also forgets (I don't know how since he lived there) that Pakistan and India have been going at it with each other for years and that this war with India was a frequent occurrence.

So the Pakistani man’s story is told, and he and the American man are still at the café at the end of the day. And then comes the ambiguous end. My guess is one of two possibilities.

I can’t recommend this book.

A 13-year-old boy, Johnny, and his friend, Jack, search for Johnny's twin sister, Alyssa, a year after she has gone missing, after everyone else, it seems, has given up. "It seems" because the case still haunts police Detective Hunt as well.

Jack has described his last sighting of Alyssa: because her father forgot to pick her up, Alyssa was walking home at dusk when a car stopped and she walked up to the open car window, smiling. That's when she was grabbed and pulled into the car, and the car drove away.

Johnny's mother blamed his father for Alyssa's abduction, and he has subsequently walked out on Johnny and his mother. So Johnny is now trying to put his family back together by finding known pedophiles in his county and spying on them, determined to find Alyssa alive. In the process, he uncovers another crime.

John Hart is a great author. THE LAST CHILD, his latest, is a page turner. But I can't praise it as I did DOWN RIVER, Hart's 2006 book, because THE LAST CHILD has a flaw that comes up again and again throughout the book. That is, Johnny's mother, Katheryn, and Detective Hunt's infatuation with her.

Katheryn is described as beautiful. Yet she is also described as addicted to all sorts of drugs, rarely combing or washing her hair, and always unaware of her dirty home and of Johnny's absence. That doesn't sound beautiful to me.

But Detective Hunt is drawn to her even as she disgusts the reader. And at the same time, he is described as smart and capable, seemingly the best detective in his police force. The two descriptions, Hunt's infatuation with a disgusting woman and his high intelligence, just don't jive for me.

Something else that irritated me but probably won't bother most other people: Hart's use of the word "that" when he should use "who." This, too, occurs throughout the book and I would think should have been caught by an editor.

But don't skip this book because of that one flaw or because of what I see as an editorial error. I bought it at Borders and don't feel cheated, that coming from a person who feels cheated when she pays $2 for a bad book. I'm still anxious to read Hart's KING OF LIES, his first book.

Without giving away too much of the story, I'll say that John Hart's Down River centers on a young man, Adam, who had been accused of murder five years before, was acquitted, moved out of town for five years, and is now back in his hometown. I won't say why because that's one of the mysteries that makes the book enjoyable.

Back in Adam's hometown are his father, a very, very rich farmer, who owns millions of dollars worth of farmland; his stepmother, who testified against him at his trial five years before; his stepbrother and stepsister, twins; his father's best friend and foreman of the farm and the "grandaughter" he is raising; some of the townspeople, including the police, who remember and hate Adam; and Adam's former lover. All these lives, we learn, are entwined.

Half the town wants Adam's father to sell his farmland to a power company; some want it desperately because it means money for them. Adam's stepmother still resents him, probably hates him. The stepbrother and stepsister don't hate him but they each have serious issues that have affected Adam in ways that the reader will come to see. And the reader will find mystery upon mystery upon mystery with all the characters.

Down River is a mystery and thriller, but it's more than that. It's also literature. I loved this book.

My words aren't adequate to describe how good this book is. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Written in 1950, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train is said to be a classic among thrillers. Alfred Hitchcock even based a movie on this book. But I was disappointed.

I don't like to say too much about a book's story because I resent book flaps that give it away and don't want to do the same. It's enough to know, then, that Strangers on a Train begins with two men meeting on a train. One immediately becomes obsessed with the other and stalks him throughout most of the rest of the book, although, of course, a book written in 1950 wouldn't use the word "stalked."

Most of the rest of Strangers on a Train also consists of the other man's thoughts, his feelings of guilt that seem to be on the brink of driving him crazy. He feels guilty about actions he took that he feels were forced on him. And his many thoughts that went on and on and on with endless repetition were so monotonous and difficult to read that I found myself skipping paragraphs.

I'm also not a fan of this book because everyone but one detective is stupid. Granted, because the book was written in 1950, the dialog sounded exactly like a 1940s movie, in which I always thought characters (with the exception of Jimmy Stewart's characters) didn't talk the way people really talk. But that isn't to say they sound stupid. In this book, they do.

The man being stalked, especially, makes one stupid decision after the other. And then, in spite of the stupidity of everyone in the book, the one exception I make, a detective, miraculously understands what happened with the two strangers on a train. Yet nowhere are we told how he figures it out other than his prior understanding of the stalker.

Although I thought I saw all the Alfred Hitchcock movies, I don't remember seeing this one. So I'm going to borrow this DVD from the library and see what Hitchcock did with it.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG by Andre Dubus is a frustrating story because everyone is stupid. And they just keep piling on the stupid, one stupid action after the other.

Part 1 is full of sex and stupidity. That's a sign of a bad, at least second-rate, writer. It seemed he padded the book with sexual details that were unnecessary to the story except to show the reader that two of the characters didn't think with their brains.

Although the author seemed to be trying to get the reader to sympathize with all three main characters, I just couldn't. What was to like?

Part 2 gives glimpses of good writing. It made me wonder if two different people each wrote a different half of the book.

Although everyone except the Iranian teenager is stupid in Part 2 as well as Part 1, the author did make the reader sympathize sometimes in Part 2. For example, when Lester considered his kids (but was so stupid he didn't do that for long), when Behrani's wife's headache was so bad the description actually made my head ache, and especially when Behrani's thoughts were given during and after the episode with his son and Lester.

Unfortunately, the book didn't get good until the second half of the second part. These were the few pages of exceptionally good writing when the author described Behrani's devastation.

Mary Pat Kelly’s GALWAY BAY is a 551-page story of the Keeley and Kelly families beginning in Ireland in 1839 all the way to their lives in Chicago and their get-together at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. While the book is fiction, it is based on the lives of Mary Pat Kelly’s own ancestors and stories told to her by her cousin, Sister Mary Erigina, who lived to be 107. She grew up on these stories told to her by this book’s narrator, Honora Keeley Kelly, who really was Mary Pat Kelly’s great-great grandmother.

But GALWAY BAY isn’t just stories of Mary Pat Kelly’s ancestors. You want to read this for its accurate historical details that Kelly researched for 35 years in both Ireland and the U.S. It covers so much that I thought I knew but didn’t. And the advantage to its being historical fiction rather than a history book is that the reader can feel how people lived through these times.

For example, I learned details about living through the Irish Potato Famine that I never knew before. I was ignorant to think the Potato Famine is capitalized because of a terrible blight that killed the Irish potato crops. That, alone, wouldn’t have been enough to send them packing for Canada and the U.S. or to merit capitalization. It was the blight three years in a row combined with English laws that seemed designed to wipe out the Irish and, indeed, did lead to so many deaths they were almost annihilated.

GALWAY BAY is full of many other examples of historical events and people. It might make you want to learn more, especially if you, too, have ancestors who lived through this. That’s what I plan.

THUNDERSTRUCK by Eric Larson tells two stories, and you won’t know what one has to do with the other until almost the end.

On one hand, there’s Marconi. He’s from Italy but lives in England. Marconi made possible (although that is contested by others from the start) practically instantaneous ship-to-shore communication.

On the other hand is Dr. Crippen. He’s from the United States but lives in England. He killed his wife.

Although THUNDERSTRUCK gets good reviews, I found it tedious. It went on and on about every little inconsequential detail. This was more than I wanted or needed to know.

And Larson knows it. He prefaces the book with a warning that he does this.

Somewhere I read that this book is a page turner. It’s not.

MOONLIGHT MILE by Dennis Lehane is a continuation of his Patrick-and-Angela series. Lehane had said he’s all out of ideas for this series, and this book even sounds like it may be his last. Lehane fans, fear not. I mean his last in the series, not his last book. And I even might be wrong about that.

Patrick and Angela are private investigators. In this book, they’re married and have a 4-year-old daughter. Consequently, they’re a bit more careful than they used to be. And Patrick hates his job.

If you’ve been reading this series, you remember when Patrick and Angela found a child who had been kidnapped from her neglectful (and trashy) mother. It turned out that the little girl had been taken by a loving couple who the child would have been better off with. The couple went to jail. Against Angela’s wishes, Patrick returned the child to the awful mother.

Now it’s more than 10 years later, and Patrick and Angela revisit this case. The girl, now 17, is again missing. And, although Patrick and Angela can’t afford it, Patrick gets sucked into the case.

Speaking of “can’t afford it,” our country’s sorry economy is a theme in this book.

This is another great Dennis Lehane book. It was a quick read because I didn’t want to put it down, which is as all books should be but so few are.

I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE by Laura Lippman begins with Eliza living a typical housewife life. The story continues for another 40 or so pages with descriptions of Eliza’s interactions with her children and her remembrances of growing up with her jealous and nasty sister. But what does all this have to do with the story, you wonder. Not much.

Then Eliza receives a letter. It is written by a female hand but is from her rapist.

Eliza had been abducted when she was 15-years-old. Her abductor was trying to find a girlfriend. Really. He grabbed countless, but at least three, girls and killed all but one—Eliza. He raped Eliza.

Now, shortly before his scheduled execution, he wants to speak with Eliza. So he dictates a letter to a woman who is against the death penalty, who has befriended him, and she mails the letter to Eliza. Really. It’s that easy for a rapist to contact his victim from prison, at least in this story.

Eliza, rather than contacting the authorities about this, goes through the trouble of having a separate telephone line installed in her house just for the rapist’s calls. Really.

And, remember, prisoners must make their calls collect. She accepts the charges. Really.

But now he says he wants to speak with her in person. So she arranges a last-minute-before-they-execute-him visit because her sister just happens to know all the right people. Really.

Eliza thinks he’s going to be honest with her. Really.

I was so disappointed in I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE! This story made me want to scream at all the characters. They all do stupid things. I list only a few here. (The least stupid is Eliza’s sister, the one who she remembers as such an awful person.)

Besides, every single page of this book has something wrong with it: if a character isn’t doing something stupid, something implausible is happening or paragraphs are rambling on and on about something that has nothing to do with the story.

This is an honest review of a book I won from the librarything.com Early Reviewer program. It was an early look at the paperback edition of the book.

Joyce Maynard is the author of TO DIE FOR, a book of fiction based on the Pamela Smart case in New Hampshire in which Smart has her teenaged lover murder her husband. In INTERNAL COMBUSTION, Maynard again is interested in a case of a marriage gone so bad that a woman wants her husband dead. Only this time she sticks with the facts, nonfiction, as she saw them over her summer’s-long investigation plus a few shorter trips before and after. And this time the unhappy wife does it herself.

This is partly the story of Nancy Seaman’s murder of her husband, Bob, in 2004; of Seaman’s murder trial; and of the effects of the Seaman marriage and murder on their two sons, Jeff and Greg. They lived in an upper-middle-class Detroit suburb, Farmington Hills, Michigan, and weren’t wanting for material things but were a tragic family nevertheless.

As previously stated, though, that story is only part of the book. More than that is the story of Maynard’s investigation into the lives of Nancy and Bob Seaman, including their childhoods. Along the way, she interviews and gets to know many different people and not only those in Michigan. But she never meets with Nancy, Greg, or Nancy's coworkers. Still, it is through this process that she comes to a decision not about Nancy Seaman’s guilt, which is certain, but whether she was justified, as a "48 Hours" episode had claimed.

Maynard should have stuck with the story of the Seamans, relating fewer incidents that exemplified their horrible marriage. It got tedious. But even all those examples aren’t as bad as going completely off the subject, which Maynard does several times.

At various points, Maynard sticks in her little jabs at Oakland County (where Farmington Hills is) and Farmington Hills for their racism and tells little stories of her trips to the city of Detroit, none of which have anything to do with “THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE AND A MURDER IN THE MOTOR CITY” (the book’s subtitle, which is inaccurate because Farmington Hills is not the motor city.)

I grew up and still live (minus a 20-year-long stay in California) right in the area Maynard speaks of. I even grew up in the same city where her ex-husband did. That’s why I picked up this book. I lived in California at the time this took place and moved back to Michigan around the time the trial ended. So I was unfamiliar with the story other than what I had seen on TV in California.

Although Maynard's impressions of Detroit and area suburbs are interesting, they have nothing to do with the reason I wanted to read the book. So I found it maddening that they were stuck throughout the book, kind of like padding.

Maybe if Maynard had been able to speak with Nancy, her son Greg, and the teachers Nancy worked with, she could have stuck with “THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE AND A MURDER IN” Farmington Hills.

Hadley Richardson Hemingway was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain is Hadley’s first-person account of their life together before, during, and after they were married. But this is a novel, not an autobiography.

Hadley and Ernest met when her friend Kate invited Hadley to Chicago, where Kate lived. It was party, party, party all the time there. Poor little Hadley from St. Louis, where her life was dull, boring, and anything but a party, was happy to return again and again, particularly because Ernest was there. He was 8 years her junior, but he was full of life, and she yearned for that now because she had missed out on so much when she was younger. So, although most 29-year-olds might have thought a 21-year-old was too immature for them, Hadley was attracted to Ernest right away.

Eventually, Hadley and Ernest began writing to each other between visits. When Ernest’s letters told Hadley about his intention to go to Europe to further his career as a writer, she was disappointed. Then he told her that he wanted her to come with him as his wife, and she jumped at the chance with little thought to what she might be getting herself into.

So not long after they married, they went to Paris. They met and interacted with various writers and other artists there and became friends with the likes of Gertrude Stein and her partner and Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Although Hadley liked them, they bothered her, too. My opinion: they were a strange gang. They partied and drank all the time and hoped they’d sell books. How did they do it? They were either independently wealthy or, like Hemingway (“Hem”), they shared their wife’s trust fund.

But Hadley had assured Ernest before they were married that she’d never stand in the way of his writing career. She told him that she would only be his partner and encourage it. So she didn’t usually complain but went along with everything. That even included threesomes for a time. No kidding. Hadley was miserable but felt one with Ernest and didn’t know how to live without him.

Ernest’s actions were not a result of Hadley’s neediness, though; I think they were because of Earnest’s association with the eccentric (read self-centered and hard-drinking) writer community in Paris. Their marriage was doomed from the beginning of their lives there.

McLain says that this book of fiction is mostly fact. That makes THE PARIS WIFE interesting. Still, I couldn’t take it in large doses because of my disgust with Ernest and the rest of those expatriate writers in Paris and also with Hadley. While I could understand how a wife could be a sap for her husband, I couldn’t sympathize with her plight when she was putting up with threesomes every day, even in her bed.

HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY by Audrey Niffenegger begins in a hospital room. A woman, Elspeth, dies and immediately thereafter watches her lover, Robert, mourn her. Somehow after that, though, her ghost is confined to her flat in London.

Edie, Elspeth's twin sister, lives in America with her husband and twin daughters, Julia and Valentina. Elspeth and Edie are estranged, and the truth of that is eventually revealed.

In the meantime, Elspeth has left a lot of money and her large London flat to J and V. And, as already mentioned, that's where Elspeth's ghost is.

Note, also, that J and V have a strange relationship with each other. Although it's understandable for twins to be close, their dependence on each other is quite strange.

Then V decides to do something about that. She could simply live her own life, but that's not enough. Instead, she and the ghost cook up a plan.

THE NEW YORK TIMES gave HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY a good review while the reader reviews I read were bad. I'd say it's someplace in between.

The book seemed pretty corny to me. But I stuck with it because Niffenegger’s fantasy, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, seemed corny, too, but still grabbed me. HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY didn't grab me.

In Catherine O’Flynn’s WHAT WAS LOST, a 10-year-old girl, Kate, fancies herself a detective. She watches people, makes up stories to herself about them, and takes great care with her notes about following them. Then one day she disappears.

The police’s immediate and only suspect is a young man, Adrian, who was her neighbor and had befriended this lonely little girl. When he could bear the suspicion of neighbors and his family no longer, he, too, disappears.

Flash forward 20 years. Adrian’s little sister, Lisa, now an adult, is an assistant manager at a music store in a huge mall, the largest in England. Also working at the mall is a security guard, Kurt.

And now we spend the rest of the book trying to figure out what either of them has to do with Kate, who we assume is the subject of the story. But as we continue to read, we have to wonder why we keep getting off the subject, exploring Lisa’s feelings of uselessness and Kurt’s imaginings. Isn’t this about the disappearances of Kate and Adrian?

I read several good reviews of this book. So I wondered what was wrong with me. Why did I skip paragraphs because they were dull?

O’Flynn does a lot of character examination in the second part of the book. It was too much for me because she doesn't point out the connection to Kate until almost the end. I guess I was supposed to trust her

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penny is a mystery that is very different from your usual mystery. That's why I read it.

The story takes place in Canada around the time of the U.S. Civil War, maybe a little before then. People from various parts of Europe have come there to brave the elements and live in a settlement together, all speaking English but with lots of different accents. A French trapper has been murdered, and the obvious suspect is a 17-year-old who has fled the settlement.

Most of the book involves the boy's mother, a halfbreed Indian, and an employee of the Hudson Bay Company hiking across Canada in a search for the boy.

The mystery is, at first, who killed the French trapper. It turns out to be more than that, though.

Yes, this is quite different from your usual mystery. But, frankly, most of it bored me. It was so darned slow! There isn't anything thrilling about it.

I wouldn't have read the whole book but for two factors: 1) it wasn't a long book and 2) the book was a gift.

I also felt like this book was beneath my reading level. That is, it seemed to be a book I might have liked when I was in the eighth grade.

It's possible, though, other readers will disagree.

In unusual writing style moving from the end of the story to the middle to the beginning to the end throughout the book, finally ending in the middle, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things tells a story of a well-off Indian family, most of it from the perspective of one or the other of twin children, one a boy and the other a girl. It’s a dysfunctional family, of course, and just about everyone in it is more or less nuts.

Except I’m looking at it from the perspective of an American, not an Indian, so what may seem nuts to me may be a cultural difference. But Roy does seem to criticize Indian culture, herself, when she shows us how a culture with a history of touchables and untouchables affects lives and personalities.

The style as I speak of it sounds confusing and mixed up, but the book is not difficult to read at all. As a matter of fact, its back-and-forth movement leads to more suspense as Roy gives more and more hints about the middle and the end.

The God of Small Things received many great reviews in the last decade (or more). And it is a very good book. But I wouldn’t rate it a five out of five because I have a big problem with it.

From the very beginning, Roy points out a difficulty with one of the characters and comes back to it again and again. Yet she never answers the question she presents to the reader. Most readers will be surprised when they get to the end of the book and may think they have a defective copy that ended in the middle because the character’s life and readers’ questions are unresolved.

The book also annoyed me because Roy used so much pointless capitalization. At first I thought it did have a point: from a child’s perspective, some words are a lot bigger and more important; they’re proper nouns. But she did this so much, so often, even when we were seeing the story from an adult's perspective, that all those caps lost their intended meaning, whatever it was.

I know there are many readers who loved this book. I liked it.

Lisa Scottoline’s novels present interesting legal dilemmas.

In Scottoline’s THE VENDETTA DEFENSE, an old Italian man, “Pigeon Tony,” who lived in prewar Italy under Mussolini and the Black Shirts and fled to America with his young son, is now accused of murdering another Italian-American, Angelo Coluzzi. Coluzzi is a rich man who is corrupt and has ties to the Mafia.

During flashbacks in the book, we see why their ages-old feud, back to their lives in Italy, where Coluzzi was one of the Black Shirts, led to the killing. And, according to Pigeon Tony, that’s what it was—killing, not murder.

THE VENDETTA DEFENSE is one book in Scottoline’s series about a Philadelphia law firm. One of the associate lawyers in the firm takes on this case, made more difficult by Pigeon Tony’s ongoing insistence that he tell the judge that he did, in fact, kill Coluzzi. Pigeon Tony was sure the killing was justified because it wasn’t murder; Coluzzi killed Pigeon Tony’s wife in Italy many years ago and his son and daughter-in-law more recently in Philadelphia.

While this book wasn’t a not-put-downable thriller, it was interesting and did make me want to keep reading. Scottoline seems to like to set herself up to solve unsolvable legal dilemmas.

Mine is a different opinion of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

I had been reading reviews of this book for a year or so. ALL raved, practically drooled.

Here's what I learned before I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: it is made up of a series of letters written after World II through which the reader will both fall in love with the people of Guernsey and learn history they probably never knew.

That's mostly true, except for the falling-in-love part. Because this book is a series of letters, the reader never really knows much about any one character. How can you fall in love with someone you don't know? I guess you could argue that people do all the time. But I don't really think so.

The fact is, the book is just plain silly and predictable. Also, because this book is written the way it is (as a series of letters), it never grabbed me and made me anxious to read more.

It's nice that it ended the way it did, but I'll bet you can guess the ending after you read the first few letters.

So why did this get such great reviews? I can only guess why, but it's obvious to me that most weren't honest.

Tom Rob Smith’s The Secret Speech is the sequel to his Child 44, in which Leo Demidov is a state security officer with the MGB (later called the KGB) in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Leo gets to the bottom of a series of crimes, serial murders of children, at a time when murders were not talked about and denied because of the claim that there was less crime under Communism.

The Secret Speech is three years after the end of Child 44 with Leo, his wife, and their two adopted daughters. It is 1956, Stalin is gone, and Khrushchev has replaced him. Khrushchev is more liberal and criticizes Stalin’s rule and tactics. And now the people who were persecuted, jailed, and tortured under Stalin are looking for revenge.

I praise The Secret Speech just as I did Child 44. Like Child 44, The Secret Speech is historical fiction at its finest, i.e. it’s a not-put-downable novel that is so well researched you might find it difficult to distinguish fiction from fact.

I advise that you read Child 44 before you read The Secret Speech. You’ll appreciate more the feelings of Leo’s wife and daughters, which are key to understanding The Secret Speech.

Two black maids and one young white woman in early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, alternately narrate THE HELP, a fictionalized account of the production of a book of true accounts. The white woman, Skeeter, is writing the book. Various black maids tell her stories of their everyday lives working in white households.

The civil rights movement is going on; apparently, though, some rich society women are slow to catch on. So the reader can easily forget that these are the 1960s and not the 1860s as black women not only cook and clean six days a week for white families; they even raise the white children.

I admit this put me off for the first few chapters. I grew up during the 1960s, and I sure never saw evidence that black women knew how to raise children better than white women did.

But I'm not from Mississippi; and all was not as it seemed to me at first. I now know that Stockett's accounts are fair. At times I even doubted this is fiction.

More than that--I found, although before I read THE HELP I thought it might bore me, I was, instead, enthralled with it. I hated to see it end. But Stockett does, afterward, explain her truth and motivation for writing this book.

THE HELP is an exceptionally good book. You don't want to pass on this one.

ONE GOOD DOG by Susan Wilson is the story of Adam, a highly paid business executive who has a breakdown and loses everything as a result, including his marriage. He gets stuck with a pit bull and ends up loving it.

I admit: I'm a sucker for good animal stories. And many other dog lovers had given the book high reviews. I believed them. That's the reason I bought ONE GOOD DOG.

But I am a well read adult who appreciates truly good books and depends on truly honest reviews. None of the reviews I read bothered to mention that ONE GOOD DOG is a children's book.

It's marketed to adults, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. This is a book I may have liked when I was 12. Even then, I think, I would have noticed how predictable everything in the story is. I knew what was going to happen pages before it happened. Everything, no kidding, was predictable.

Seriously, Susan Wilson would be better off with a publisher who would market this book to younger readers.

Although LEFT NEGLECTED by Lisa Genova is fiction, it is about living with a real affliction, left neglect. Left neglect occurs after damage to the right side of the brain. The affected person is unaware of the left side of their body and the left side of everything around them. Therefore, she can’t process or perceive anything on the left side of her body or environment. Yet, this is not because of blindness or paralysis or even lack of sensation on the left side.

In LEFT NEGLECTED Sarah’s brain damage happens when she is on her way to work, preoccupied with locating her cell phone. Her car flipps. The next thing she knows, she’s in the hospital. She had been in a coma for about a week and would soon discover the symptoms of left neglect.

Before her accident, Sarah had been quite a busy working mother of three. Not only that, but her job as vice president of marketing was so time consuming, it was a wonder she had time for her family at all. Somehow, this superwoman did. But all that was about to change at least temporarily.

While I’ve been seeing much praise of Lisa Genova for her skillful writing about this medical condition, I give her hats off, too, for her ability to describe for pages and pages the life of a busy mom while still keeping me interested. I think you’ll enjoy, as I did, Genova’s humor as Sarah deals with each child before and after work.

Soon, though, Sarah has her car accident and is in the hospital. Now we see her begin dealing with her left neglect and with the people working on it with her. I can assure you, her descriptions are accurate. And, yet, both Sarah and the author keep their humor throughout.

When it’s time for Sarah to go home, though, will Genova be able to retain her accuracy or just keep trying to be funny? I was pleased to see that, yes, she still does both.

As I said, I can assure you that Genova is accurate in her descriptions of the feelings and thoughts of a brain injured person forced to live with this unexpected and, put lightly, inconvenient condition. Although brain injuries vary and do not all involve left neglect but some other result, the thoughts and feelings of the afflicted person and the reactions of nonafflicted people around her are common

DEWEY: THE SMALL-TOWN LIBRARY CAT WHO TOUCHED THE WORLD by Vicki Myron, Bret Witter (Contributor), was published in 2008. Obviously, I didn’t read it right away. That’s because I was afraid it would be a tear jerker. But the cover picture of that cat finally proved irresistible when I found the book at a used book sale. I read it, and I loved it.

If you like cats, you’ll love this book, too. And there’s enough description of library work that librarians would also enjoy this book, regardless of how they feel about cats. But a librarian who is also a cat owner absolutely should not miss DEWEY.

Some of DEWEY is funny, all of it is touching. But it’s more than a MARLEY-type book, with descriptions of crazy incidents.

DEWEY begins with a book depository. That’s where Vicki Myron, the director of the Spencer, Iowa, Library, finds the 8-week-old kitten one freezing cold morning. He was near frozen to death, and his paws were frostbitten. But he loved her and everyone else who would hold him immediately. And all the librarians there loved him back. So, of course, they kept him.

And now you might expect the remainder of the book to describe cat antics. But Myron actually tells us how Dewey helped so many people on a daily basis, truly helped them. He even improved the library. And it even may not be a stretch to say that he gave some status to the small town of Spencer, Iowa. Sure, cat antics are in there, but they’re part of the stories of a cat who loved everyone and helped the lives of so many.

I highly recommend this book. It’s just as good today as it was in 2008 when it was getting so much publicity.

Sometimes I just can’t wait to blurt it out: THE SLEEPWALKERS by Paul Grossman is an outstanding thriller. Like Joseph Kanon’s books, this is excellent historical fiction as well.

The setting is 1932 Berlin. The body of a young woman has washed to shore. Willi, a Jewish police detective and former World War I hero, famous already for solving another huge case, is called to the scene. He notes that she was beautiful. But her legs are horribly deformed, almost as if they are backward. And her hair has been shaved. She is also missing both wisdom teeth, indicating she was probably American. She’s dubbed “the mermaid.”

Before he has a chance to get anywhere with this case, Willi is given another, higher profile assignment—to find the missing princess of Bulgaria, who had been visiting Berlin with her husband. According to the doorman at the hotel she walked out of, she looked like a sleepwalker. Willi’s subsequent investigation finds many more missing persons cases involving sleepwalkers.

With his assistant Gunther, Willi uncovers more and more evidence that the unthinkable may be going on in Germany. And it may all begin with a hypnotist.

I highly recommend THE SLEEPWALKERS. But I admit I did have a problem with Willi’s prostitute. She’s a friend of the American he feels may be “the mermaid.” But she soon becomes a love interest to Willi. He turns off his brains when it comes to sex because he hasn’t had any in 2 years. Is this reason enough to leave a prostitute alone in his apartment all day while he goes to work or to trust her with details of his cases? This tarnished an otherwise fantastic read for me.

In spite of that one criticism, I still insist that THE SLEEPWALKERS is the best kind of thriller. If you hesitate to read it because you aren’t familiar with Grossman, it’s time to expand your horizons and read a new author. He’s so good that I’m preordering his next book, CHILDREN OF WRATH, due out in February.

I’ll say it right up front: ONLY TIME WILL TELL by Jeffrey Archer is a don’t-miss-it novel, the first in a series that will continue the story of the Harry Clifton family and the Barringtons. It will make you anxious to read the next installment.

Harry is growing up without a father. He died when Harry was just a year old, but Harry doubts the cause of death that everyone gives him—a war injury. This is the novel’s first mystery.

A child with a “voice of an angel,” Harry receives a choral scholarship to a school attended by rich boys and encounters so much snobbery and mistreatment he runs away. But, at the urging of “Old Jack,” the mysterious man who lives in an old train carriage, Harry returns in time for breakfast.

He does become good friends with two boys at school. One, Giles Barrington, is the son of Hugo Barrington, Harry’s dead father’s former employer. Hugo Barrington is ONLY TIME WILL TELL’s bad guy.

The book is told in parts, each part a different character’s point of view. In this way, we learn more and more. And the mysteries surrounding different characters are cleared up or built up.

ONLY TIME WILL TELL follows Harry, his mother, “Old Jack,” and the Barringtons from 1920 to World War II . At each stage, we see how far Harry’s mother will go to see that he attends the best schools and wants for nothing and how far Hugo Barrington will go to see that Harry does not attend the best schools and is unsuccessful.

Family sagas such as this book can be overly long and boring, especially for readers who enjoy books of thrills and suspense. I’m betting, though, that even those readers will love ONLY TIME WILL TELL. What saves it is Archer’s style. By telling the story from different character’s points of view, he keeps adding mysteries and solving them, building suspense by way of Hugo Barrington and the limping former policeman he employs. Still, this is a family saga, not a thriller.

Also, Archer’s method, telling the story from various points of view, rounds out his characters. You’ll love some of them and care about them. So, even though the last part of the book is predictable and, I think, a little corny, you’ll still hate to see the book end. Your consolation is remembering that, while this book ends, the story continues.

A THOUSAND LIVES: THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOPE, DECEPTION, AND SURVIVAL AT JONESTOWN by Julia Scheeres surprised me. I thought the story of Jim Jones, his cult, and the mass murder-suicide (which, according to what is now known, was actually a massacre) that ultimately occurred was an old one, that nothing new could be said about it. Most of us know Jim Jones was a cult leader who lead his followers to a mass murder-suicide at Jonestown. But there’s so much more to know now, and that new information is related in this book.

First of all, A THOUSAND LIVES doesn’t use the word “cult.” Why not? Scheeres says something like, no one practicing a religion thinks it’s a cult.

Jones wasn’t always a creep. His life reminds me of a long-time politician’s life. They start their careers as good and sincere and honest, but the power they have over others’ lives eventually goes to their heads and corrupts them. It’s interesting to see Jones as good and sincere and honest and then become the creep who lied to his followers and became more interested in his power over them than in improving their lives.

But Jones became more than a creep. He became a mad man and was far worse than we knew.

And the book contains so much more previously unknown information. But I don’t want to give it away here; as some reviews will. Just believe there is more here for you to learn now.

Some of the information Scheeres divulges left me with more questions: how could so many adults, including several politicians and people in other positions of power, have been fooled by a monster? And how could so many of them do ANYTHING at his command?

I say “monster,” and I know you’ll agree with me that Jim Jones was after you read this. I remember what was said when the massacre happened. It wasn’t called “massacre” then. Read this, and you’ll see that it was.

Scheeres has gathered together this new information in a way that she can get more personal. She examines the lives of specific members of the cult, especially when they lived in Jonestown, Guyana. It was difficult to read sometimes but definitely more interesting than just a recitation of information. It even gets frightening as cult members try to defect and leave but can’t. They were trapped. Were they also drugged? Were they hypnotized? Scheeres presents evidence that they were but says not.

If I were gathering together this information, I would have organized it differently. And I would have posed my questions someplace near the beginning and then tried to answer those questions. But what a job it must have been to sift through everything now available to her! So much disgusting information that I’m sure will make you see some aspect of the Jonestown massacre differently.

I won an ARC of this book through goodreads.com’s First Reads program. This is an honest review.

22 BRITANNIA ROAD by Amanda Hodgkinson is a wonderful book. It was rated one of the best of 2010 by amazon.com, but I just got around to reading it. Hodgkinson manages to tell four stories at once without confusing the reader. Instead, her organization of the four stories to tell one story creates more drama.

This is the story of a Polish couple, Silvana and Janusz, and their baby/child, Aurek, during and after World War II. They were separated for 6 years when Janusz went off to join the Polish army. Therefore, Silvana's story of her experiences during the War is told separately from Janusz's story of his experiences at the same time.

In chapters between these chapters are the stories of Silvana, Aurek, and Janusz after they are reunited in England. These stories are told from Silvana's point of view and Janusz's point of view.

Sound confusing? It isn’t.

I'm so glad I didn't read many reviews of this book because reviews often say too much. I promise I won't. But, as a teaser, I will say that there comes a point in Silvana's story after the War when she divulges a secret that just about knocked my socks off. You may do as I did and page through what you already read, looking for a clue. It's there. I missed it.

SHELTER, Harlan Coben’s first young-adult novel, is a spinoff from his Myron Bolitar series, adult novels. Now we have the beginning of a new series based on the exploits of Myron’s 15-year-old nephew, Mickey Bolitar. As was Myron, Mickey is a high school basketball player. And as was Myron’s series, Mickey’s series is mystery/thriller.

Mickey and his mother were introduced in Coben’s last Myron Bolitar (adult) novel, LIVE WIRE. All you fans of Coben’s Myron Bolitar novels who are unhappy that this was Coben’s last because he has switched to YA and feel that Coben has abandoned the readers who made him--not totally. In this first installment of the Mickey Bolitar series, Mickey lives with Myron. Mickey’s father (Myron’s brother) is dead, and his mother has been an inpatient at a drug rehabilitation hospital. Mickey dislikes his Uncle Myron because of the way Myron treated Mickey’s mother. (And you know that can’t last. We love Myron)

Now Mickey is a new student at the high school that had been attended by his father and uncle. He’s a hunk so right away attracts girls and is attracted himself to one in particular, Ashley. But soon, without a goodbye, she disappears. This is the setup for one mystery.

As faithful Coben readers already know, his books are always mystery upon mystery upon mystery. Here’s another.

An old woman who lives down the street from Myron’s home opens her door one day to smile at Mickey and tell him his father isn’t dead. In Mickey’s quest to learn more from her, you guessed it, he runs into even more mysteries.

And just as Myron had his sidekick Win, it looks like Mickey has a sidekick, or maybe two or three. Maybe we’ll see more of “Spoon,” the announcer of random facts, and Ema (with a long e), the fat girl in black. There’s also another gorgeous 15-year-old girl for Mickey who may be a regular.

I am one of the fans of Coben’s adult novels, his standalones as well as his Myron Bolitar series. I wasn’t happy about his switch to YA and figured that LIVE WIRE was not only his last Myron Bolitar novel but, also, Coben’s last novel that I would read. Then along came an advanced reader copy of SHELTER (through librarything.com Early Reviewers program).

My primary concern with this new book was not whether it would appeal to young adults. Personally, I don’t care. But because I’ve loved and bought every one of Coben’s adult novels and felt I was rudely abandoned when I read about his switch to YA novels, I cared about whether they might be suitable alternatives for his adult fans.

I’m here to tell you that Coben hasn’t completely abandoned us. This YA novel still contains recognizable Coben elements. I enjoyed it, although I wish I hadn’t been able to guess who some people really were early on. That’s a deviation from Coben’s adult novels.

I was also surprised at the violence in this YA novel, but what do I know about that? Maybe young adults nowadays are desensitized to violence.

So, although I expected to dislike SHELTER, I didn’t. But I do still think Coben owes us more adult novels. And he can do that without giving up Mickey’s series. SHELTER is a quick read, and I’m sure other books in the series will be, too. Coben will have plenty of time.

Since I wrote the above review, I received an email update from Coben's Web site. Apparently, he DOES plan to continue writing adult novels as well as this Mickey Bolitar series. He even has a standalone coming out next spring. And, surprise, he MAY write more Myron Bolitar books.

BIG MIRACLE by Tom Rose is the nonfiction story of a nonevent (Rose’s word) in 1988 that became so huge it captured the attention of the world and just about preempted a presidential election in the United States. In Barrow, Alaska, “the tip of the world,” three whales were trapped beneath ice and couldn’t migrate south to warmer waters as they did every year at that time. They would die when a hole in the ice froze over and they were unable to breathe.

This was a nonevent, says Rose, because it was not uncommon; whales became trapped under ice and died every year for thousands of years. This was wildlife. But it still became an event because the media made it an event.

Rose initially makes the mistake of subjecting readers, who probably expect the story of the whale rescue, to many long descriptions of whaling and the whaling industry and many long paragraphs of historical detail about whaling. While that interests some of us, it isn’t the animal story readers expect. Although Rose could argue that these details are necessary to understanding the story of the three trapped whales, I still insist that he overdid it. He could and should have stated simply that a long-time whaler in Barrow, Alaska discovered, just by chance, three whales trapped under the ice.

Rose is a successful journalist. But he wrote this book like he didn’t study journalism in college. Keep it brief, simple.

Although Rose continues with stories that were less dull, stories of life at the top of the world and how the media, the rescuers, and the players in the rescue did their jobs there, BIG MIRACLE is still easy to put down. Background information about most participants in the rescue, and even some of the reporters, added context to the story, but much of the historical was unnecessary. And so was the repetition. Sometimes I wanted to scream, too much information, Tom!

So, if you think this book is strictly about three trapped whales and the efforts to save them, think again. Rose also has a valid point to make: real news stories were ignored in favor of this nonevent. Rose was one of those reporters.

I cannot recommend highly enough ONE MORE RIVER by Mary Glickman. I’ve been calling people to tell them to read it. I even convinced someone’s book club. Plus, ONE MORE RIVER is a 2011 National Jewish Book Award finalist in fiction, first runner up to Aharon Appelfeld's UNTIL THE DAWN'S LIGHT.

ONE MORE RIVER begins in the 1960s in Vietnam. That’s where Mickey Moe Levy is, associating what is around him with what he knows from home in order to live through his time there. In so doing, he recalls his family’s past.

Mickey Moe remembers especially meeting his wife, the beautiful Laura Ann. And now we need some background.

So we go back to Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s before Mickey Moe was born. His mother, a beautiful high-born southerner, was somehow attracted to his father, an unattractive man with an unknown past but lots of money. They married, raised a family, and lived in a huge home in a swanky neighborhood and gave lavish parties. They always had lots of money, and were unaffected during the Great Depression.

But then Mickey Moe’s father died in World War II, and his mother couldn’t locate his money or his relatives. Mickey Moe was only 4 years old at the time. But it wasn’t until he was 25 that he bothered to look into the mystery that was Bernard Levy, Mickey Moe’s father. Mickey Moe needed to prove to Laura Ann’s parents that all his family history would meet with their approval.

So ONE MORE RIVER tells Bernard Levy’s story, beginning with his childhood. In alternating chapters, Mickey Moe recalls his and Laura Ann’s search for the truth about Bernard Levy. This is two stories, one mystery.

The writing is superb, the style original. At least, I can’t think of another author whose writing style is like Glickman’s. This book made me wish I could read it nonstop, with no interruptions, no need to go to work.

THE PHYSICK BOOK OF DELIVERANCE DANE by Katherine Howe is an interesting take on the innocence of the women hanged as a result of the Salem Witch Trials. History has shown that they were all victims of others’ hysteria. But what if one of the accused really was a “cunning woman”? That is the supposition of this book.It’s 1991. Connie is a Harvard student working on her doctoral dissertation. At the same time, she’s living in the very old home left by her grandmother, supposedly getting it ready for sale. The home is near Salem, Massachusetts. Connie finds “Deliverance Dane” written on a piece of paper inside a key inside a very old bible in the house. Her curiosity about the name leads to an investigation, which leads to the subject of her dissertation: a “recipe” book used by Deliverance Dane to cure the ailments of local people and animals. (It should be noted that Deliverance sometimes failed in spite of her book.) Connie needs to find that book.
When she hits a wall and she thinks she can trace it no further, her advisor, a professor at Harvard, becomes furious with her. He seems to be taking Connie’s investigation personally. Why? What does he have invested in this? When this story deals with historical events, even those that are fiction, it’s enjoyable. Sometimes this is Connie’s research that so concerns her advisor. But sometimes we flash back to the 1600s and 1700s so that we see Deliverance’s book change ownership. In this way, we’re always a step ahead of Connie’s investigation.This story also has magic, but it’s not as annoying as you might think. Even though it doesn’t seem at first to add to the story line and even if the magic does seem silly at times, it’s not just padding.But other parts of the story did irritate me, especially Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned old home with no heat or electricity. It’s just too easy for Connie and her dog to live there. For example, at one point she makes a pot of pasta for dinner with a guest. How did she make it with no gas or electricity? And what about

In BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP by S.J. Watson, Christine wakes up every morning with no memories. Every day her husband tells her who they are and what happened to cause this memory problem. This book is about Christine regaining memories, little by little. At first, it sometimes seems slow and repetitious because of Christine’s same routine every day. But it’s also more and more mysterious with each new memory. Some things are implausible. For example, Christine keeps a journal. Every day she describes that day, so she knows what happened in the days before. BEFORE I BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is her journal. How does she have the time to both write it (in longhand) and then reread it every day along with anything else she does that day? But I just went along with it.Then Christine starts remembering enough to be suspicious. And just as she goes back and forth suspecting Ben or her doctor or her old friend, then suspecting her memory instead of them, I, too, went back and forth with my own suspicions. It truly became a thriller. BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP forces the reader to become tense with suspicion. It is this aspect that I think must be the reason the book is such a bestseller and garners so much praise. I can tell you that this is what won me over and is the reason I rate it so highly.

THE SNOW CHILD by Eowyn Ivey doesn’t live up to the many reviews of it that I read. It is simply a retelling of a Russian fairy tale.

But I would think that, in doing so, the author would have filled in the blanks, i.e., she would have made the tale seem more realistic by showing how the unrealistic might really have happened. And she does seem to be trying to do that. But the reader still needs a willing suspension of disbelief. The book is full of unanswered questions.

I knew THE SNOW CHILD was based on a fairy tale. I learned that that’s not all—-it IS a fairy tale.

I won this book from Freda's Voice blog.

PRAGUE FATALE by Philip Kerr is mystery/thriller-historical fiction. The book’s official synopsis describes a murder investigation at the home of Reinhard Heydrich in 1941 Czechoslovakia. But, it turns out, that’s not where the book begins. Bernie Gunther, the narrator, doesn’t even get there until well after 100 pages.

From page 1, this book is full of details about the people, places, and events in Germany and Czechoslovakia in the early 1940s. That could be why it’s reviews are so good. I take another view because I read this is also a mystery/thriller. But the story is overtaken by all the historical details as Kerr RAMBLES ON AND ON with Gunther’s thoughts about them. As a result, the story gets buried and is slow, not thrilling.

If you’re looking for combination mystery/thriller-historical fiction, better choices are any book by Joseph Kanon.

PRAGUE FATALE is one book in a series. This is the only one I read, though, and there are many reviews that are to the contrary of mine from people who read the series. I won it from the publisher through reviewingtheevidence.com.

THE ART OF FORGETTING by Camille Noe Pagán is a young adult novel, and my three-star rating is for a YA book. I made the mistake of assuming it was a more advanced book, which I prefer, and would give it one star that. But I don't think one star would be fair just because I accidentally picked the wrong book for me.

I call this YA, but I'm over 50, and the term "chick lit" is new to me. I suppose that people more familiar with "chick lit" would call it that. But THE ART OF FORGETTING is one of the types of novels I read as a young adult. Therefore, I call it YA.

The reason I say it would not be approrpiate for a book club is that it is YA. I don't think I would want to belong to a book club that reads YA books.

I've read a couple of Kristin Hannah's books for book groups. These are YA/chic lit, and I didn't like them; at the same time, I know that this style is popular with many. If you are one of these, you'll like THE ART OF FORGETTING.

The book is about North Korea. It was difficult to read about such a hellish country and the sorry state of everyone in it. But it is also difficult to read such choppy writing. As a result, I thought throughout that I was missing something as I tried to get a handle on the orphan master's son, Pac Jun Do. In my opinion, someone did some great marketing of this book and put out there some stupendous reader reviews that really sold the book to a lot of readers who believed them. In reality, it's difficult to follow. It is hard to tell if description is imagined or true. The writing is clumsy. First Jun Do is here, then he's there, then you can't tell where the heck he is. Too much is left unsaid, left to the reader's imagination. Yet torture scenes are described in awful detail.

I didn't like this book at all.

If you like thrillers, you'll love this one. THE CONVICTION by Robert Dugoni is a bring-to-the-dinner-table, stay-up-late, can't-put-it-down thriller. If you haven't read a Dugoni book and are hesitant to read this for that reason, throw your caution out the window. This will make you want to read his other books.

Every time I got to a part in this book that seemed to be a place where Dugoni wrote himself into an unanswerable question or a corny incident, he writes himself out of it by coming up with an answer or explanation. That is, all except once, and I let him slide on this.

One of his characters excuses his bad acts, including murder, with the very unequal bad act of the government: they took away his retirement package. It's not a good excuse so I hoped Dugoni would undo this somehow, but he didn't. But let it go because everything else in this book is a thriller the way all thrillers should be

The many reviews that praise the thriller TRIPTYCH by Karin Slaughter must be based, I think, on the second half of the book. If so, then the praise is justified. But a book review should be based on a book’s entirety, and Slaughter paints a picture of characters and background for almost 200 pages before she gets to the suspense. She risks losing readers after page 50. But if you stick with it, it not only gets better; it gets great.

TRIPTYCH is the first book in a series about Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But the book doesn't begin with him. It begins with a newspaper clipping from 1985 about the murder of a 15-year-old girl in Georgia. This is why you may disagree with my opinion. Because the book begins with a murder, you might say, it begins with suspense. Maybe. But that little clipping wasn't enough for me.Especially in the case of that 1985 murder, the details are hard to read because they are so infuriating and frustrating. What needs to be said is never said, what needs to happen never happens.
One reader review of this book complains that the murderer is apparent halfway through the book. That person doesn't get it. True, we can figure out the mystery 200 or so pages in, but the suspense is just beginning. After we know who the murderer is, the book gets un-put-downable. Believe it, this book WILL grab you. But the last couple chapters may turn off some readers because it is so violent.

BEL CANTO sounds promising at first. Patchett writes beautifully, leading her reader to believe that her description of a large, formal birthday party held at the home of the vice president of some South American country is the beginning of an engrossing story. When terrorists interrupt the party, though, fantasy begins. It's not so bad being a hostage in Patchett's story. Over the several weeks that the terrorists keep their hostages in the vice president's home, some of them, both terrorists and hostages, even feel they were never happier. What follows, then, are monotonous, unrealistic, even ridiculous descriptions of hostages' friendly relations with terrorists. Patchett's terrorists are sympathetic. They are poor, deprived people who don't want to hurt anyone. Patchett may have been trying to describe a real psychological phenomenon, hostages who end up caring for their captors, a type of Stockholm syndrome (capture-bonding). These feelings are understood to be irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims.

People who like and care about animals are nicer people, I say. Brian McGrory, author of BUDDY: HOW A ROOSTER MADE ME A FAMILY MAN, is one such person. He loved his dog.

But loving a dog is pretty easy because dogs are people pleasers, even dogs not as perfect as his Harry. The second half of the book asks: what about a rooster?

This is the test: the woman he loves, his dog's veterinarian Pam, and her two little girls have a rooster named Buddy. McGrory doesn't like the rooster; Pam and the kids love the rooster. Now what to do?

So McGrory gives us accounts of his dealings with the rooster. That includes his experiences with Pam's daughters and his efforts to become a member of their family. These stories are funny and touching, and they're a pleasure to read especially if you, too, have struggled to find happiness and contentment with your husband's or wife's children or if you, too, have observed the lengths some divorced parents will go to to satisfy their children.

But back to Harry: almost the first half of the book is devoted to him. I loved reading about Harry but was wondering when I'd learn what he had to do with the title character. Turns out not much, although McGrory does try to relate the Harry accounts with the Buddy accounts when he says that Harry was the reason he met Buddy. Even though that's true (because Pam was Harry's veterinarian), the Buddy stories and the Harry stories are separate in time.

So this is pretty much what the book is: nonfiction presented in many short stories, first, about Harry, then about Buddy and family, all in chronological order. McGrory contrasts his two lives, and often recalls Harry during the Buddy stories.

I would have preferred that this book was one story rather than a series of episodes. It could have flowed very well from lonely McGrory after he lost his dog to McGrory's efforts to become a family man when a rooster is part of the family. That's what McGrory tries to do but in episodic form.

ILLUMINATIONS by Mary Sharratt tells the story of Hildegard von Bingen, recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches and as a prophet by the Lutheran Church.

Hildegard's divine visions were likely the reason her mother gave her to a Catholic monastery when she was a child, where she was forced into a tomb-like existence for 30 years. Her visions continued her entire life. When she was sure they came from God, she saw the importance of writing a book about them. Further synopsis is in the publisher's comments.

ILLUMINATIONS is based on documented fact, but it is not a biography. Here, Hildegard's story is told as a novel. In so doing, Sharratt interjects Hildegard's thoughts, psychological insights, and dialog and keeps the reader's interest more than a biography would. For readers like me, that makes this book more readable, and that is why I rate the book so highly.

This book would be perfect for the reader who likes well-written romances that are far and away better than most books called romances. CASCADE has a story that does not depend on descriptions of sexual gymnastics. Still, I wanted again and again to skip through paragraphs and pages. A couple times I even considered giving up on the book entirely. That is because O\\\\\\\'Hara makes the common mistake of what I call \\\\\\\"too much rumination.\\\\\\\" The main character, Dez (Desdemona Hart), thinks, at length, too much. If the purpose of a novel is to capture and hold a reader\\\\\\\'s attention, to entertain them, CASCADE wanders from that intention too often with excessive narration. I believe that is the reason one reviewer said she could not finish this book. She thinks the reason is Dez. She thinks that Dez is too unlikeable to care about. But who says a reader has to like a main character for a book to be a success? Granted, Dez is detestable. She marries a good-looking successful pharmacist, Asa, just so she and her father have a home. At her every mean and selfish act, Asa forgives, even goes out of his way to be kind. How could she not love someone like that? Instead, she chases after another man, one she continues to love for years and years.

THE ORCHARDIST is a lovely book, and many people rave about it. So you might not want to pay attention to my criticism. Maybe they're right and I'm wrong. But I have two problems with this book.
First, the author, Amanda Coplin, never lets her readers know any character. She glosses over everything.
Second, Coplin uses too many sentence fragments, and she doesn't use quotation marks. This is a device, I'm sure, but for what, I'm not sure. I only know that the result for the reader is choppy sentences that are difficult to read.
I won THE ORCHARDIST through http://www.ManOfLaBook.com blog.

A RELIABLE WIFE starts off excellent but later contains circumstances that cheapen it. This book becomes too unbelievable. Although many would argue that, as fiction, it should not need to be believable, the fact is, the highest ratings go to those novels that grab readers and suck them in because they believe it. Even science fiction presents a story that readers come to believe, at least as long as they\'re reading it.


But A RELIABLE WIFE grabs the reader initially with its story of a lonely man who writes a personal ad for a reliable wife only to be deceived. He gets his wife, but she\\\'s not who she says she is, and her motives aren\\\'t pure. From there, though, the story disappoints. It\\\'s not bad, just not as good as its beginning promises.

A WILDER ROSE would interest past readers of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series of children\\\'s books. The publisher\\\'s description that I read on the ARC I won from Kirkus says that this tells the story of Rose\\\'s and Laura\\\'s collaboration on the Little House books, which should come as a surprise to readers who always thought they were written by Laura. But, in fact, A WILDER ROSE is about Rose. Although A WILDER ROSE does describe the \\\"collaboration,\\\" that is not what the book is about. Her work on the Little House books was a part of her life and only parts of A WILDER ROSE. I had a hard time sticking with this book and found it too easy to put down.

This is a darling story that I would have loved when I was 11. That is not a negative comment unless you were hoping for adult reading material.

Because ALMOST PERFECT is a book for young people (younger than young adult), I can't review it adequately. I can only comment as an adult reader: I was bothered that the main character, 14-year-old Benny, talks, thinks, and acts like he is 11.

I think Manning's point is that immature Benny matures with responsibility. Good point, but, in the meantime, the kid sure did irritate me.

However, this book deserves a high rating for young readers.

He's done it again. Harlan Coben has once again written a winning mystery/thriller in MISSING YOU. Or should I say "mysteries/thrillers" (plural)?

MISSING YOU has more than one mystery going on, one characteristic of all Coben novels. These mysteries all involve Kat (Katerina), a New York police detective whose father, also NYPD, was murdered 18 years ago. Of course, that's one of the mysteries: who did it? Kat also searches for a missing woman, who, it turns out, is one of several people who trust someone they met online, in another of the mysteries. And another mystery has Kat finding her old fiance, who now goes by another name, on that same online dating site.

As usual, this Coben novel is a can't-put-it-down thriller. And, as usual, I repeatedly wondered as I read it, how can Coben keep writing himself into seemingly unsolvable mysteries, only to solve them satisfactorily every time?

One disappointment: although MISSING YOU gets interesting sooner than most books, it is missing one characteristic common to all Coben novels until the last few years. That is, his novels were always tnrilling right away, from page 1 or 2. MISSING YOU didn't grab me until the end of Chapter 1, not bad but not up to Coben's old standard.

Although I already have 40-some books in my wishlist, I now have to add at least one, maybe five, more. I like this book a lot.

THE DEVIL'S PUNCHBOWL is my first Greg Iles book, which is the third in a series about the Penn Cage character. While Iles is good about supplying background information, so a reader can start these books out of order, THE DEVIL'S PUNCHBOWL ends on a cliffhanger. Now I want to read the next and maybe the next and the next (still to be published) in the series.

In this book, Cage is the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. A casino there, which he had hoped would help revive Natchez's faltering economy, is owned by a corrupt Irishman who is bilking Natchez out of tax money, running dog-fighting rings, and supplying his customers (and himself) with prostitutes. Cage gets wind of it when his old friend, who had worked as a dealer in the casino, is murdered, and the murder is apparently tied to the casino.

A couple parts of this book (descriptions of dogs and rape scenes) were hard for me to read; they were too graphic for me. But you can skim those if they bother you, too, and not lose track of the story.

One other criticism has to do with two of the other characters: Cage's friend Daniel Kelly (note Iles' use of a good-guy Irish-American to balance the bad-guy Irishman) and girlfriend Caitlin Masters. They seemed superhuman to me, especially Kelly. He was a Bruce-Willis-type character. She could kick off a tin roof with her bare feet after she walked up a wall and while she was upside down. They are both a little too amazing.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed this book and look forward to more by Greg Iles.

This story, if true, might break your heart. Even as a novel, NO BOOK BUT THE WORLD will leave you sad and angry at the waste of a life.

Ava and her younger brother Fred have been raised by two parents who are free thinkers. They believe that most school systems are confining and putting a name to mental difficulty is labeling so also confining, not free. Therefore, they run their own school and do not get Fred, who clearly has mental difficulties, the help he needs.

Ava begins her story as an adult. Fred is in trouble with the law and hundreds of miles away. The book then consists, alternately, of her point of view and that of her best friend/sister-in-law, husband, and, finally, poor Fred.

The book goes back and forth from present, while Fred is in jail, to past. Descriptions of their childhood were overwritten sometimes. But the reader does need to know and understand how Ava and Fred were raised, how Fred dealt with his world, and how his parents, as free thinkers, just let him be.

The writing is beautiful. It made me think of Ian McEwan.

The first several chapters of this book make it seem to be a young-adult novel, The last few chapters of THE FEVER turns out to be a darned good mystery. That is better than just a good mystery. Add \"darned\" because everybody is suspect, anything could be it, and the solution is a surprise. Because it seems, at first, to be YA, it may bore readers who shy away from \"easy reading\" and prefer more complex novels that deal with adults and adult situations, But THE FEVER becomes very good, but its main characters are teenagers and it\'s an easy read.

High school girls are having seizures, getting sick, and talking strange, one after another. There are lots of high school settings and teenager dilemmas. So, if you shy away from YA, it will be tempting to skim some of the story. If you do, though, you may miss clues to what is to blame. Abbott sticks clues everywhere, in many teenager conversations and situations.

Even though this seems to be YA reading level, if you like good mysteries, you may still enjoy this one.

This is a ridiculous story with a dumb main character, a lawyer working at the White House, and a deranged and spoiled First Daughter. I dislike it so much that I forced myself to read half the book, then could go no further.

It doesn't seem fair to rate a book I have not entirely read,but Book Movement gives me no choice.

Michael Koryta has written several books. I\'m told that SO COLD THE RIVER is not a good one to start with because it is so different from the others. But I did begin with this one.

SO COLD THE RIVER reminds me of a Stephen King novel. That is not to say that if you like King, you\'ll like Koryta. You might, but I found a problem that I don\\\\\\\'t have with King\\\\\\\'s novels.

This book starts out promising. Eric, a failed filmmaker hoping for a comeback, is hired to make a movie about an old, dying man. So Eric begins in the cities where the man grew up, West Baden and French Lick, Indiana. The cities and the great hotel in West Baden are not fiction, but the supernatural properties of the water there, obviously, are.

Koryta has a good story going. Problem, though: he is just too wordy. Many paragraphs in this book should have been whittled down to a sentence, or they should even have been eliminated because Koryta was only repeating himself.

But Koryta\\\\\\\'s writing is good; I\\\\\\\'d like to try his other books. SO COLD THE RIVER only needs better editing to eliminate the unnecessary wordiness.

HUNTING SHADOWS bored me, and I finished reading it only because it was a book group choice and I will be leading the group this month.

If you\\\'ve never read Charles Todd, as I hadn\\\'t, I would not suggest you start with this book, number 16 in a series. My friend started with number 1 and liked it. Perhaps it would have made a difference if I had read the series in order, but number 16 bored me so much that I don\\\'t want to read anymore of Todd\\\'s books.

The setting is various cities in England in 1920, shortly after World War I. Two murders and one attempted murder have occurred, and Scotland Yard\\\'s Inspector Ian Rutledge has been brought into the investigation. So we follow Rutledge (along with Hamish, who is never adequately explained in this 16th book in the series) as he tries to solve the murders, which seem to all be committed by one person.

But Rutledge encounters many suspects and many other characters along the way. It may be a trick for you to remember them all. Also, you will have to pay close attention to seemingly unimportant comments Rutledge makes early in the story; late in the book, he discovers what he wondered way back then.

This may be more interesting if you read the previous 15 books in the series first.

If you liked Jenny Milchman's first book, COVER OF SNOW, and even if you didn't, you should like this, her second book, RUIN FALLS. I didn't read other reviews, though. If you read reviews before you read the book, you're taking the chance that something written may spoil the suspense you might have enjoyed discovering on your own.

So, to make a long story short in order not to give away what isn't mine to give, another resident of Wedeskyll finds herself in another predicament. This is a standalone story, though. In this one, a woman's children have been kidnapped, and she looks for them herself rather than passively wait for others to do it for her.

That's all you need to know. You'll thank me later.

Although NATCHEEZ BURNING is fiction, much of it is based on actual cases involving racial crimes in Louisiana and Mississippi during the 1960s. Add the typical Greg Iles style with thrills and suspense, and this book is a winner.

Penn Cage, a lawyer and mayor of Natchez, Mississippi, must save his father after he is accused of murder not once but twice. Natchez and close-by areas are full of corrupt characters, including city and state officials and even senior citizens. Penn is sometimes at odds with his fiance, Caitlin, an ambitious newspaper reporter and publisher who wants to write the story of these people and expose their crimes dating back to the 1960s to the present. Of course, Penn and Caitlin become personally involved and subject to (too much) violence.

Penn and several of the other characters in this book are continued from three previous books. But NATCHEZ BURNING is also the first in a trilogy. And the end does leave questions unanswered to be continued, I assume, in the second book.

This thriller is good but not unputdownable. It deserves high ratings because of its basis on real cases.

As a reader of both fiction and nonfiction but never science fiction, I truly enjoyed THE MARTIAN. I sure didn't expect to and was reading it only because my husband bought it for me so that I would go with him to see "The Martian" movie.

Mark Watney, an astronaut left for dead on Mars, did not die, after all, and spends more than a year managing to both stay alive and find a way to get back to earth. Sound corny? I thought so, too. But by the time I was halfway through the book, I agreed with the WALL STREET JOURNAL that it was brilliant. Yes, a lot of reviewers incorrectly describe books that way, but in this case, you'll see why it's true.

The story is told alternately in first and third person; that is, Watney logs his efforts in first person and NASA and the rest of the world root for him in third person. Watney's are the brilliant parts of the book. And, if you thought when you were in school that math was a useless and unnecessary subject, Andy Weir puts the lie to that here.

Now I'm anxious to see the movie.

Because ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE won a Pulitzer Prize and because this book has so many great reviews, you may expect too much. I did. Because this book has been summarized so many times before, I skip that and, instead, describe my disappointment.

First understand, I do not claim that this book is bad, only overrated. It is not a five-star book, which a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book should be.

More than 400 pages of this book are snippets of information about the lives of a blind French girl and German boy-electronics-wiz, given in alternating chapters, in alternating years. This all seems to be building up to something. As a result, you will wonder for 400 pages how their lives will interact and what is the significance of a diamond. That's a big buildup. Then they finally come together for, what, a day? That's it. Then we're back to the snippets. Then the snippets skip decades. And that's it.

The second disappointment are all the skippable paragraphs. Many authors have this problem. They seem to be too in love with their writing. I compare it to a woman who is so in love with her beauty she wastes hours gazing at herself in the mirror.

So now you are warned. You will probably enjoy ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE more than I did because your expectations have been lowered.

In spite of my opinion, maybe because of it, this is a great book for book clubs. Most people love it, and an opinion like mine leads to some great discussion.

As you read WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT, you may wonder, where is this going. If you were to ask me, I'd say, no place interesting. Although Sebastian Faulks must have a point to this story, he's so slow in making it that he lost me.

This story is several stories within a story as the main character remembers episodes from his past, beginning with his boyhood, to his days as a student, to his World War II experiences, to his love life. Sometimes the stories alternate. They are slow.

I asked for and won this book from librarything.com. I wanted to try Faulks, a new author for me. I'm sorry because someone else who wanted this book didn't win because I did.

While THE QUALITY OF SILENCE isn't quite as superior a story as was SISTER, Rosamund Lupton's first book, which won awards and was highly praised all over the world, I would still agree that she rivals Tana French. SILENCE made me cold, high praise considering that cold is not only the setting of the story but, also, the motivator the characters in this story work with and around, determining everything they do. I, too, was cold; I felt like I was there because of Lupton's convincing and powerful descriptions.

A mother and 10-year-old deaf daughter from England have come to Alaska to join their husband/father, who is in northern Alaska creating a wildlife film. But authorities there have determined that he died in a fire. Not believing this, mother and daughter, by EXTRA extraordinary means, travel to find and save him. The farther they get, the colder they (and I) got. Cold is the great driver, even more so than the suspicious blue headlights following them from a distance.

Here is my only criticism. While the main characters properly use words and expressions that are what I call English English (such as "cooker") because they are English, when Americans are speaking, their words and expressions should be American English (such as "stove"). But they aren't always. That sort of irritated me.

Another irritation, so I guess that isn't my only criticism. Lupton and her editor need to learn the difference between "further" and "farther."

I'm still anxious to read AFTERWARDS, Lupton's other book. Thanks to librarything.com, I was able to read THE QUALITY OF SILENCE, her latest, still unpublished, as an ARC.

Easy prediction: THE GUEST ROOM will be on many, even most best-of-2016 lists.

Richard gives his brother a bachelor's party that takes a couple of unexpected turns when the girls he thought were just strippers offer sexual favors to a bunch of drunks. It gets worse when there is a murder and it is soon discovered that the girls are sex slaves from Russia.

The majority of this book then examines how Richard, his wife, Kristin,and his nine-year-old daughter, Melissa, deal with the aftermath. Alternate chapters are written in first person by one of the girls, "Alexandria." She tells us that she is Armenian and describes how she was kidnapped and brought to Moscow to learn the sex trade. Eventually, she is brought to America.

Alexandria's chapters are difficult to read, at least until she leaves Moscow. Richard's, Kristin's, and Melissa's chapters are careful and thoughtful. The story is riveting, and I hated for it to end.

Agnes Magnusdottir was the last person to be publicly beheaded in Iceland. She had been convicted, along with two other people, of murder. BURIAL RITES is based on years of research into Agnes's life both before and after the conviction. While the book is a novel, even what Hannah Kent imagined is based on likelihood. Much is true.

While this book has received many five-out-of-five-star ratings, I found the entire book to be depressing so can only give it four. Every bit of this story is sad, but the writing is excellent.

The flowery (for lack of a better word) language that Daphne DuMaurier uses in JAMAICA INN (as well as her other novels) and the gender discrimination scattered here and there irritated me in 2016 while I accepted both when I read DuMaurier's REBECCA in 1969. But, after a while, I just enjoyed the story and accepted it as it was written in the 1940s.

Mary, the main character of JAMAICA INN, has come to Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt and uncle after her mother's death. Her uncle turns out to be a horrible man who Mary comes to detest. Mary learns, usually through deliberate snooping but sometimes against her will, her uncle's business.

DuMaurier clearly intended to show that Mary is above the usual role cut out for the 19th century woman. Even so, in order to enjoy this novel, the reader still has to accept that it was written with 1940s sensibilities.

Jon Krakauer is one of the best writers of nonfiction. He first proved that in magazines, but his books began with INTO THE WILD in 1996.

If you haven't read this book about Chris McCandless, who, at 24, tried to live in Alaska wilderness and failed, you may be under the impression that this is the story of that attempt. But too much is unknown because McCandless did it alone.

Instead, Krakauer tells us right away that McCandless lived for four months by himself in the Alaska wilderness and ended up starving to death. So that isn't a spoiler. The rest of the chapters are examinations of how McCandless came to be the type of person who would want to do this, of other people who were this way, of whether he had a death wish, of whether he was stupid or naive. Krakauer even puts himself in some chapters when he compares one of his own exploits to McCandless' and when he visits the old bus that McCandless lived in. Krakauer finally makes some conclusions about McCandless, some guesses based on the evidence he has laid out.

INTO THE WILD was a great beginning to a string of Krakauer's other books of nonfiction. Those, too, are at least as good, some even better. And, we can assume, more is to come.

Mahtob Mahmoody is the daughter in NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER, a book written in the late 1980s by her mother, Betty Mahmoody, about their escape from her Iranian father, his family, and his country. If you haven't already read that book, do it now, before you read MY NAME IS MAHTOB. Otherwise, the latter book will be dull.

If you have read NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER, you will appreciate Mahtob's view of those circumstances. Betty's account of their supposed "two-week vacation" to Iran took place when Mahtob was 4 to 6 years old. And Mahtob does remember that time in flashes, as most of us do, although her flashes were, perhaps, more memorable.

As an aside, I hope Mahtob somehow sees this review of her book so she can read my apology. Recently (February 2016) I went to her book event at a bookstore in Okemos, Michigan. I asked her how she could remember that far back. She explained (as she does in the book, although I had not gotten that far yet). All is believable, and I'm afraid I sounded like a skeptic when I asked that question.

MY NAME IS MAHTOB continues to her adulthood -because their story of terror does not end with their escape to freedom. As long as her father was alive, she and her mother had to be cautious of their every step because he never went away and neither did his threats to kill Betty and to kidnap Mahtob.

This book is not nearly as thrilling as reviews by others would have you believe. In fact, the suspense they all mention is pretty ho-hum.

Hannah and Lovell have a fight. The next morning all seems normal, but Hannah disappears after that. So the rest of the book, told alternately from Lovell’s and Hannah’s points of view, consists mostly of their memories. Sometimes they remember different occasions during their marriage, sometimes they remember when their kids were younger, sometimes they even think about their own childhoods. You can safely skim the latter; they don’t seem to contribute to the story.

Reviewers’ mentions of suspense probably refers to Hannah’s chapters during the final third of the book. I won’t tell you Hannah’s error, but I will say that I caught it long before she did.

I won this book through Thoughts in Progress blog (http://www.masoncanyon.blogspot.com/).

IN THE CLEARING is a continuation of Robert Dugoni's Tracy Crosswhite series. She's a detective with the Seattle PD, and in this book she is involved in two cases, one outside her jurisdiction as a favor to a friend. Each case is a mystery to be solved.

The unraveling of mysteries is interesting, so that kept me reading to the end. Unfortunately for me, though, the stories were too easy to put down. And while they did contain suspense, it wasn't enough to make me anxious to pick the book back up. I liked it, though, just not enough to read it quickly.

This disappoints me because I know Dugoni can write a story that is unputdownable. Probably he should give Crosswhite a rest and write a standalone or get back to David Sloane's great courtroom drama. We need more like THE CONVICTION.

I just added another book to my list of favorites, the second book by Rosamund Lupton included in that list. But I still haven't decided whether the word "afterwards" refers to after the loss of consciousness or after death.

There is a fire at a private elementary school. Whose fault is it and is it arson? Two of the people hurt in the fire watch the investigation while their bodies are unconscious. One of those people describes it for her husband.

That puts simply a most involved story with twists and turns that will keep your attention and have you guessing throughout. As soon as you are pretty sure, Lupton changes your mind and makes you sure of something else.

Plus this is the best type of mystery/thriller-- literary.

You can always depend on John Hart to write an outstanding literary thriller. And he's done it again with REDEMPTION ROAD.

Various mysteries are going on here. Mainly, though, we're given the character Elizabeth. She's been a member of the police force for 13 years, and she's the daughter of a preacher who she hates. Why does she hate him? A former member of the police force, Adrian, is getting out of jail after 13 years. Was he guilty of the crime he was convicted of? Elizabeth didn't think so 13 years ago and did her best then to find proof of his innocence. Now the identical crime is happening again. Is Adrian guilty, or is he being set up? Those are only some of the mysteries in REDEMPTION ROAD.

The story is both character driven and plot driven. That's the best kind of thriller, and that's why you want to read this. But it isn't flawless.

REDEMPTION ROAD doesn't get my highest rating because of one character, Gideon. He is a 14-year-old boy. Hart speaks of him and has him act like he is 8. Hart even mentions Gideon's toys near the end of the book, when he could be 15. That irritated me.

But that's me. It may not bug other readers. I sure would feel better, though, if Hart would at least delete that reference to toys and if the person in charge of punctuation would delete all the commas after "but." (As a technical editor, "but," makes me cringe.)

THE MASK is not the first in a series about Vanessa Michael Munroe; rather, it is well into the series. But it passes my test: a book in a series should be understood without requiring that the previous books have been read. So that's one good point.

Another is its comments about Japanese society and laws, particularly when they are compared with American society and laws. And that's what the story is about: why Munroe's boyfriend was arrested for murder, why it is practically impossible to get him out of prison, and how to investigate what really happened.

Unfortunately, the majority of this book describes that investigation, and here is the problem with that: Munroe. She is superwoman and too hard to swallow.

If you are familiar with Lee Child's Jack Reacher, I would say that Munroe is a female version of Reacher. Like Reacher, Munroe is successful at most anything she tries to do. And boy does she, like Reacher, kick ass. In other words, she always wins a fight, even against a man, even against three men, even against three men with pipes and guns.

Just as unbelievable is Munroe's ability to be Vanessa or to be Michael. She can switch from a desireable woman to a man who can wear her boyfriend's clothes and fool everyone into believing she is Michael. No explanation is given about how she must have changed her voice. The reader is told only that she gets away with this because she is tall.

For these reasons, the book is boring and seems too long.

I won THE MASK through librarything.com.

I AM NO ONE is a book about privacy.

Patrick Flanery tells a good story about a college professor, Jeremy O’Keefe, whose life and experiences sound like they may be somewhat autobiographical (NYU, Oxford, film, Irish in England, etc.). Someone is watching O’Keefe and nosing into the private details of his life but who and why?

The book could have been cut in half, though. The story is simple, but it is told with too many sentences, and the sentences are too long. They are so long that, often, by the time I got to the end of one, I forgot the beginning.

I haven’t read Flanery’s other books, so I don’t know if this is his usual style. If not, I suspect that all the long sentences, all the reflection, were used to make the reader feel what O’Keefe is feeling. Maybe that was a good idea, but it sure makes this book difficult to read.

COMES THE END would be perfect for the young adult scifi fan. While at first it seems to be another this-is-the-end, the-aliens-are-coming-to-get-us story, a YA reader will enjoy the suggestion of devils who befriend the main characters and the awareness of who the aliens really are.

It is easy to see this first book in a series as a television series. I heard that is planned, and I certainly look forward to it.

If you, like me, do not know or care much about the art world, including art history, painting restoration and sales, art museums, etc, you will still probably enjoy THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS. I sure did.

This novel is two stories: one of Sara de Vos, a 17th-century painter in Amsterdam, and the other of Ellie Shipley, also an artist but working as a painting restorer, and Marty de Groot, the owner of a painting by Sara de Vos. The story of Ellie and Marty is during the 20th century, beginning during the 1950s in New York, then skipping to Australia in 2000. We move around among these three periods--the 1600s, the 1950s, and 2000—throughout the book.

While this devise Dominic Smith uses of skipping around from one story to another and one of three periods to another may seem difficult to pull off, he does so. This method is so effective that most readers will love the stories in all three periods. And they will think about these three characters even when they are not actively reading the book.

My book group at the Romeo (Michigan) District Library won copies of THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS from BookMovement.com/AuthorBuzz.com.

Although some authors can write a novel in a series to also work as a standalone so that the reader can enjoy it, even out of order, PANTHER'S PREY is not one of them. This is the fourth in a series about Leo Maxwell, a lawyer working as a public defender, and too much of this novel depends on your understanding of previous books.

Most of PANTHER'S PREY, however, can be understood. Leo has worked alongside a young woman, Jordan, defending a client who confesses to crimes he did not commit. Leo has a week-long affair with Jordan--ONE WEEK. In the majority of the book, then, Leo risks his life numerous times to learn what happened to Jordan. It would be easier to accept Leo's actions if they were on behalf of a wife of 30 years.

The story drags, i.e., it is slow. It is not thrilling. I didn't much care about any of the characters, even Leo, even Jordan's father. These two characters, especially, should have more personality. Instead, they bored me.

I won PANTHER'S PREY through goodreads.com.

If your favorite books are those that you don’t want to put down, that keep you up at night, read DARK MATTER. Even if you are not normally a science fiction fan but do love thrillers, read DARK MATTER.

This excellent novel presents happily married Jason who has a son and a job as a professor at a small college. He sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he had taken a different path 15 years ago when he married his wife, Daniela. Don’t many of us wonder the same thing, how the road not taken might have changed things for us? Jason got an answer to that question.

DARK MATTER is Stephen Kingish. Some of his books do not have monsters or clowns but are about normal people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. DARK MATTER is like those.

Or maybe Crouch should not be compared to King. Crouch is not a new author. He wrote the WAYWARD PINES trilogy, the basis for the TV series of the same name. But I did not read it; Crouch was new to me, so I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked DARK MATTER.

I won this book through librarything.com.

All the reviews I have read of BEFORE THE FALL have praised it, some going so far as to say that it’s the best mystery/thriller of 2016. Believe it.

BEFORE THE FALL is the best mystery/thriller in recent years. No kidding. GONE GIRL and THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, the 2015 books that so many other mysteries/thrillers since then have been compared to, don’t hold a candle to BEFORE THE FALL. That is, BEFORE THE FALL is much better than those earlier books, much more literate and unputdownable at the same time.

A reviewer on bookreporter.com, although she named this book a “Bets On Pick,” said that if she had edited BEFORE THE FALL, she would have cut more. I disagree. I didn’t want the book to end, so the more the author, Noah Hawley, told me about the characters, the better.

Simply put, the story begins with a plane crash into the ocean. There are two survivors. BEFORE THE FALL examines the backgrounds of each passenger and crew member. It also shows the experiences of the survivors after the fall. The mystery throughout: why did the plane crash and was someone responsible?

NOTE: One of the passengers on that ill-fated plane was a top executive at a 24-hour cable TV news station that is obviously meant to be Fox News, although the fictional TV station, per policy, makes (rather than just reports) news. And one of the news show hosts, who ”reports” recorded (bugged) telephone conversations of one of the survivors, is NOT, I’m sure, meant to be Bill O’Reilly.

In the book THE COVE, the cove is a place where nothing good has ever happened to anyone who lived there. At this point in history, the end of World War I, can that be changed?

THE COVE begins with a mystery in the prologue, then soon after another mystery makes you forget about the first one.

Allow yourself to discover this mysterous story as it was meant to be discovered: as you read it. Don't read reviews. Don't even read the book flap or the back of the book until after you've read it.
THE COVE is an exceptionallly good book because it is mysterious. But I made the mistake of reading reviews of this book before I read it, and most of them revealed the solution to one of the mysteries. So I was deprived of the pleasure of slowly discovering the story as it was revealed. I might have given THE COVE five stars otherwise.

If you don't make that mistake, you'll love THE COVE.

The IRISH TIMES says that Lisa McInerney is “arguably the most talented writer at work in Ireland today.” Most readers will probably agree after they read THE GLORIOUS HERESIES.

This is a character-driven book. And the dialog sounds so authentic and is so good that McInerney doesn’t waste paragraphs on descriptions of people and their surroundings, as so many authors do. Most of it is contained in the dialog. Also, McInerney assumes that her readers are intelligent and will understand her allusions.

The only problem with such a character-driven novel is that it can leave the reader wondering about the plot. The best novels, in my opinion, are usually both plot- and character-driven. I say “usually” because THE GLORIOUS HERESIES is so exceptionally written that I cared about most of the characters (even the crazy arsonist and the prostitute) and was as anxious to read it as I am the best plot-and character-driven novels. This book is the exception to my rule.

You’ll care about one character more than the others. For this character’s sake, by the time you read half of THE GLORIOUS HERESIES, you may be angry that nothing good ever seems to happen. It does get difficult to read bad news all the time. I’d like to read something by McInerney that deals with normal people who have jobs.

Another irritation: THE GLORIOUS HERESIES mentions several times the horrible economy in Ireland that some of the characters blame for their states in life. But they never consider that the problem could be the other way around. That is, maybe the way they live their lives is keeping the economy down.

Read THE GLORIOUS HERESIES. It may be the only character-driven novel that makes you anxious for the author’s next.

I won this book through librarything.com.

SPILLED BLOOD would be classified as a thriller. I liked the story, but it didn’t thrill me.

There are a lot of lawyers in this book. One of them, Chris, is divorced from the mother of his teenaged child, Olivia. His ex-wife, Hannah, calls him to the small town where she and Olivia live because Olivia has been arrested for murder. For the rest of the book, Chris investigates who else may have committed the murder. I must have missed what “spilled blood” has to do with this story. But Brian Freeman chose those words for his title, so they must be in there someplace.

Others were thrilled by SPILLED BLOOD. So maybe you should listen to them and not me. But I think much of the story is predictable. Don’t worry about the final solution, though; it’s a surprise, although the very end isn’t.

Once again Harlan Coben has written an unputdownable novel.

As always, Coben gives us a multilayered story that is actually story upon story upon story. That's what makes it unputdownable, but that also makes for lots of characters names to remember. So pay attention and don't read it too fast.

The main story is about Adam and Corinne. A stranger has revealed to Adam a secret Corinne has kept from him for a couple of years. After he confronts her with it, she disappears. Now the mystery(s) begins.

Every one of the stories involves a devastating secret and usually blackmail. They are all intertwined, and each builds on Adam's mystery. Each also keeps the reader trying to guess the solution. But I've never been able to guess the solution to Coben's mysteries. I didn't guess here, either.

Although Ian Caldwell is non-Catholic, THE FIFTH GOSPEL is full of details about the Vatican and the priesthood. This is a literary mystery--who killed a religious scholar and why, is the Diatessaron really the fifth gospel and where is it, and is the Shroud of Turin really what is claimed and who does it belong to?

What fine character development in this novel! In particular, two priests, brothers, one Roman Catholic, the other Greek Catholic, are the main focus. Told from the point of view of one of them, Alex, this story is his investigation of these mysteries after Ugo, the religious scholar, is found dead, apparently murdered. Ugo had been studying the Diatessaron and found allusion there to the Shroud of Turin. Is this the reason he was murdered?

Catholic readers will appreciate all the research Caldwell did on the Vatican and the priests and bishops there. I'm not sure, however. if a non-Catholic would. I think THE FIFTH GOSPEL might have bored me if I were not a Catholic.

Or maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe the reader will appreciate this novel for its character-driven mystery when so many mysteries/thrillers are simply plot driven.

Just last evening an alarm sounded on my iPhone, signaling another Amber alert of a child abduction, probably a parental kidnapping. That is the main subject of ALMOST MISSED YOU. Violet’s husband, Finn, has left her waiting on the beach while he has taken off with their 3-year-old son. She did not see the problems in their marriage that led to this because of his lies of omission. And Violet realizes that she, too, kept quiet when she should have spoken up.

Meanwhile, Violet’s and Finn’s good friends, Caitlin and George, have hidden problems of their own, not to mention Caitlin’s lies of omission that contributed to Violet’s and Finn’s troubles. And, like Violet and Finn, Caitlin and George are each lying to the other by omission.

Fans of women’s fiction, which I am not, will love ALMOST MISSED YOU. The novel explores, mostly, the two couple’s friendships, marriages, and lies of omission that threaten to tear it all apart. This subject matter is too soap operaish for me, but is popular with so many people that the term “women’s fiction” was coined just for them.

So ALMOST MISSED YOU contains lots of secrets and lies, and that is essentially it. A story like this doesn’t appeal to me. Yes, lots of people would disagree with me. I would have disagreed, too, when I was a young adult.

Of the Karin Slaughter books I’ve read, PRETTY GIRLS is by far the best. For that matter, PRETTY GIRLS is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

The pretty girls in PRETTY GIRLS are three pretty sisters. When the book begins, one of those sisters, Julia, has been missing for almost 20 years. The family, including her two younger sisters, Lydia and Claire, and her mother and father, have never felt closure. Lydia and Claire, as a matter of fact, have felt ignored by their parents as a result.

Eighteen years ago, Claire married Paul, a genius-level architect. They are rich and happy together. That happiness is not to last. First, Paul is murdered. Then, when Claire is going through his personal belongings, including his home offices and computers, she finds evidence that Paul had been leading a hidden life. And she is to discover much, much more. Paul had been committing and was responsible for horrors.

Since Julia went missing, Lydia became addicted to drugs, let herself go fat, and is estranged from her family. But when PRETTY GIRLS opens, she has gone straight, has a daughter, now a teenager, and has an ongoing relationship with the man who lives next door. Claire involves Lydia in the horrors.

I will say no more about this story. Doing so would deprive readers of learning what Claire and Lydia do while they are doing it. If readers don’t know their discoveries ahead of time, most will find this book can’t-put-it-down good.

To contradict myself, I should say this much more: some scenes involving torture are hard to read. But they are not gratuitous; they ensure that readers feel as horrified as they should.

No one writes a story like Tana French. Her style is original, not like any I’ve read elsewhere. And her dialog: it’s so good I feel like I’m there—in Ireland—and she even has me feeling at home with all the Irish slang. She also doesn’t waste space or my time with paragraph upon paragraph describing the atmosphere in which her story takes place, as so many authors do.

So much for French’s books in general. As for THE TRESPASSER in particular, while it’s not as good as her BROKEN HARBOR, which blew me away, it’s up there with FAITHFUL PLACE, which is her second best. I’ve read all her books, so you can take my word for it.

All her books, so far, are about different characters, detectives mostly, on the Dublin Murder Squad, although each stands alone and doesn’t depend on the last book. In THE TRESPASSER, two of the characters, partners Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran, have also appeared in other books, although here they are main characters.

Conway is the narrator. Throughout the book we see what Conway sees and read how Conway feels about it. She is having a hard time as the only female on the squad. But the careful reader will sometimes suspect her perception.

She and Moran are tired of always getting the domestic murder cases handed to them. When they are given a case involving the murder in her home of a single young woman, they are sure it’s another cut-and-dry Domestic, easy to solve, even too easy. But this turns out to be more. This may even have the rest of the Murder Squad hating them.

Conway and Moran also have to deal with Detective Don Breslin, who seems to be trying to steer their case toward the victim’s new boyfriend, even after Conway learns details that point in another direction. When he speaks with Conway and Moran, they almost telepathically know what the other is thinking (evidence of a good partnership) and speak to Breslin accordingly.

French has another winner with THE TRESPASSER. I highly recommend it and only do not give it my highest rating because I gave that to BROKEN HARBOR.

I won this book from luxuryreading.com.

THE BURN PALACE is a book that any lover of mysteries/thrillers doesn’t want to miss. Several mysteries are going on at the same time, all in and around one small town

What happened to a newborn baby kidnapped from a hospital?

What is the significance of a snake in the baby’s place?

Why was a man scalped and who did it?

Why does the mother of the kidnapped baby hate him?

Why does this small town suddenly have a problem with cougers prowling the area and attacking humans?

Why are old people suddenly dying at a greater rate?

And more mysteries continue throughout. Stephen Dobyns skillfully brings them all together and solves each one.

However, be prepared for an overly long book. It could use more editing to eliminate a few redundancies. An even greater challenge to the reader is Dobyns’s use of SO MANY characters. I literally had to use a yellow highlighter to mark each new character name so I could leaf back a few pages when I needed a refresher of who was who.

I won NORTH OF BOSTON from MauriceonBooks.com two years before I finally read it. I didn't know what I was missing.

The book begins after Pirio is in a boating accident. She, alone, survives after floating for four hours in water temperatures that would have killed most people . She learns that a much larger boat collided with the one she was on and then left the scene – – it was a hit-and-run accident. Even worse, she later realizes that this was a case of murder; someone was trying to get rid of the captain of the boat Pirio was on.

Who was responsible, and what were they trying to cover up? Pirio wants to get to the bottom of it. Most of NORTH OF BOSTON is about her endeavor to do that.

What a great story, with such creative characterization! If you haven't read this yet, please don't put it off any longer.
A

Some books, like BEHIND HER EYES, present situations that make the reader ask, how will the author write herself out of this? And then sometimes the author does, but other times the author uses what I call "the easy way out" and makes the impossible possible with paranormal abilities.

BEHIND HER EYES really had me going for the majority of the book. Louise makes a few poor decisions when it comes to Adele and David, the first and probably worst being her inability to tell Adele that she (Louise) was sexually involved with David and to tell David that she (Louise) had become a friend of Adele's. Louise didn't want to give up either. So she made a whole lot of trouble for herself. This sounds like a silly romance novel, I know, but really it isn't. It is quite a page turner.

Where BEHIND HER EYES goes wrong is in the last couple of chapters. Whereas others say this end is a surprise, I would add that it is a disappointment. It is too easy to use paranormal abilities as explanations. So, while others gasped in surprise and then gasped again, I laughed.

Now I wonder, did Sarah Pinburough mean for the last chapter to be funny? Because, after the surprise/disappointment of the previous chapter, I think it is.

This review is of an ARC sent to me by the publisher.

Chris Bohjalian never disappoints. With THE SLEEPWALKER, he has again written a novel that is both plot- and character-driven, heavier on character. He gives the reader a can’t-put-it-down engaging story and examines its main characters as we, along with the narrator, try to figure out what happened to a missing wife and mother, Annalee.

THE SLEEPWALKER is told from the viewpoint of Lianna, one of Annalee’s daughters, years after the incident. When Lianna’s college professor father goes to a conference for the weekend, she and her younger sister wake one morning to discover their mother is not in the house. Immediately, they (and soon most everyone else) suspect that their mother had wandered off while she was asleep. Annalee has a history of sleepwalking.

In the remainder of THE SLEEPWALKER, Lianna observes the main characters. While her father and sister seem to be sure Annalee had died after sleepwalking, Lianna only suspects this. She becomes involved with a detective on the case, Gavin, and wonders about his involvement with her mother even while Lianna is more and more attracted to him.

Adding to the mystery are the italicized lines at the beginning of each chapter. Who writes them? Although Lianna narrates this story, those paragraphs are obviously special clues.

Perhaps some readers will not like the relationship between Lianna and Gavin. She is only 21 while he is 33. That age difference would have been illegal if they were a little younger, and you might think he would have considered her out of bounds. So maybe the story would work a little better if she was older. But maybe not; this way we can be suspicious of his guilt and his intentions.

Bohjalian’s THE SLEEPWALKER is another winner.

I won this book from luxuryreading.com.

As is the case with all Harlan Coben novels, FOOL ME ONCE is a thriller with many different mysteries going on at once. And that’s what makes this book, all his books, unputdownable. Since I began reading this book, the only constructive thing I did was finish it.

We follow the beautiful but tough Maya, former army captain, a helicopter pilot, as she investigates and gets to the bottom of two murders, first of her sister, then of her husband. The reader will suspect everyone yet still be surprised at the outcome. It’s typical Harlan Coben.

It is also typical of Coben to grab the reader right on page 1 or 2. So I was disappointed that FOOL ME ONCE didn’t grab me until page 63. Still, other readers may differ because the story is interesting right away.

Anthony Marra is one of our best writers. He’s so good, I like to read his sentences over again for their cleverness. He proved that with A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA and proves that again with THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO. Even so, TSAR is not another CONSTELLATION.

CONSTELLATION is an excellent novel in every way. TSAR isn’t a novel; it is a collection of short stories, which I usually avoid because they necessarily lack character development. Also, while short stories may be interesting, they are not able to grab me, pull me in so the book becomes unputdownable like a novel can.

TSAR’s short stories seem to try to have these qualities of a novel. The stories are interconnected; the book has a cast of characters who may appear in more than one story, and the places and certain objects remain the same. Therefore, some character development happens, but it’s not enough and left me disappointed.

So TSAR bored me. But I’m hoping that this book is just something Marra put out there to tide his readers over until he has the time to give us another great novel.

BIG LITTLE LIES is a surprise to me. Although the subject matter, women’s issues, normally bores me, I was pleased that Moriarty built up suspense everywhere she could, particularly with the chapter titles and with the gossipy-sounding witness comments at the end, sometimes the beginning, of each chapter.

This book has three main characters, all women, each with a typical issue.

** Madeline has three children, one by the husband who left her, the other two by her second husband. Her oldest child has chosen to live with her father. He has not kept an eye on their child’s online activity.

** Jane, new to the community, has a child as a result of a one-night stand. The child is accused of being a bully.

** Celeste has twins and is dealing with domestic abuse.

All three of them have children in the same kindergarten class at Pirriwee Public school.

That much would have been enough to turn me away from BIG LITTLE LIES. But right from the start, the book contains chapter headings to indicate when events take place in relation to Trivia Night, a costume party for parents of children at Pirriwee Public school. So I knew that something big was coming up on Trivia Night and, because one of the commentators at the ends of chapters is a police detective, that the big thing had to do with the law.

Moriarty also injects suspense into the lives of each of the three main characters. What will become of Madeine’s oldest child? Will other mothers drive Jane from the community? And, especially, will Celeste leave before her husband kills her?

Another reason this women’s-issues book didn’t turn me away is that I enjoyed its dialog. It is quite witty, especially when Madeline is speaking.

So, even if you don’t enjoy books about women’s issues, you may want to give this one a try for its buildup of suspense and its dialog. If you do enjoy books about women’s issues, you’ll enjoy this one more than most.

What a pleasure to read! The writing in A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW is delightful.

Sentenced in 1922 to house arrest for a poem he wrote, the gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, may never again leave his home, a grand hotel in Moscow. But the hotel certainly is grand--the count befriends various employees there and becomes involved with so many aspects of life there. We see him make a large life for himself.

This book is full of elegant language, reflecting, I assume, the language of a gentleman; stories of the count’s past and of the lives of others in the hotel; friendships to last 30 years; and plenty of sarcasm. But don’t expect that this is similar to Amor Towles’ excellent RULES OF CIVILITY.

Frankly, I read A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW because I loved RULES OF CIVILITY. They aren’t alike; A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW is better.

I received my copy of A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW from luxuryreading.com.

HERE AND GONE is what I call a “grabber.” In the first chapters, you’ll want to know what is happening. Then, at about the halfway point, this book will grab your attention so tightly you will want to read late into the night.

Audra and her two children are traveling cross-country when they are stopped by a local Arizona sheriff. He plants evidence, says he suspects her of a crime, and arrests her. A deputy arrives to take the children to “a safe place.” Audra is put in jail and awaits a hearing.

I wasn’t happy with these chapters. The whole situation with Audra and the sheriff is too frustrating (she isn’t as smart as her 11-year-old son), and child abduction is too horrible. But the chapters are short and necessary to the story.

Next are chapters about Danny, the kind of person he is, and how he came to be that way. His child, too, was abducted in much the same way as Audra is claiming.

These chapters are necessary setup. Again, they are short.

After that, while HERE AND GONE is somewhat predictable, it is still a grabber. But this review will not take away from your enjoyment of this book by providing anymore details. It grabbed me because I didn’t read reviews.

I won this book through librarything.com.

If you expect, as I did, that Paris’s THE BREAKDOWN is an improvement on her last book, BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, I would say, yes and no. The two books have in common a husband who appears to be deeply in love with and devoted to his poor, unsuspecting wife. After that, THE BREAKDOWN is better or worse than BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, depending on how you feel about the latter. I thought THE BREAKDOWN was better AND worse.

In THE BREAKDOWN, the wife, Cass, is concerned about both a murderer on the loose near her home and her forgetfulness. She and her husband, Matthew, fear she is suffering from early onset dementia. But this book isn't sickening as is BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, which is so sickening in the cruelty of the husband that I had to put it down frequently.

However, most of THE BREAKDOWN is an enumeration of the seeming symptoms (forgetfulness and paranoia) of Cass’s breakdown. It gets tedious.

Worse, THE BREAKDOWN is predictable. It is so predictable, I knew right from the beginning who was pulling tricks on whom. So most of what happened made me angry that the character could not see what was so clear to me.

If you like stories about rotten marriages, maybe you’ll like this. I sure didn’t.

THE WIND IS NOT A RIVER is a perfect combination of fact and fiction. While presenting actual “events [that] are forgotten footnotes in the history of the Second World War,” Brian Payton tells a story of two people who might have been caught up in them.

In this excellent, unputdownable novel, John Easley is a journalist who was in the Territory of Alaska when the Japanese bombed a naval base and an army base on islands there. Although the U.S. government orders all press corps out of Alaska, ensuring that civilians are mostly unaware that the war has come to the U.S., John feels they have a right to know and it is his duty to sneak his way back in. On his third try, he gets in and then accompanies an aircrew running sorties over the Japanese-occupied village of Attu. The plane crashes. What a mix of fact and fiction!

THE WIND IS NOT A RIVER continues to mix fact with fiction as it tells, in alternating chapters, the stories of John’s survival while he evades enemy detection and of his wife Helen’s determination to find him.

This book truly grabbed me. Wherever I went, whatever I was doing, THE WIND IS NOT A RIVER was with me until I finished reading it. I not only enjoyed John’s and Helen’s stories; I also learned of this attack on the U.S. that the government mostly succeeded in keeping quiet.

This novel gets my highest rating. I didn’t want it to end so read the Acknowledgments and the Author’s Note to put it off.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich went to Harvard Law School, although she didn’t practice law long before she began writing full time. The title THE FACT OF A BODY, though, is based on something she learned as a first-year law student: (as I understand it and in my words, not hers) we have the fact of a child’s dead body. But where does the explanation, the story, for that dead body begin? Does it begin with that child entering his friend’s home and then being strangled? Or should the story begin sooner? A year sooner? Thirty years? Maybe even before the person who caused the death was born?

So Marzano-Lesnevich tells the story of both a murder and what led to the murder. That is, we learn of the murderer’s life and we learn, because this may be relevant, what happened before the murderer was born, even the circumstances of his mother’s pregnancy.

Should the story go back that far? Two different juries had to decide.

Interrmingled with these chapters about the murder and the murderer are chapters about Marzano-Lesnevich’s own life with a family that kept secrets in a home that was full of both pain and love. Throughout the book she compares her experiences and the inactions of her family members to the murderer and his story.

These comparisons are a stretch. Of course, pedophiles can be compared to each other. But it seems, to make that a book-length comparison, Marzano-Lesnevich compares her family members to the murderer’s.

These are the parts of the book that bored me. When Marzano-Lesnevich tries to compare her family life and the murderer’s, she seems to be trying too hard to make the two separate stories go together. Her effort is book length, though.

But THE FACT OF A BODY is probably TOO long. Worse than that, the book is haphazard, with both stories told first in one year, then another, sometimes back, sometimes back further, sometimes forward, up, over, etc. (“Up” and “over” are how it felt.)

Marzano-Lesnevich put together a book that might hove worked better if she left the comparison to her grandfather and the murderer. She could also cut out much of her irrelevant family life and try to keep to a timeline that is easier for the reader to keep track of.

Yet, this would be a good book for a book club. It would lead to lots of discussion and some may like it more than I did. This book already has plenty of great reviews.

I won an advance readers copy of THE FACT OF A BODY from the publisher, Flatiron Books.

Although I haven’t read John Boyne’s other books so can’t speak for them, his THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES is truly a winner, some will even call it wonderful. Coming from me, this is a compliment you can believe.

This book is partly a coming-of-age novel. If this type bores you, as it does me, you’re in for a surprise. Boyne’s dialog (and THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES is packed with it) is so enjoyable, so clever, I promise, you won’t be bored.

I’m not sure if Boyne exaggerates when he describes Ireland in the 20th century or of Catholic priests there. The book begins in the 1940s when a 16-year-old Catherine is denounced by a Catholic priest in front of her church’s congregation, including her family. She is thrown out of her small village, and Catherine travels, penniless and pregnant, to Dublin.

So begins the life of Cyril, Catherine’s son. We meet him when he is 7 years old and follow his life in seven-year increments thereafter.

Throughout THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES, Boyne seems to exaggerate. All Catholic priests in Ireland are cruel, Cyril’s adoptive parents are ultra-distant and insist he realizes that distance, his father and his father’s lawyer invite a jury for dinner, etc. But Boyne’s greatest seeming exaggeration in this book is 20th-century Ireland’s treatment of homosexuality. I say “seeming” because he probably doesn’t exaggerate there.

So it turns out that this book is about growing up through adulthood as a homosexual male in 20th- and 21st-century Ireland. Again, this subject may bore you, as it usually does me. It may even put you off. But in this case it won’t do either.

Boyne is such a skillful writer, he won me over, even with put-offish subjects. THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES is the best kind of long book: when I got to the end, I didn’t want it to end. Now I want to read his other books.

I won an ARC of THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES through librarything.com.

The old Dennis Lehane is back. Thank goodness SINCE WE FELL is not another of his historical mafia books. Looks like he’s done with those.

But SINCE WE FELL doesn’t begin like one of Lehane’s older novels. The first half of this book is a study of Rachel, the main character. It does not grip the reader almost immediately, as you might have expected of Lehane before his mafia books.

Instead, we learn of Rachel’s discontent with her mother, who refuses to tell Rachel who her father is/was. Eventually, Rachel looks for him on her own. This leads to her initial meeting with Brian, a supposed private detective, who refuses to take her money for a job he knows he can’t do.

We also learn a lot more about Rachel, maybe more than we need to know sometimes. For various reasons, though, she is frequently afflicted with panic attacks. They disrupt her life so much that she becomes almost totally housebound.

The second half of SINCE WE FELL is Lehane as we used to expect. Now we come to know Brian better. Is he all that he seems? Who is he, really?

There’s more plot to the second half. But the character study in the first half is what makes the book more than a plot-driven thriller.

AMERICAN WIFE is fiction. Be sure to remember that, although the American wife in AMERICAN WIFE is based on Laura Bush. Just remember that she really is a character of Curtis Sittenfeld’s imagination. Then you may enjoy the book properly because you understand what it really is.

This book is mostly a soap opera. That should not put you off. After all, I call Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA a soap opera.

Just like a soap opera, AMERICAN WIFE takes time to get into, to grab you and make you care. So the chapters describing Alice’s (Laura’s) childhood and adolescence can be boring, as it was for me. But later, particularly when she becomes first lady, her first-person accounts are absorbing.

Because Alice tells her own story, she is also able to ruminate and does so frequently. The story does not progress during these times when she tells you what she really thinks and feels. This is when you need to be most conscious that Alice is a figment of Sittenfeld’s imagination.

What a pleasure THE STARS ARE FIRE is to read! This book, although not a thriller, is so full of suspense, it is unputdownable and will keep you reading until late at night.

The great fire in Maine in 1947 really happened. The book's descriptions of causes and effects are fact. The story of Grace and her children could have been real.

Before the fire Grace feels trapped in a loveless marriage with Gene, although they both love their two small children. When the fire spreads out of control, Gene has been helping a group of men trying to prevent the fire’s spread to their homes. He is one of many who go missing. Now Grace and her children are homeless, they have no money, and their source of income is gone. Now, also, Grace does not know whether her missing husband is dead or just using the fire as an excuse to leave his family.

All Grace can do is wait. In the meantime, she does what she has to do to take care of her family, including her mother. She also becomes involved with men, both far better than her husband. You'll wish for an easy outcome. But no book as good as this one ever takes the easy route.

I found a new author. Anita Shreve is new to me, and I’m so impressed with her writing. Now I want to read her backlist of books.

I won THE STARS ARE FIRE from bookclubcookbook.com.

ALL HE EVER WANTED is a story of obsession. It is fiction written in the form of a memoir by a man who had been obsessed with his wife.

I felt sorry for this man, Nicholas, for about the first two thirds of the book. I forgave him his faults when (as I see from previous reviews I’ve read) others did not because it was apparent to me that this memoir is Nicholas’s confession. He now sees his errors and is sorry. Later, though, I wondered: is Nicholas sorry because of what he had done or does he just feel sorry for himself.

Throughout ALL HE EVER WANTED, Nicholas gives hints of the outcome. Even so, this “memoir” is unpredictable. I didn’t know, while I read the last third of the book, why he was writing this. Was it meant to be a memoir, a confession, or a justification for bad acts.

I’m afraid that some other reviewers gave this book a low rating because they found the narrator/main character to be despicable. As I see it, Anita Shreve’s INTENTION was to, first, show what a sap Nicholas was and, later, horrify the reader with Nicholas’s actions. I don’t rate a book on the likability of its characters.

Although I liked this book very much, as did everyone but one person in my book club, Daphne du Maurier did not outshine herself, i.e., her book REBECCA, which she wrote in 1938, is better than MY COUSIN RACHEL, which she wrote many years later, in 1951.

This story is told in first person by Philip, who is first concerned for his sick cousin Ambrose and his mistreatment by the woman he married, another cousin, Rachel. Twenty-four-year-old Philip hates Rachel, sight unseen. But after his cousin dies, Philip quickly and immaturely falls in love with her and gives her everything he inherited from Ambrose in spite of Ambrose's letters of discontent.

Throughout MY COUSIN RACHEL are displays of Philip's immature pining after Rachel and Rachel's suspect behavior. Suspicions fill this book and even end it. Different readers have different understandings of it.

THE KEPT WOMAN is the eighth in Karin Slaughter's Will Trent series. I also read the first book (Triptych) in this series. Although I've read and enjoyed some of Slaughter's books outside this series, I won't be reading the other six books in this series.

Here's the simple reason why: Will Trent and his series concentrate too much on Angie Polanski. And that aggravates me.

Polanski is Trent's wife but not in the normal sense. She flits in and out of his life, and she just causes trouble. So how can such a character last? Yet seven books later, here she still is.

Trent is with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is investigating a case of apparent murder, with a couple of unidentified bodies. Throughout THE KEPT WOMAN it appears that Polanski is dead, then it doesn't, then it does, then it doesn't.

Will this series ever be rid of her?

I love Slaughter's writing and am anxious to read more of her books. But she has taken this Angie-Polanski-the-ball-buster theme too far. I'm sick of reading about her.

I won this book through librarylovefest.com.

It could have worked well. The last few chapters of FINAL GIRLS are a surprise. It’s structure, divulging the past little by little while characters in the present deal with the aftermath, each in her own way, has worked well in other novels.

So why doesn’t FINAL GIRLS deserve a high rating?

The first third of this novel is nothing but an introduction, first to Quincy’s hellish past, her run through the woods into the arms of a policeman, then to her seemingly normal present. It drags.

Then Tina/Sam enters the picture. Tina/Sam comes across as a suspicious person. Now FINAL GIRLS doesn’t drag as much. But Tina/Sam and Quincy do so much, while Jeff, Quincy’s live-in boyfriend, sleeps through it all. It is so unlikely.

The story progresses. Quincy learns more and more about Tina/Sam and the other final girls. It gets good. But the end is too neat and leaves me unhappy with its improbability.

I won FINAL GIRLS from bookclubcookbook.com.

If you, like me, dislike romance novels or even romantic thrillers, I promise, THE WIFE BETWEEN US is neither. Although it does describe a love triangle, it doesn't exactly. It seems the ex-wife is stalking and terrorizing the girlfriend, but then it doesn't.

No one in this book is as they first seem. It will feel like you are constantly having to revise your understanding of people and events. As a matter of fact, halfway through the book you may want to stop and reread everything you have read so far.

And it won't seem that you are reading a romance novel, promise.

I won an ARC of this book from St. Martin's Press.

Before I review THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US, you should know my attitude going in: I resisted reading it. I had read the THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY and did not like it. So I did not want to read another book written by Annie Barrows. But Barrows had really been a co-author of GUERNSEY, whereas she is the sole author of THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US. And what a difference that makes!

It's 1938 and Layla has come to the small town of Macedonia, West Virginia, to write a book on the history of that town. She rents a room from a once prominent family in Macedonia, including 12-year-old Willa. Willa adores her father and wants to learn everything about him.

So while Layla investigates and discovers Macedonia and writes her book, Willa sneaks.

I read THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US only because my bookclub was reading it. But it won me over with its snappy dialogue and its different perspectives on what Layla and Willa find.

Everyone knows that a well written book about an animal will make you cry or at least come darned close to it. And THE PENGUIN LESSONS is that good. That's fair warning.

Tom, an adventurous young man who grew up in the English countryside, has secured a job as a teacher in Argentina. He spends his breaks traveling as much of South America as he can afford. It is during one such break in Uruguay that he comes across hundreds of dead penguins on a beach. They had been victims of an oil spill.

But, wait, did he see one of the penguins making small movements? He comes closer. Yes. He picks up the penguin, decides to clean it up, and there begins his story of Juan Salvador, his pet penguin.

This is a small book, and it is a quick read. What it lacks in characterization, it makes up for in penguinization.

I haven’t seen the movie based on BROOKLYN. How can they do it unless they rewrite the screenplay?

BROOKLYN starts in Ireland. Eilis is a young lady with no job prospects or male companionship. She moves to America (Brooklyn, specifically) when she is assured that her job prospects there, at least, will be better. What I just said in 2 sentences, Colm Tóibín says slooowly in more than 50 pages. Then he tells us about Eilis’s simple life working and going to school in Brooklyn.

That’s the problem. Although BROOKLYN is well written, not much happens in it. And what does happen is slow and so-whatish. There’s nothing here that makes you anxious to turn the pages, not even the love interest. Sure, when the story is almost over and about 1/10 of it is left, you may find yourself rooting for someone, but, in the end, even that is pretty ho hum.

I’m anxious to see what the movie does with BROOKLYN.

What a delightful little book!

LITTLE AUCTION ANNIE by Marcie Cornett is about a recent college graduate, Annie, who has earned a degree in interior design. She inherits an old home and decides to not only live in it but also use it as a showcase for her design talent. So she starts hitting up auctions in her pursuit of furniture, drapes, utensils, etc. for her home.

Descriptions are detailed and should interest a young adult who has considered an interior design career. Plus the story is fun and even includes a little love interest.

This book is delightful in large part because, at a time when so many books, even the best of them, include sex and foul language, LITTLE AUCTION ANNIE doesn't. Instead, it only hints at them while still managing to convey its story.

I'm not sure that this is appropriate for a book club, though. Its subject is too simple and quick to encourage much discussion.

Chris Bohjalian's THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT is a riveting literary thriller. That is an understatement. It's the best kind of book: the kind you can't put down so you put off doing anything else, including sleeping.

The main character, Cassandra, is the flight attendant. She sleeps around with strange men, and she is a raging alcoholic. She disgusts even hersèlf. But that isn't enough to make her stop.

As a result, she wakes up one morning with a dead man. And her problems keep escalating daily from there.

Although Cassandra is an unsympathetic character, she does redeem herself in my eyes. She cares for cats in an animal shelter every chance she gets. Besides that, she watches reruns of "The Big Bang Theory."

I read an advanced copy of this book. It's a safe bet for preorder.

This book has a great mysterious-sounding title. And THE DEEP DARK DESCENDING really is a mystery. But it lacks suspense and is not a thriller.

You might want to finish reading this just to find out what the main character discovers. But his process of discovery may bore you.

Lisa Unger has written some great books and she’s written some stinkers. BLACK OUT is somewhere in between.

Ophelia grew up with unloving parents. Her father was mostly absent, both physically and mentally, and her mother seemed too stupid and selfish to be able to love her. As a result, Ophelia became unhinged, mentally ill. And it got worse while she willingly and unwillingly accompanied a murderer through several states. She was traumatized and unable to save herself.

Now Ophelia is Annie. She is happily married and has a child. (Speaking of which, both Ophelia/Annie and her mother pick names for their children like most people pick names for their pets. Victory?) Her mental illness, seemingly, continues.

Because I love this type of book, mystery/suspense/thriller, I often must have a willing suspension of disbelief. But BLACK OUT asks for too much. Why were Ophelia/Annie and her husband so duped? This is never adequately explained, at least not enough to suit me.

Worse, though, are the loose ends, Ophelia/Annie’s friend Ella and the detective. Who was Ella? Why is the detective there and suddenly not? No answers, just possibilities.

So much has already been said about A DEADLY WANDERING, especially since Matt Richtel won a Pulitzer Prize for this book, I hesitate to repeat. But I will say this: if you talk on your cell phone or text while you drive, even if you use a hands-free device, you may not want to finish reading A DEADLY WANDERING because you won’t like what it says. Richtel would say that you are in denial. If you don’t talk on your cell phone or text while you drive, you know people who do, and this book will absorb you. Maybe you will want to highlight lines throughout the book.

I am one of those people who does not use my cell phone while I drive, and I don’t understand how this could be controversial. But Richtel tells the true story of Reggie Shaw, who, at first, proclaimed that he was not guilty of causing the deaths of two people even though he had been texting while he was driving. How could there be any question that he was distracted? And why do people insist that they can multitask while they drive?

Richtel proposes that some people are that addicted to their cell phones. And he backs it up with scientific proof.

But A DEADLY WANDERING does not read like a science book. The style of this book reminds me very much of Jon Krakauer's books. Here Richtel tells personal stories, some of people directly connected to Reggie’s story, others of the scientists who study the issues Reggie’s story brings up.

Everyone should read this.

Part I of THE OTHER MOTHER is Daphne, who has a 6-month-old baby named Chloe, talking about her new friend, Laurel, who also has a baby named Chlo?. (Note the special character on the “?” in Laurel’s baby’s name.) It is some year in the 2000s. Interspersed with these first-person accounts are pages of Daphne’s journal from the 1970s. Every character (Daphne’s husband, Laurel, her husband, even Daphne, herself) may not be who they seem to be.

It’s kind of corny.

Then comes Part II. Now Daphne’s accounts are interspersed with pages from Laurel’s journal. This part gets interesting. Who is Daphne, really?

Finally comes Part III and back to the corn. Interspersed throughout this part are pages from the journal of Edith, a mental patient at a psychiatric hospital who supposedly ditched her newborn baby, left him for dead. And the closer we get to the end, the more unlikely Part III is. The end is too wonderful.

I won this book through Librarything.com.

Although all Jenny Milchman's novels (so far) take place in or around the Adirondacks and may share a character or two, each is a standalone and can be read in any order. So, if you haven't read her books, WICKED RIVER would be a great place to start. Or, if you have, if you loved her first book so followed as she wrote subsequent books, you will be impressed with WICKED RIVER and you may even decide this one is her best.

Natalie and Doug, just married, honeymoon on a river and in a forest in the Adirondacks. But nothing goes as planned. First Natalie is horrified to learn what Doug's had intended to do and wonders if she knew who she married. Then as they become more and more lost and near death in the forest, a stranger comes along. But what does he really want and what will he do to keep them?

Suspense in WICKED RIVER begins even before Natalie's and Doug's "honeymoon," even at their wedding. No kidding, the reader will be sitting at the edge of her seat throughout this book. Even if some may feel that the end is a little corny, no one will deny that this story is truly a thriller. We should be seeing it on the bestseller lists.

I have a rule, "the rule of 50." After I have read 50 pages of a book, if I am terribly bored with it, I stop. So, after 50 pages of TO THE BRIGHT EDGE OF THE WORLD, I stopped.

Although my two nephews, both in their 20s, loved this book, I hated it and could not finish reading it. I read 100 pages, and it was slow going.

This is about living in a world that is almost all online. So I think the problem is a generational one.

NEWS OF THE WORLD is a nice little book, nothing earthshaking but still a good book and one you'll want to read.

In post-Civil War time, Captain Jefferson Kidd travels to small towns in Texas where he is a reader, that is, he reads the news of the world to gatherings of people there. At one of his stops, he is given a 10-year-old girl to deliver to her aunt and uncle. The little girl, Johanna, had been stolen by the Indians when she was 4 years old. Now she is Indian, herself, having lost all traces of European language and manners. We travel across Texas along with the captain and Johanna and watch as they grow to love one another, the "old man" and his "little warrior."

You'll probably love this book. Most people do.

THE BAD DAUGHTER is the only book by Joy Fielding that I've read. From this one example of her writing, I would say that it is similar to that of Lisa Scottoline. If you like one, you'll probably like the other.

Robin's father married her best friend, Tara. Now Tara and Robin's father, along with Tara's 12-year-old daughter, have been found shot and near death. And the mystery is: who did it?

That's basically it, a simple who done it. If you really, really try, you can probably figure it out before the end of the book. I didn't really, really try, but the end still was not a surprise.

If you read SALT TO THE SEA, it would be easy to understand if you do not realize this is a young adult book. But among the many awards it has won are at least four for best YA fiction.

SALT TO THE SEA is historical fiction. It is almost the end of World War II, and the Soviets are advancing. People are fleeing the Soviets’ unspeakable atrocities. In this particular case, a young female nurse, a handsome young man of mystery guarding his secret pack, a woman who is almost a giant, an old man who was a shoemaker, a girl from Poland, and a little boy are all headed for the coast. They intend to board a ship that will take them to the relative safety of Germany.

This is the story of a little-known maritime disaster that was bigger even than the disasters of the Lusitania and the Titanic.

And this is YA historical fiction at its finest. It is appreciated by adult readers as well as teens.

THE CHALK MAN is a good book. But it has been overly praised. You will enjoy the book more if you don't let all of the five-star reviews set your expectations too high.

Probably it's the end of THE CHALK MAN that grabs so many great review13ts. Although the reader knows already that a certain character is flawed, the ending italicizes and boldfaces "flawed."

I thought this end was funny, though. I know the author did not intend this reaction. But see if you don't agree with me.

I won this book through thebookdivareads.com

Although I loved Stephen King's horror novels when I was younger, I now apprciate his thrillers that do not include horror, even if they do have some magic (such as his 11/22/63). MR MERCEDES is a thriller minus horror, minus magic. Maybe this is not the stereotypical Stephen King novel, but those of us who are tired of the horror and the supernatural like it just fine.

Put shortly (and so as not to say too much, which most reviewers do), Bill Hodges has retired from the police force but manages to perform a whole lot of illegal activity in his pursuit of a homicidal maniac. Granted, this crazy guy went after Hodges first. But why didn't he just call the police, as a police retiree would be expected to do? Shucks, that would be no fun!

And it is entertaining to see this supersmart crazy person being outsmarted by the old retiree and his friends. I look forward to reading the second book in King's Bill Hodges trilogy.

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, first published in 1939, deserves a comeback. It is a wonderful novel that is almost forgotten nowadays as readers try to keep up with all the novels currently being published.

This book came to the United States in 1940 and won the National Book Award for favorite novel that year. The 1941 edition was in my parents’ bookcase for many years before I finally picked it up to read. Before long, I was asking myself, what took me so long, because it could be the best classic I ever read.

The story, narrated by Huw Morgan, is about years of his family’s life in a Welsh mining community during the reign of Queen Victoria. As an older man, he has finally decided to leave and is reminiscing. If all coming-of-age tales were this mesmerizing and this touching, I wouldn’t avoid them as I do.

Particularly attractive is the English the narrator and other characters use. While the reader is to understand that they are really speaking Welsh, their sentence structure is distinguished from English English. I loved the sound of it the way I love the sound of a Tana French novel.

Although Richard Llewellyn’s descriptions of the valley may seem wordy, the reader should understand the necessity of emphasizing its beauty and how mining operations were destroying it. This destruction is the reason Huw is leaving.

TONY AND SUSAN is a story within a story. At least it’s supposed to be. Susan is reading a book written by her ex-husband.

Most of TONY AND SUSAN is that book, the story within the story. It’s about Tony, a college professor, whose wife and child are abducted and murdered. The story starts out pretty good, although Tony is quite a wimp. But then the story degenerates; it gets tedious and dull. Worse is the end of the story within the story. It is quite a letdown.

Worse than the story within the story is the story, Susan reading. I cannot figure out why these parts of TONY AND SUSAN even exist. I call it “the story,” but is it really if it makes me wonder, so what? Again, I don’t know why it’s there. And again, the end is a letdown.

BLINDSIGHTED, Karin Slaughter’s first novel in her Grant County series, leaves me surprisingly pleased. I’m surprised because, although her two standalones that I read (COP TOWN and PRETTY GIRLS) are excellent, I was dissatisfied with the two books I read in her Will Trent series. But this series is just different enough to make me want more. So I’m happy that I started this Grant County series at the beginning, i.e., with "Grant County, #1." Now I intend to read the rest of the series in order.

Told from the perspectives of three people in Grant County (Sara, the coroner and a pediatrician; Jeffrey, the police chief and Sara’s ex-husband; and Lena, a detective), BLINDSIGHTED’s plot involves their hunting down and interaction with a serial rapist. But there is more to this novel than that. As with all Slaughter’s novels, BLINDSIGHTED is not only plot driven. The three main characters also have personal stories, including their thoughts and feelings throughout. It is these personal stories that, in the end, leave the reader hanging just enough to make her anxious to read Grant County, #2, KISSCUT.

SOMETIMES I LIE isn't a bad book (although it does irritate me that so many book titles contain the "lie" word lately). But this book is overrated.

Amber is in a coma, although she can hear what others around her are saying. First she feels one way, then she gradually remembers more and more.

Claire, Amber's sister, seems fine, then not fine, then good, then bad, etc. And so it goes with all the characters in this book, including Amber. Also, most of the characters, including Amber, are unlikable.

Told In "Before," "Now," and "After" chapters, including diary entries, SOMETIMES I LIE should have you confused about everyone in it. But it is not unputdownable. If you've heard that it is, lower your expectations.

THE BISHOP’S WIFE is about a Mormon bishop’s wife, Linda, who gets overly involved in the lives of people living in her ward, which is the bishop’s responsibility. She is so nosy (when she should be minding her own business) that she insinuates herself right smack in the middle of two simultaneous mysteries.

A man dies, leaving his second wife and two adult sons. The mystery is his first wife. How did she die? Did he kill her? Why did he take such meticulous care of his garden?

At the same time Linda involves herself in that, she finds another mystery going on with another family in her ward. In this case, another wife and mother has died but more recently. And the child is just 5 years old. Her husband and father-in-law are conservative, even more conservative than the usual Mormon. So it’s easy to suspect them. Besides, her parents are sure her husband murdered her. Did he? Linda finds out.

Both mysteries are good enough that I wanted to finish reading the book, although Linda is ridiculous. Partly because of Linda, THE BISHOP’S WIFE seems like a young adult novel, although it is meant to be a novel for adult readers. Also, the writing style is too YAish.

For these reasons, I do not rate THE BISHOP’S WIFE highly. But readers who really are YA would rate it higher.

JUST BETWEEN US reminds me of BIG LITTLE LIES with suspense. Not that the storylines are alike, but both books are about friendships between women and their lives with their husbands and children. That sounds dull to many of us. But, remember, JUST BETWEEN US has added suspense. Yes, Rebecca Drake has made this subject matter a thriller.

Heather, Julie, Sarah, and Alison are friends who regularly meet at a coffee shop. When Heather appears to be abused, the other three friends want her to leave her husband. In the meantime, Julie loans Heather her gun. Predictably. that’s where trouble and, shortly thereafter, the suspense begin.

The problems with JUST BETWEEN US are the friends’ decisions. They’re pretty stupid throughout. Plus, their antics and the results of their antics are implausible.

I won this book through https://theteddyrosebookreviewsplusmore.com/

Simply put, 4 3 2 1 presents Archie Ferguson's four possible lives. That is, one Ferguson is born, but his life might have gone one way or another or another or another. 4 3 2 1 examines each way his life might have gone.

I liked 4 3 2 1, and I didn't like it. Its references to history, literature, and movies are superb. But the length of the book combined with the disjointed presentation of Ferguson's four possible lives often leads to confusion.

THE LAST BALLAD is historical fiction about a poor female textile mill worker who one day in the 1920s walked off the job and joined the National Textile Workers Union. It is also about a certain one of their strikes in 1929 in North Carolina. The ex-mill worker was Ella May Wiggins, and that particular strike was the Loray Mill strike. These we know to be true because Wiley Cash says so in this “Afterword.”

Historical fiction always has some truth to it. That’s what makes it so appealing. But what about THE LAST BALLAD is true other than what Cash writes in his “Afterword”? I wanted to believe, especially, in Richard McAdam, the enlightened but weak mill owner, and Hampton Haywood, the black Communist from the North. So I did some research, and it looks like the other characters in the book just aid the story and are straight from Cash’s imagination.

Not only does Cash write well enough to make the reader want to believe his fiction; he also tells a balanced story. That is, for example, Ella is dirt poor, barely able to feed her children, but well-off Katherine McAdams wants to and does help her. Cash also shows both the good and bad characters in the police and in the strikers.

This is an interesting story of a little-known part of American history.

I won this book through the JATHAN & HEATHER website.

I always like Karen Slaughter's novels. Sometimes, though, I love them. And this is one of those times. PIECES OF HER is one of her best.

First is the story of Laura and her 31-year-old daughter, Andrea. After Laura is attacked by a stranger wearing a hoodie, Andrea goes on the run. During her travels, she learns more and more about Laura, and the immature Andrea grows up.

Every other chapter is another story, 32 years earlier. Mainly, this one deals with Jane and Nick and the cult-like group of anarchists that Nick leads.

Watch as the two stories become one.

This book isn't just another thriller. Slaughter obviously did some research and presents real facts along with her fiction. Plus, it's unputdownable.

I won an ARC of this book from the publisher, William Morrow.

THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR is like an Agatha Christie novel. That is, it has lots and lots of twists as one character after another is suspect, first this guy, then that guy, then that guy, then back to one of those guys, then on to another guy, etc. And more and more of the mystery is solved until the surprising reveal. Except THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR doesn't end the story there. A bit of what-comes-next follows and a not-so-surprising but, I think, funny end.

It's not a bad book. But it's not so good that I'll be reading more of Shari Lapena. That's because, like the Agatha Christie novel's I've read, THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR is long on mystery but short on story. If you are an Agatha Christie fan, you may rate this higher than I do.

THE GREAT ALONE is said to be a second departure for Kristin Hannah, the first being THE NIGHTINGALE. Her other books that I've read are what I call “chic lit,” young female centered and, to one degree or another, revolving around their love lives and petty issues like their need for a new hair style or outfit. While some women like that type of book, I don’t.

I can’t yet speak for THE NIGHTINGALE, but THE GREAT ALONE is different, mostly. A married couple and their 13-year-old daughter flee Washington state and move to the wilds of Alaska. We read about their struggle to survive in such a harsh environment. The man gets violent often, especially during the winter, when days are short. That’s not chic lit.

But most of the story is told from the point of view of the teenage girl. Although it is in third, not first, person, Hannah refers to the adult main characters, the parents, as “Mama” and “Dad” and uses their names only in dialog. It made feel like I was back in 8th or 9th grade.

For that reason, even though THE GREAT ALONE is not chic lit, I give it only three out of five stars. I admit, though, I would have given it four stars when I was younger.

I KNOW YOU KNOW is it a mystery. It is not an exciting one and seems pretty bland at times during the first half of the book. But it becomes more and more of a page turner until the last couple of chapters become a delightful surprise.

Twenty years ago two boys were murdered. Although someone was found guilty of the murders and put away, was he really responsible?

Now a 20-year-old skeleton of a man is unearthed near where these murders occurred. Are they related?

Although the subject matter is definitely meant for an adult, the writing style often sounds young adult, which bores this reader. Some adults prefer “easy reading,” so this may not detract you. It is, however, one of the reasons I do not rate I KNOW YOU KNOW highly.

I prefer books that are not so easy to put down as this one is. But, because it does become a really good mystery with an unpredictable finish, I am tempted to call I KNOW YOU KNOW a four-star book. In all honesty, though, I have to consider that it bored me in the beginning. So I rate it three.

If you are not put off by a book with a YA writing style, consider this, and try I KNOW YOU KNOW.

I won this book through librarything.com.

Why do so many reviews give books high ratings because of their last couple/few chapters? Case in point: CROSS HER HEART.

Just about all of CROSS HER HEART is figuring out secrets. Normally that’s OK in a mystery/thriller, which CROSS HER HEART is. But most of the secrets in this book are kept from the reader. I prefer to learn what is going on AS a main character does, not AFTER.

Sarah Pinborough does have Marion, one of the characters in CROSS HER HEART, solve mysteries at pretty much the same time as the reader. But the main character, Lisa/Charlotte, is a mystery to the reader until the last several pages.

Three quarters of CROSS HER HEART is frustrating, not thrilling . But that last quarter is not frustrating and is more thrilling than what comes before. That’s not good enough for a high rating.

Even if you think you’re sick of World War II novels, try this one because THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE is more than that. Jessica Shattuck has assembled what SEEMS to be a story of three German women, survivors who were married to heroic men of the Resistance. But little by little we learn these women’s secrets.

Together, Marianne, Ania, and Betina, the women in the castle, survive the aftermath of World War II. Their stories continue through 1991, all the while revealing Betina’s and Ania’s secrets, and those of the people they were and are involved with. THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE examines guilt and moral culpability. It is not as simple and cut and dry as Marianne believes.

THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE goes back and forth in time, but it is not confusing if you pay attention to chapter headings. Rather, you will find, when you are taken back in time, you will understand more. You may find that you identify with Marianne and see German guilt for what they did or didn’t do before, during, and after World War II, even for just what they thought, in a new light.

THE WIFE, for the most part, is a diatribe on the unfairness of it all, of being married to a selfish man and of the uselessness of a woman’s trying to make it in a man’s world.

Joan and Joe meet when she is a student at Smith College and he is her professor. They have an affair, and Joe leaves his wife and infant daughter for Joan. No surprise, he continues to have affairs throughout their marriage, although he never leaves her.

Joe has never wanted anything more than to be a writer. But, so far, he has published only a short story in a small periodical. After he marries Joan, though, his career picks up. (It was at this point that I predicted the “surprise.”) Joe becomes a successful and highly praised author. As a matter of fact, when THE WIFE opens, he and Joan are flying to Finland so he can receive a prestigious international award.

It is during this trip that Joan remembers their marriage in a series of flashbacks, and she reflects on the unfairness of it all. Yet she never seemed to want fairness until now, when she has finally had it with Joe getting all the praise.

When the “surprise” is revealed in one of Joan’s flashbacks, I wasn’t surprised.

YOU is a tale of, primarily, two mentally unstable people, one more dangerously so than the other. While I normally would skip a book with as much sex in it as this one has, the story of these two main characters and the extreme obsession the one has for the other kept me turning the pages.

The APPARENTLY normal Joe works at a bookstore and is well read, intelligent, and funny. He meets (Guinevere) Beck, referred to as Beck. Joe is attracted to her so learns where she lives. After he observes her strutting about her apartment, windows uncovered, naked, he becomes obsessed with her, DANGEROUSLY obsessed. Joe stalks Beck and, as the story continues, he becomes more and more dangerous and more and more obsessed.

I’m not going to describe more of the story. That would be doing the reader a disservice. I resent most other book reviews, even the book flap, that say more. Readers enjoy the story more when they do not anticipate what someone already told them is going to happen.

However, I will say that the last two chapters of YOU are a bore. Don’t worry, they’re only a few pages. But they should have been shorter.

BLINDNESS could be the worst book I ever read. That is not because of the language used in the translation and not because of its storyline. Rather, it is just plain sloppy.

Using simple language, BLINDNESS describes a country dealing with a highly contagious epidemic in which people are going blind for an unknown reason. It’s a great premise and reminds me of the epidemic in Stephen King’s THE STAND.

But considering how difficult BLINDNESS is to read, I wonder how it won a Nobel Prize and THE STAND, a far more intricate and absorbing book, didn’t. It must have been a case of Portugal’s (where the author, José Saramago, is from) turn to win.

“Sloppy” describes the way Saramago presents BLINDNESS. Not only are paragraphs unnecessarily long, they are incorrectly long. They contain entire conversations between at least two people, no quotation marks, and haphazard punctuation (usually commas where periods should be).

BLINDNESS is, therefore, difficult to read. There is no indication of when someone stops talking and another person begins or when a character is thinking rather than talking out loud. Truly understanding this book requires rereading.

SLIVER OF TRUTH is Lisa Unger’s second novel. It is a continuation of her first novel, BEAUTIFUL LIES. You’ll understand and enjoy SLIVER OF TRUTH more if you read BEAUTIFUL LIES first.

This continuation begins, probably, a year or two after BEAUTIFUL LIES ends. Ridley Jones thought all her troubles were over, but they get even worse now. Not only are there more secrets and lies but one, in particular, sure is a surprise.

Who is Ridley’s "Uncle" Max? How important is he and to whom? Did he really die? Plenty of people don’t think so and hope Ridley can help them find him.

Again, SLIVER OF TRUTH Is both plot- and character-driven. And, again, Lisa Unger writes in first person and in a conversational manner, as if Ridley is talking just to you.

In THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN, Lisa Jewell starts by presenting many mysteries and builds up to the main who-done-it of the book. I enjoyed trying to figure it out; Jewell made me suspicious of everyone. Then, when I thought I knew, she added a twist. Her best twist of all left me undecided but in a good way. I ended up thinking how crafty of Jewell to do this to my imagination.

What the English refer to here as a garden, I would call a park with gardens in it but also playground equipment. Encircling this 3-acre private park are what I imagine are different types of condominiums and apartments (although this is not what they are called in the book). I would refer to this arrangement as a complex. Because of this complex arrangement, neighbors are involved with each other perhaps more than they might otherwise be.

So we learn enough about some of them to be suspicious when a tragedy occurs. And we learn more and more as one of the neighbors investigates and as a very smart 11-year-old questions what she sees.

Although THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN involves several children who are 13 and under, which you may think would bore you, the story contains enough adult characters and material to keep your attention. I recommend it.

THE PERFECT MOTHER is a surprise. And then it's a surprise again, and then it's a surprise again, and then it's a surprise again, etc. The first surprise for you may be, as it was for me, that this is more than just a book about young mothers and the trials of motherhood. THE PERFECT MOTHER contains so many twists and turns that it really is a pleasure to read.

The epigraph Aimee Molloy puts at the beginning of the book refers to three blind mice, a hint of what is to come. Three young mothers (Collette, Nell, and Francie) with newborn babies are members of a "mommy group," a support group for, yes, mothers of newborn babies. They become determined to help another member of the group (Winnie) when her baby boy is kidnapped.

This is not only a plot-driven novel, though. Molloy also goes into the thoughts, difficulties, backgrounds, and secrets of each of the "three blind mice." In other words, THE PERFECT MOTHER is a character-driven novel as well. It also involves the hidden characters of a couple other people (more surprises), although the character at the end could have used more development.

In FINDERS KEEPERS, Stephen King returns to one of his old themes. In his book MISERY, a character was obsessed with a certain author’s books, and here King repeats that theme.

As a young man, Morris commits a crime because of his dissatisfaction with the way that certain author, John Rothstein, has ended his book series. Morris then buries a trunk full of notebooks containing Rothstein’s stories, poems, even novels that no one has read yet. The idea is that Morris would come back for them later; the notebooks would stay there waiting for him.

Thirty-plus years later Pete, who coincidentally also loves Rothstein’s novels, unearths that trunk. Pete has also found lots of trouble.

Now come Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson, three of the characters from King’s MR. MERCEDES, to the rescue.

This second book in King’s MR. MERCEDES trilogy is delightful. At the same time, though, although FINDERS KEEPERS does allude to the MR. MERCEDES killings throughout, King takes a little too long to have the Hodges trio enter the story.

But that is just my opinion, and you may find no problem at all. King is great, and it’s hard to criticize anything he writes.

The first half of LIE TO ME is Ethan’s side of the story, the second half is mostly Sutton’s. They’re a married couple, both writers, well known, especially him. But she has a secret past.

Consequently, when Sutton disappears, mysteries abound: Is she dead or alive? If dead, at her own hand or murder? If murder, who did it? Of course, Ethan is the first suspect. Is he guilty or is he being set up? If he’s being set up, by whom and why? That’s the first half.

The second half is less mystery than answers. Therefore, the first half is more absorbing. But there certainly are some attention-grabbing answers.

I enjoyed LIE TO ME but found the end somewhat perplexing. Therefore, it rates 3.5 stars more than it does 4.

As a Stephen King fan who has been reading his books for the last 40 years, I admit that nowadays I’m less captivated by his monsters. So I enjoyed the first two books in his MR. MERCEDES trilogy and expected END OF WATCH, the final book in the trilogy, to be the same (no monsters). WRONG

Brady is back. Yes, in MR. MERCEDES he was a monstrOUS bad guy. But in END OF WATCH he is literally a monster with awful supernatural powers. And the entire book involves the threesome, Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson, trying to find Brady and put an end to his destruction of vulnerable lives. But they first have to accept that he is doing it and then figure out how he does it from his hospital room, where he is in a semicomatose state as a result of the head injury he received when Holly whacked him in MR. MERCEDES.

I didn’t like END OF WATCH as well as I did the first two books ( MR. MERCEDES and FINDERS KEEPERS) in the trilogy. That is not to say that I didn’t like it at all. I just wish Bill could have had his “end of watch” with a monstrous bad guy rather than a monster.

THE SQUIRREL MANIFESTO is a five-star book for its illustrations, which are the reason most kids pick up a book in the first place. And its theme of financial responsibility is a good one, although I don't agree that preschool-age children need to be concerned about paying taxes. That seems ridiculous and, so, downgrades the book's rating to four stars. It could have been three stars if those illustrations weren't so darned cute.

Many people love Mary Kubica’s books. I’m not one of them. I’m sorry to say that because I always want to love what I’m reading. However, after reading two of her books, I’ve decided she’s not for me.

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT strikes me as a book for young adults, one I would have liked when I was a teenager. So, if you’re a teenager, try it. But I’m way past YA.

Three stories are going on here, all connected but in different timelines. Two are Eden’s stories, the other one Jessie’s. It’s easy to figure out how Jessie and Eden are connected long before Kubica spells it out.

Eden’s stories are too soap opera-ish, too repetitious. She wants a baby and thinks she will do anything to get one.

Jessie is sleepy all the time in her story. Much of it doesn’t make sense, but I decided that was because of lack of sleep. And I’m sure that is what Kubica meant for the reader to think so she would be surprised in the end. But I wasn’t just surprised; I was disappointed to put it mildly. To be honest, I was angry because I felt like all the time I spent reading Jessie’s story was wasted.

If you are one of the readers who likes Kubica’s books, pick this one up. Then you’ll see what I mean.

I won this book through [email protected].

Historical fiction appeals to many people because they take for granted that it teaches them history but in a novel (as opposed to history book) form. But what if a book, billed as historical fiction, deviates from the truth, not just a little but a lot? Is that OK because this is, after all, fiction? If a publisher/author claims it is historical, shouldn’t the reader expect a reconstruction of past events?

That is my problem with VARINA by Charles Frazier. I’m not sure of its accuracy and don’t know if I can be without reading another book about Varina.

Varina was the second wife of Jefferson Davis, the president of a nonexistent country, the Confederacy, during the American Civil War. Although she is not WELL known, many facts about her life are known, and most readers of VARINA assume they are incorporated into this novel. I did. Now I wonder.

VARINA begins long after the Civil War, when Varina is living in the North (which she really did). She reunites with a man who she saved when he was a child. (He really did exist, although they never really reunited.) Now she remembers for him her life before, during, and after the Civil War.

Whenever I read historical fiction I want to know what parts of it are fiction and what parts fact. Usually the author adds notes to make this clear. But Frazier did not add notes to VARINA. So I looked them up on the Internet.

I found an article by Kimberly J. Largent from Ohio State University called “The Life of Varina Howell Davis: First Lady of the Confederacy” (https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/life-varina-howell-davis-first-lady-confederacy). Much of it differs from VARINA, in particular that Jefferson Davis never got over his first wife and was not a good husband to Varina. According to Largent, they both loved each other very much, and she was not jealous of the first wife at all. Also, when Varina tried to escape with her children to Cuba after the war, the book VARINA has Jefferson meeting with her only once, when they were captured, whereas Largent says he met with them often, off and on during their escape attempt.

So who’s right? I rate VARINA with four stars because I give Frazier the benefit of the doubt that he wrote HISTORICAL fiction, not just fiction. But if the OSU article is correct, I downgrade that to two stars, maybe one.

I cannot emphasize enough how wonderful SECRETS OF EDEN is. Every sentence is so well written, and the story is arranged so well.

SECRETS OF EDEN begins with the first-person account of a Baptist minister, Stephen. After he baptizes one of his parishioners, Alice, she says, “There,” and Stephen forever blames himself for not realizing what she meant by that word and for not saving her from her husband.

Part II is the account of the state’s attorney, Catherine. She suspects that Alice’s husband did not commit suicide. She then suspects Stephen and looks for evidence against him.

Eventually Stephen meets Heather, an author of inspirational books about angels, who helps him and Alice’s daughter, Katie, with her first-hand knowledge of wife abuse, murder, and suicide. Part III of SECRETS OF EDEN, is Heather’s first-person account.

The final part of the book is Katie’s first-person account.

Every part of SECRETS OF EDEN sounds like it really is written by that person who narrates it. The writing and the story are mesmerizing as each part builds suspense, adds clues, and moves the story further. This is one fine literary thriller.

Two stories are going on in THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER. One story is Helena’s past when she grew up with her father, dubbed “The Marsh King,” after he kidnapped and raped her mother; the other is Helena’s present after she learns of her father’s escape from prison.

At first, I thought I was not going to like THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER because the first quarter of the book contains too many details that do not advance the story. But I continued reading because of Karen Dionne’s skillful descriptions of life among Michigan’s Upper Peninsula’s marshes and navigation in the area. Throughout THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER I wondered how she was able to do this so well that I felt like I was there, even getting cold when Helena fell in the marsh and when she was forced to spend three days in a well.

But, I promise, the two stories do become tense and unputdownable. Dionne’s ability to describe tracking someone in the marshy area does this in Helena’s present-day story of searching for her father (although I wasn’t convinced she couldn’t have left this to the police). And the story of Helena’s interactions with “The Hunter” and of bringing her mother and herself to safety is equally as tense and unputdownable, especially because Dionne tells both stories at the same time.

So I was glad I finished reading THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER and upgrade my original rating of three stars to four.

It’s difficult to put simply a synopsis of such an involved book as THE GOLDFINCH. There’s so much to say about it! But suffice it to say that the narrator, at 13, is the victim of a museum bombing. His mother is killed, and at the insistence of a dying old man, he leaves the museum with a painting, saving it from possible ruin. Both these results, along with PTSD, affect his life for many years after the bombing.

If you read other reviews of THE GOLDFINCH, you know that people either love it or they hate it. I’m at the positive end of the scale, i.e., I loved it. But I understand the negative remarks. I just don’t agree.

Most of the negative reviews complain that the book is too long, the narrator’s thoughts go on and on and on. Yes, THE GOLDFINCH IS long, 771 pages. That’s too long for some people and too long for some books. Some people are put off by a long book because some books aren’t good enough to make them want to invest that much of their time in it. It might have seemed that way to them as it did to me at first.

The story didn’t get off to a good start for me because its narrator is a 13-year-old boy, and most books about kids bore me. But I found this book is the exception; Donna Tartt’s writing is that good. Besides, he doesn’t stay 13. I was sorry to see his story end. Maybe some people gave up too soon.

I was happy to read that some reviewers compare this to Dickens’ books because I thought that, too. Except THE GOLDFINCH is a modern Dickens book (and better, I think).

In Rene Denfeld’s THE CHILD FINDER, Naomi is known for her ability to find children, sometimes dead but more often alive. She, herself, escaped something when she was a child, something she forgets, and was subsequently raised in a foster home, with her foster brother, Jerome.

That is one of the mysteries: what does Naomi forget?

The main mystery of THE CHILD FINDER, though, involves Madison, who was lost in the woods when she was 5-years-old. It is now three years later. Chapters alternate: mostly Denfeld concentrates on Naomi’s search for Madison and the present state of Madison. But two other stories are also going on: Naomi’s other job—finding a missing baby whose mother is in jail for her murder—and Naomi’s relationship with Jerome.

There are some problems. Every character in this book is so one dimensional the reader never really knows any one of them, even Naomi. That means this is a plot-driven, rather than character-driven, story. Also, Madison is only 5- to 8-years-old in the chapters that describe her, yet most everything she does seems way beyond a child that young.

Other than these two problems, though, THE CHILD FINDER is an engaging book. I stayed up late to finish it last night so, obviously, am glad I read it. As I understand, this is the first in a series, and I’ll be looking to finding out about her next case and whether, this time, she investigates alongside Jerome.

This is a test: can I write well enough to convince you to read THE EIGHTH SISTER, to make you believe, if you’ve read Robert Dugoni before, that this is his best and, if you haven’t, that this first book in his Charles Jenkins (who you may remember from the David Sloane series) series is a great place to start? I finished reading it last night in the middle of the night, when I should have been sleeping. And I’m a picky reader. And I write honest reviews.

Part 1 of THE EIGHTH SISTER places Jenkins in Russia after he believes he has been reactivated as a CIA agent. His objective is to find the identity of the eighth “sister.” The other seven “sisters” are CIA spies. Already, two have been found out and probably killed. Can Jenkins help prevent a similar fate for the other five “sisters”?

Before long, though, Jenkins learns that all is not as he had been told.

Descriptions of Russia and Turkey sound so authentic that I wondered throughout this part where and how Dugoni got his information. (Read the “Acknowledgements.”) These details, along with Jenkins’s struggles there, make this the best kind of book, i.e., the unputdownable kind, the kind you have to keep reading, even during lunch and dinner.

I never describe a book’s plot so much that the reader’s enjoyment might be spoiled. Therefore, I don’t describe Part 2 because it might say too much about what happened in Part 1. (Warning: Don’t read other reviews unless it isn’t important to you that you experience this book as the author intended.) But David Sloane is back in Part 2 and so is his stepson, now a law student. Let’s hope Sloane continues in the rest of the Jenkins series.

Other reviews compare THE EIGHTH SISTER to books by LeCarré. In my experience, THE EIGHTH SISTER is better. Really.

THE DOUBTER’S ALMANAC is a good story, but the storytelling is dull.

THE ELECTRIC HOTEL is historical fiction that goes all the way back to the beginning of silent movies (which was in the 19th century in France) to the 1960s showing of “The Electric Hotel.” But the book begins with an old man in 1962 and the PhD candidate who is interviewing him for his dissertation on “innovation in American silent film before 1914.” Nearly everything else is flashback as the old man, Claude, tells his story.

The first and longest flashback deals, mostly, with Claude, a movie maker, and Sabine, the actress he loves. This part, more than half of the book, is both interesting, as the reader learns how and where this movie business began and what obstacles they had to deal with, and boring, as Dominic Smith is often too wordy.

But after Claude’s production of “The Electric Hotel,” the story is both interesting and engaging, even for someone who doesn’t particularly care about the movie making business. I know I’ll never feel the same way about Thomas Edison again.

I expected to love THE ELECTRIC HOTEL because I loved Smith’s last book, THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS. I didn’t. But I did like THE ELECTRIC HOTEL a lot. I must have because now I want to watch some silent movies. And I wonder if anyone asked Smith whether he modeled Claude and Sabine on real people.

I won this book through goodreads.com.

So many great things have already been said about THE GUEST BOOK by Sarah Blake that, I felt before I read this book, it was sure to be a letdown. Too much praise leads to high expectations. This was especially true because Blake’s previous bestseller, THE POSTMISTRESS, disappointed me after all its complimentary reviews.

But THE GUEST BOOK deserves every word you have heard about it. It is as if the two books were written by different people.

Mostly, THE GUEST BOOK is about secrets. Three generations of a well-to-do family are described, including the secrets kept by the first two and the eventual unraveling by the third.

This story is sad. To me, that is partly because the secrets are not only about wrongs committed but also about the shame that accompanies them. Also, what appears to be racial prejudice is sometimes something else.

Even though I am delighted with THE GUEST BOOK , some of it does irritate me:
a) This would be more reader friendly if chapter headings are years rather than consecutive numbers.
b) Stories of different family members depend on a few too many coincidences.
c) Perhaps this is just my misunderstanding, but it seems silly that Americans, even though they are New Yorkers, use English affectations, e.g., “mum” and “pram.”

But overlook these. Most people can.

I won an ARC of THE GUEST BOOK from the publisher, Flatiron Books.

THE RISEN may not have been promoted as much as Ron Rash’s other books. I hadn’t heard of it until I found it two years after its publication. And what a find it turns out to be!

Two brothers, Bill, a successful neurosurgeon, and Eugene, a failed writer and an alcoholic, learn that the body of an old acquaintance, Ligeia, has been discovered. Eugene tells the story of the summer 46 years ago when they met Ligeia and of their present predicament. Who killed her?

This is my favorite of all Rash's books. It’s short but leaves quite an impact.

I hadn’t heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But I should have. He was a German theologian and Nazi resistor during the 1930s and 1940s who always showed moral courage from the time he was a young man. He took part in various attempts to kill Hitler and was hanged as a result at the end of World War II just as the Allies were coming to occupy Germany.

SAINTS AND VILLAINS by Denise Giardina is a novel based on the truth of Bonhoeffer's life. From the time he was 14 he knew he wanted to study theology. As a Christian, Bonhoeffer couldn’t justify what he saw happening to his country when the Nazis came into power. He (and his family) hated what he saw the Germans doing to the Jews much earlier than others acknowledged it.

Bonhoeffer's moral courage was obvious as early as his seminary days in New York. But it was in Germany that he spoke out against Nazis, often in sermons, even when it seemed the majority of Germans supported Hitler.

This should not have been a new story to me, and I’ll always remember it. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK is billed as true crime, which I guess it is. But not really, not as most of us think of it. It is actually the investigation of the investigation of true crime.

Michelle McNamara, the author, became interested in the case of a serial rapist, then murderer, who began in Northern California in the 1970s and worked his way south to 1986. She liked to think that she could assist in the investigation more than 10 years later. But she actually wrote about her investigation of the investigation of the crimes.

I am not giving anything away when I tell you that McNamara died before she could finish writing the book, before she could identify the rapist/murderer herself. But the way I heard it before I read the book was that she died before the case could be solved. I was given the impression this was an open case when it was actually a cold case.

I feel like I was fooled because this book is not at all what I expected. Dates were all over the place, and the true crimes were not given in any type of order. I was confused throughout.

Could it be that its great reviews are mostly because McNamara died before she could finish her book?

If you look for trouble long enough and hard enough, you’ll find it. That’s what A CONSPIRACY OF TALL MEN says, at least in part.

We are introduced to Linus and his two friends, all conspiracy theorists. They’re always on the lookout for trouble. And, boy, do they find it when Linus's wife is killed. She was on a plane she shouldn’t have been on with another man, and someone bombed the plane.

Many twists and turns abound as we follow Linus on the one hand and his friends on the other as they figure out the mysteries. In the middle of the book I was sometimes confused and had to re-read some paragraphs. But all in all I enjoyed the book and it’s dialogue very much.

But I wonder if anyone besides me is curious about Richard Preston, the name, not the character. I read reviews of this book but have seen no one else bring it up. When I saw that name, I immediately thought of the author Richard Preston. How amusing that his name was used for a character so concerned with a plague.

I read this because I liked Noah Hawley’s latest book, BEFORE THE FALL, so much. I see with A CONSPIRACY OF TALL MEN that he was writing five-star books even 20 years ago. (His picture from back then makes him look like he was about 12 years old when he wrote it.)

THE WORDS BETWEEN US is Erin Bartels' second novel, following WE HOPE FOR BETTER THINGS, and it is probably the better of the two. I would categorize it as a young adult novel. So it is as YA that I praise it.

In alternating ”Then” and “Now” chapters, the main character, Robin, gives first-person accounts of her past and present until the two finally meet.

Robin begins her "Then” chapters when she was 14-years-old and sent to live with her grandmother after both her parents landed in jail. She went to a new high school and met Peter, the love of her life. But first the two became friends when he gave her books and she paid for each with a poem.

The “Now" chapters are 18 years later, after Robin fled her new hometown, Peter, and the law. She owns a used bookstore and is suddenly receiving unsigned packages in the mail. They are obviously from Peter because each package contains one of the books he gave her so many years before.

It’s a YA love story, the kind I used to read, with no teenaged sex, just sweetness.

Its title refers to a drought. The setting of THE DRY is a small farming town in Australia, and everyone is suffering because of the drought. God-awful things are going on in this small town, and often the drought is being blamed.



But Federal Agent Aaron Falk knows better. He and his father left there when he was 16 years old because it was such a nasty place, with some really bad people making them miserable.



So why is he back now, 20 years later? It appears that his best friend there has shot himself along with his wife and five-year-old son. But Falk and the town sheriff, Raco, are finding that all is not as it appears.



So that is that mystery. But there is another, the reason Falk and his father left the small town all those years ago.



THE DRY is unputdownable. The mysteries have twists and turns on every page. But you also want to watch every page for clues. Believe it, this is a book you will be sorry to see end.

THE WIDOW is good, not great.

We know right away that a woman is being hounded by the press because her husband, who has done something bad that everyone is interested in, has died suddenly. So the rest of the book is mostly flashback.

Turns out, the police and most other people believe the husband, Glen, kidnapped a 2-year-old girl and probably murdered her. His wife, Jean (the widow), stood by him for four years. The police and most other people believe she has been lying for him. But now that Glen is dead, will the widow come clean?

Not only is the story told mostly in flashbacks but, also, from various points of view. So the reader has to pay close attention to the date at the beginning of each chapter. But I found it easy to follow. Also, though, the story is easy to guess at. No result is a surprise.

Every time I review a book by Joseph Kanon I say the same thing: he’s done it again. That is not to say the story is the same, but THE ACCOMPLICE is Kanon’s usual historical fiction/thriller with characters in situations I’m sure they can’t get out of but always do. Presentation is always smart dialog, no long paragraphs describing scenery as in so many other novels. This book is, as Kanon’s books always are, excellent.

Aaron Wiley feels obligated to find Otto Schramn, a doctor who performed medical experiments on Jews during World War II. It is now the 1960s, and Aaron’s uncle Max Weill, who has been tracking and turning in Nazis since his imprisonment at Auschwitz, has spotted Schramm in Germany but dies soon after.

So Aaron deduces that Schramm has left for Buenos Aires and follows him there. With assistance from a German newspaper reporter, an Israeli agent, a CIA station chief, and even Schramm’s daughter, Aaron hunts for Schramm, a monster turned crazy man.

MY DARK VANESSA is really a two-star book for me because of its subject matter. I would have and maybe should have stopped reading the book after the first chapter. But I wanted to figure this girl out. So, for that reason, I think other readers might not be so put off and rate the book with three stars.

Vanessa is a lonely 15-year-old. She doesn’t have friends. She eats by herself in the cafeteria. Then her male English teacher gives her some attention. It begins with a pat on the knee. She likes it. You can guess where it goes from there.

Chapters alternate between her high school and college years and when she is about 15 years older. Otherwise, I could not have finished the book. As it is, I still have not figured her out.

I won an ARC of MY DARK VANESSA from William Morrow Books.

ABOVE THE WATERFALL is a literary mystery, above all, literary. It is a character-driven novel with plot. It is poetic, especially in its descriptions of the natural setting in which most of the story takes place.

Les, a sheriff, and Becky, a park ranger, are the two main characters in ABOVE THE WATERFALL. They share a love for the natural world they work and live in. But Les also sees the scum of the earth, including methadone addicts and their "labs." Les’s and Becky‘s first-person accounts are in alternating chapters throughout the book.The mystery: who dumped kerosene in a stream, killing trout important to the livelihoods of a resort owner and his employees?

This is a beautiful novel. Ron Rash's writing is gorgeous. Although he emphasizes character, he also gives the reader an intriguing mystery his characters deal with, each with their own baggage.

The last several chapters of AFTER ANNA are so good they're unputdownable. For many book reviewers, that's enough for a five-star rating. But the first half of the book, for me, was frustrating to the point it was sometimes difficult to read. Unless I like a book from beginning to end, it doesn't get five stars.



AFTER ANNA is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Noah and Maggie, a happily married couple, at least â??before Anna.â?



Anna is Maggie's daughter. Maggie hasnâ??t seen Anna since she was a baby, when Maggieâ??s first husband had her declared unfit and moved with Anna to France. Now Annaâ??s father has died, and she is back in Maggieâ??s life. For Maggie, this is wonderful. But for Noah, who was originally happy to have Anna join their family, Anna is not who she seems to Maggie.



Noahâ??s chapters are â??after Anna,â? that is, after Annaâ??s murder. Heâ??s on trial. Maggieâ??s chapters are before Annaâ??s murder. In both cases, the truth of the matter is obvious and, therefore, the first half of the book is frustrating.



But when Maggie travels to Maine with her friend Kathy and her stepson Caleb (yes, Noah's 10-year-old son), the story is no longer predictable and becomes one of Lisaâ??s Scottolineâ??s finest. My only criticism is when Maggie talks like a junior high school girl and introduces Kathy more than once as her "best friend.â?

Of the four Lisa Jewell books I’ve read, THEN SHE WAS GONE may be the best. She calls the story "bizarre," herself.

Laurel and her husband Paul were in their 40s when their daughter Ellie went missing. Ten years later some of her bones are found. So they know she is dead, but for how long? And how did she die? Was she abducted or did she go willingly?

By this time, Laurel and Paul are divorced. Paul has gone on with his life, but Laurel cannot. Then she meets Floyd. As the two spend more and more time together, you should be on alert for too many coincidences. Laurel notices them and, before long, she puts two and two together, to her shock and dismay.

I won’t say more to spoil a good read except to remind you that Jewell calls this story bizarre.

Although one third of all book reviews are fake, i.e., they are written either by people paid to write good book reviews or by friends of the author, this is not one of them. You can believe it: MIRACLE CREEK is probably the best book you will read in a long while.

Although the book flap says that the main characters are a family and a single mother, the book is actually told from the viewpoints of several characters, and I would say that each of them is also a main character.

Simply put, two people die in MIRACLE CREEK, and a single mother is put on trial for the murders. But what really happened?

Several characters have chapters devoted to their viewpoints. Turns out that lies and secrets abound among all of them. There are so many lies and secrets that I sometimes lost track. You may end up thinking the no one person was responsible.

Wilkie Collins was a contemporary of Charles Dickens, they were friends, and I expected something like a Dickens book. But I found Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE to be more in the style of JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS than any of Dickens’ books that I have read. I loved JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS when I was 12 and 13 years old, and now I know that I still would if I read them again. That is to say, I loved THE WOMAN IN WHITE.

This book is considered to be the first detective novel, called “sensation fiction“ at the time. Walter Hartright, the main character, presents both his investigation of the conspiracy crime against Laura Fairlie and testimony of various witnesses. In this way, Collins uses multiple narrators to tell his story.

Fairlie is the young, innocent, and beautiful blond who marries the scoundrel, Sir Percival Glyde, even though she loves Hartright. Glyde and his friend, Count Fosco, scheme to take Fairlie's fortune. Hartright takes the law into his own hands to restore Fairlie’s name even if not her money. Of course, there’s much more depth to the story. But this is the center around which the mysteries revolve.

THE WOMAN IN WHITE is not only plot driven, though. The evil Count Fosco and the brave, intelligent Marian Halcombe are especial evidence of the characterization in this novel.

Remember when Collins described his characters, though, he was writing from the perspective of a male in the 1850s. So when he said, for instance, that Halcombe was masculine, he was probably referring to her qualities of bravery and outspokenness.

Fairlie is a character whose description Collins probably thought was positive. Yet her innocence during the 1850s would be seen as childish today. I thought she seemed stupid as well, frankly. (Other Fairlies are in THE WOMAN IN WHITE, but this review refers only to Laura Fairlie.)

But if you just accept Collins' characters and go with the story as written, with long sentences and too many commas, you'll know why it's a classic and love it as I do.

I dislike science fiction and fantasy. Blake Crouch makes a liar out of me when I say that, though. Case in point: his novel RECURSION. It's science fiction. But once I began reading this book, I never wanted to put it down.

Seeking to help her mother's dementia, Helena invents a technology that lets people preserve their memories. In doing so, she accidentally makes it possible for people to actually go back to reexperience their memories and redo their lives. But what seems like a good thing, she learns, really isn't.

One bad effect of this accidental technology is False Memory Syndrome (FMS). After Barry, a New York City detective, decides to look into FMS, he meets Helena, and together they work to eradicate the technology.

The title of this book is RECURSION because that is exactly what Helena's and Barry's work entails. Again and again and again they return to a memory and relive their lives, hoping they can do it right this time.

The reason I don't like science fiction and fantasy is that I find it just plain ridiculous, usually. But RECURSION and the other Blake Crouch books I read, DARK MATTER and PINES, are intelligent science fiction while also can't-put-it-down books.

If you are the type of reader who quits a book after 50 or 100 pages if it hasn’t grabbed you by then, you might regret this in the case of THE ESCAPE ROOM. It gets better in the second half.

Most other reviews of this book say that it is can’t-put-it-down good. But they aren’t speaking of the first half. If you can wait 150 or so pages, you really will see why they say that.

Sara gets a job in finance on Wall Street. She’s making six figures so doesn’t want to quit even though her coworkers, four of them in particular, are so unfriendly, even nasty.

Sara’s story is in chapters that alternate with those of her four coworkers. Sam, Jules, Sylvie, and Vince are caught in an elevator, which they assume is an “escape room,” their employer’s idea of a training exercise.

Even though the second half of THE ESCAPE ROOM is better than the first half, most readers will find some difficulties in the latter part of the book as well. The most glaring of these is the impossibility of Sara’s revenge.

The highest compliment I can pay a book: I couldn’t put it down; I was up way past my bedtime so I could finish reading it. That’s what happened last night. I just had to finish THE SECOND MOTHER before I could go to sleep.

Like all Jenny Milchman’s novels before, which either take place in or are about someone from Wedeskyull, a small town in the mountains of New York, THE SECOND MOTHER begins there. Julie, a niece of the disgraced ex-chief of the Wedeskyull police, is grieving the death of her baby girl. She wants to get away from Wedeskyull so decides to resume her teaching career on a small island off the coast of Maine. There is where she experiences even greater trouble.

The island is full of secrets and lies. Has Julie become incarcerated in a mental institution?

Disregard a job application that asks marital status and number of children. Accept the unlikely abilities of elementary-school-age children. Go with it. Then you have here a most excellent and suspenseful story.

If you read Fiona Barton’s previous book, THE WIDOW, and wonder, as I did, if THE CHILD is a continuation of that story, it is not. The two books are connected only by the character Kate Waters, a newspaper reporter. And this is the better of the two investigative news stories.

The child in THE CHILD is the skeleton of a baby found buried behind a home being torn down in England. The mystery is: whose baby was it? Kate thinks this is a potentially great story if only she can get to the bottom of it.

THE CHILD is the best kind of story, one that is both character- and plot-driven. Along with Kate, you will learn more and more about the characters and come to a conclusion, finally, with the help of science.

I also like the treatment of age in Barton’s books. If you think about the main characters in most stories, doesn’t it seem that they are usually in their 20s or 30s? It is as if to say that someone older than that is no longer interesting. So I love Kate Waters. She’s my age.

If you liked Ann Rule's true crime books, you will be happy to read A TANGLED WEB, written by Ann's daughter Leslie Rule. This is the true story of a woman obsessed with a man. She met that man on the computer, and she used the computer to feed her obsession.

Shanna “Liz” Golyar and Dave Kroupa met through a computer dating service. Kroupa made it clear that he wanted to stay single and date no one woman exclusively. Golyar seemed to agree. Instead, though, she became obsessed with Kroupa.

When Kroupa met Cari Farver through that same dating service, Golyar made an excuse to interrupt them at Kroupa’s apartment. Shortly after that, Farver went missing. And Kroupa came to hate her as she bombarded him with horrible emails and texts. At least they seemed to be coming from Farver.

Of course, Golyar received similar emails and texts, supposedly from Farver. And she and Kroupa became closer that way. So began the four-years-long harassment, not only of Kroupa but, also, Farver’s mother and other relatives and friends.

Rule lays out all the manipulation, the whole mess, so neatly that it will be hard for you to believe no one figured it out sooner. Why wasn’t it obvious to Kroupa right away? Why didn’t police figure it out when they downloaded Golyar’s cell phone?

This story attracted a lot of attention, including from the “Dateline” TV show on NBC in 2017. You can access it on the computer. But you’ll want to read this much-more-detailed book first.

The best kind of novels are both character-driven and plot-driven, not one or the other. That’s what we get with FORCE OF NATURE. This is a mystery in which we learn a tiny bit more and a tiny bit more as the story is told from various characters’ points of view. FORCE OF NATURE is a literary thriller.

Although FORCE OF NATURE isn’t quite as thrilling as THE DRY, Jane Harper’s first mystery/thriller, it does continue with Aaron Falk, the Australian federal agent who is also a main character in THE DRY. Plus, FORCE OF NATURE, while maybe not just as, is still an unputdownable book.

This story involves a missing-person case in which a woman, Alice, has disappeared from her employer-sponsored hiking/camping trip. Although the federal government would not ordinarily bother with a case at this level, Alice has secretly been providing documents to Falk that he needed for his investigation of her employer. He is concerned that her disappearance had something to do with this.

The more we learn about each character and what she did during their hiking/camping trip, the closer we come to an answer. But it is so convoluted, you will only come close.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is about the silly manners followed by the very rich New York society in the 1870s. While the book is romantic, the romance serves to show the absurdity of the “rules” they lived by.

Newland Archer is a part of this society yet sees the absurdities. But he’s a young man in his 20s and just goes along with it. He becomes engaged to May, a girl from another wealthy New York family. May is an innocent who follows the rules and believes in them. She is not a snob; she knows no other way.

Then Newland meets May’s cousin, Ellen. Ellen disregards many of the rules. And that attracts Newland. He falls in love with her.

Although I’d like to see this movie, a book about romance and wealthy New York society can sometimes bore me nowadays. I found myself rereading paragraphs because I would forget what I read immediately after I read it. My mind wandered while I was reading, not a good sign.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is not what I was expecting. I expected a book about a teenager who committed a mass school shooting. But WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is also about life with an evil child.

This is the mother’s tale told from the beginning—the very beginning—of that child. She writes it as a series of letters to her husband. So, throughout the book, the reader is kept guessing about where her husband is now.

But the mother’s story isn’t just descriptions of life with Kevin. Each of her letters is long on psychology and philosophy, too.

The mother’s big question: whose fault was it? Certainly, the reader has to wonder whether the mother’s own attitude contributed to Kevin’s evil nature. But it seems to me that the father was even more at fault. I think, as a matter of fact, he was a big part of the problem.

And then there’s Celia. She doesn’t appear until later in the book, but she serves to emphasize Kevin’s God-awful evil.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is probably a five-star book. I give it only four stars, though, because the evil is so difficult to read that I had to put the book down often.

THE WOMEN OF THE COPPER COUNTRY is another of Mary Doria Russell’s excellent books of historical fiction. She keeps the story not only engaging but historically accurate, taking into account that a few characters are composites or complete fiction to show more of the nonfiction.

The Copper Country of the book’s title is Calumet, a copper-mining town in Michigan‘s Upper Peninsula. But it isn’t really a town. It is really an area consisting not only of the mines but also 40,000 residents, homes, a fine business district, library, medical facilities, etc. It is owned entirely by the mining company, Calumet & Hecla, the employer of most of the men in Calumet.

During 1913 and 1914, Annie Clements organizes and leads the women of Copper Country whose husbands are members of the Western Federation of Miners union. She was even arrested during one prolonged strike that became violent when C & H sent in their strike breakers. She was also a survivor of a fire in Copper Country that killed 73 people, mostly children.

James MacNaughton is the general manager of C & H. He is so obnoxious and evil he seems to be a fictional character to make Annie and her women seem all the more saintly. But he really was that awful, according to Russell.

Russell introduces us to more characters, of course. In so doing, she shows us several different perspectives on life in Copper Country.

A review cannot do this book justice. Read it. You will learn so much, and you’ll enjoy doing it.

I am anxious to hear Russell speak about this. Some parts of the book seem almost unbelievable, and I’d love to ask her about them.

I had an event with her all arranged at my library. Then the pandemic and the lockdown preempted that. Michigan’s governor has started to open things up but not libraries yet. So we’ll see if and when we can rearrange it. Fingers crossed

I'm sorry I entered and won the contest for FROG MUSIC from bestsellersworld.com. If I hadn't, someone else could have won this book. They might have enjoyed it. I didn't.

Other reviews of this book say it is one woman's investigation of the murder of her friend. I found that is untrue. Blanche, a dancer and whore, did not actively try to solve the mystery of who killed Jenny, the pants-wearing (a crime in 19th century California) woman who ran into Blanch with a "two wheeler," the tall bicycle with the big front wheel. Rather, Blanche figured things out when facts presented themselves.

The good: this is historical fiction and almost all the characters are real. Although their details are fiction because historical records are unclear, they really existed at that time.

The but: too much repetition and too much wordiness. I was bored.

EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN is about bravery. Most of the book takes place in England at the start of World War II and before the United States joins them. Mary wants to join the war effort right away so is assigned teaching duties. Later she joins her friend Hilda as an ambulance driver. London is a dangerous place to live, and they choose to volunteer for even greater danger.

At first I found these chapters to be too young adultish, especially those about Mary's romance with Tom, a school administrator. But the chapters about Tom's roommate, Alistair, after he joins the army are excellent. These kept me going for about 100 pages, until I loved it all. (That is in spite of Mary's strange family. They are very rich. Mary's father never appears. Her mother seems untouched by the war. Neither parent seems to care much about Mary. Sometimes she lives with them, sometimes not. That doesn't seem to concern them, even when she is only 18.)

EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN shows us the hardships of the beginning of World War II not only to the English military but also to English citizens. What a relief it is to them when the US arrives.

THE CAPTIVES is written unlike any book I’ve read before, and I‘m happy that I did.

At first I thought it might bore me because it seemed to contain more rambling than
action. But I came to realize what you should know beforehand: although there isn’t much action in this book, what action there is is important and is dependent on the rambling thoughts of both the psychologist and Miranda. Pay attention. The rambling should give you a clue.

Every other chapter is the psychologist at a women's minimum-security prison who failed at private practice, who seems to have failed at much of what he has ever attempted. Perhaps this is why, when one of his patients at the prison turns out to be a woman he had a crush on in high school, he becomes obsessed with saving her.

In every other chapter are remembrances of that woman, Miranda. She seems to have had a normal childhood until her sister was killed in an auto accident. Little by little, we learn of her bad choices from then on and what she did and what she said and what she really intended.

The end may surprise you but probably shouldn't.

While many people will feel THE EXILES is a five-star book and while I would have felt the same several years ago, my taste has evolved. I didn’t love it. I liked it, but I don’t have the heart to give it just three stars. It was such a nice, if somewhat predictable, story.

After Evangeline’s father dies, she becomes a governess in early 19th-century London. But after she has an affair with the adult son of the household, she ends up pregnant and in Newgate prison. From there, she is shipped with other prisoners to Australia.

On board, Evangeline meets Hazel, a midwife and herbalist. It is Hazel, not Evangeline, who plays the largest part in this story.

But this book is also about a third female, Mathinna. She is an Aboriginal child, taken on a whim to live among white people.

I read that this is to be made into a TV series. It is sure to make great television.

I won this advanced copy through LibraryThing.com.

If a book doesn’t grab you by page 50, you shouldn’t feel bad for abandoning it. But SO BRAVE, YOUNG, AND HANDSOME should grab you right away with Leif Enger's typical writing style. However, I found that this book doesn’t live up to its promise.

Monte Becket is an author. He has written a bestseller, and everyone is anticipating what comes next. But he doesn’t have it in him, whatever “it” is. So he leaves his ever loving wife and child to join his neighbor, Glendon Hale, who is headed for Mexico. Glendon wants to apologize to the wife he left there many years before, and Monte wants to find "it."

What follows are chapter upon chapter upon chapter of unlikely events. This is how Monte gets from here to there, and the heck with his wife and child, who want him home. He ends up in California, where Glendon‘s wife has remarried and settled with her new husband. (It doesn’t spoil the story to tell you that.)

The book bored me to tears. I did not care about any one character. The whole thing is just plain silly. It felt like reading a comic book.

Trivia: Remember Erica Kane’s sister, Silver, on “All My Children”? She was played by Deborah Goodrich Royce, author of FINDING MRS FORD.

Review: FINDING MRS FORD Is about two girls in their 20s, Susan and Annie, who become friends while they both work at a women’s clothing store. Together they leave that job for waitress jobs at a disco, which is where their troubles begin. It is 1979.

Cut to 2014. Susan is living a cushy life in New England, in a very large “cottage," with two little dogs and a housekeeper. Her life is ideal until visitors from the FBI question it.

The first half of FINDING MRS FORD alternates between these two years. In 1979 Susan and Annie become involved with Middle Easterners, and Susan finds she must still deal with them in 2014. Is there no escape?

At the end of the first half, right about the midway point of the book, comes a twist. Everyone loves a book with a twist, and this is the high point of FINDING MRS FORD.

The second half of the book explains what happened between 1979 and 2014. Although one aspect of FINDING MRS FORD seems implausible to me, the twist along with the circumstances in 2014 make for a lot of suspense. No doubt, this book will make you anxious to read Royce's next, coming in 2021.

By the way, the names and places in 1979 suburban Detroit are accurate. I'm just about the same age as Susan and Annie, and I also lived there then. The book even mentions the store across from my high school, the church I attended for 17 years, and the cemetery where my uncle is buried.

Read THE FALLING WOMAN. I enjoyed it, and so should you.

A jet with 123 people on board has experienced turbulence and crashed. Only one person survives, the unknown and unaccounted for ”Falling Woman," who somehow survived the fall of several miles to earth and walked away.

But this book is only partly about her. THE FALLING WOMAN is also about Charlie, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator assigned to find “The Falling Woman.”

"The Falling Woman” is Erin. She is dying of pancreatic cancer and wants the rest of her life to remain private. So she goes into hiding.

We read about Charlie’s frustrations and Erin's misgivings. We follow both their stories and, on the one hand, want Charlie to locate Erin and learn her identity while, on the other hand, we root for Erin and her wish for privacy.

How can both of them get what they want?

I won THE FALLING WOMAN through librarything.com.

Lisa Jewell is one of my go-to authors. In other words, I can trust I will like her books before I even know a thing about them. In the case of WATCHING YOU, though, I was initially afraid I made a mistake, that it was just going to be another MY DARK VANESSA by Kate Elizabeth Russell, a book I did not enjoy.

But I should have known better. Yes, it does involve a handsome, charismatic male teacher. And, yes, there is the suspicion that he preys upon young girls. But this is a murder mystery, a who-done-it.

The story begins before the text begins, with a picture of an actual diary entry of a student who states she is in love with her teacher. Then the text begins with a murder investigation on March 24 and interviews with various suspects/witnesses on March 25. But most of the book is flashback beginning in January.

The flashbacks continue moving forward to March 25. Who had reason to commit the murder? Lots of people. So who did it? It’s possible that you’ll guess it before the end but not likely.

Two of the suspects/witnesses are a crazy lady and a lonely boy, who watched the neighbors the whole time. Thus the comparisons to “Rear Window” (although I would compare it to THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW.) And thus the title.

ROSE MADDER doesn't rate near the top of all the Stephen King books I've read. Only one part near the 300-page mark was quite a page turner, but that tense feeling it elicited didn’t last long enough.

A 32-year-old woman named Rosie (not Rose Madder, a color) has been married for 14 years to an abuser, appropriately named Norman because he's also insane. And he is a police detective.

One day she finally leaves their home in an unnamed state and takes a bus to an unnamed Midwestern state. There she finds help and is beginning to get her new life together.

But crazy Norman uses his police training to look for her. Most of ROSE MADDER is about his search and find and Rosie's response.

Stephen King is normally such a great writer, this book, with its silly boring stretches, surprised me. There is nothing wrong with the premise, but he could have made it so much better!

The parts taken up with Norman's viewpoint (italicized) certainly emphasize his insanity, but they are overly long and repetitive. The rest of ROSE MADDER is better, but too much of it is spent inside a painting. While everyone knows that King can deal well with life inside a painting (or a drain or a hole in the ground, etc.), he doesn't in this case. It is too ridiculous.

ROSE MADDER was published in 1995, but I had never heard of it for more than 10 years. Now I know why.

Although James Herriot was a farm veterinarian in the English countryside and dealt mostly with large animals such as cows and sheep, he also took care of dogs and cats. He wrote a series of books popular the world over about his veterinary experiences with all the various animals he treated. But JAMES HERRIOT’S CAT STORIES is a collection of his touching stories about the cats, exclusively.

This is a small, illustrated book. Each story is a selection from one of his books in the series. I love his series and so, of course, I loved these cat stories. This is another of Herriot’s feel-good books.

After my initial poor reaction to Lisa Regan’s VANISHING GIRLS, I'm pleased to say that it is an excellent mystery. I now recommend it.

When the story opens, Josie Quinn has been suspended from her job as a detective for the Denton, Pennsylvania police force. Yet she involves herself in the cases of some missing girls. This seemed a stretch to me, so I did not have high expectations for the rest of this novel.

But Regan proved me wrong. Quinn finds mystery after mystery after mystery. And the case of the vanishing girls, she finds, is convoluted. Almost no one is who they seem to be, most particularly the police.

VANISHING GIRLS is the first in a series about Quinn. There are more, so you can binge if you have not already done so.

Although I was pretty sure I would disagree with the majority of other readers who said that THE NIGHTINGALE by Kristin Hannah is an excellent book, I can now honestly tell you to believe it. I had read two other books by Hannah and was not impressed, so I doubted that she had it in her to write like this. I was wrong.

This book has been reviewed so much already, it is sufficient to say that it is a piece of historical fiction that highlights the remarkable women of France when the Germans occupied that country during World War II. The story concentrates on two sisters, one based on an actual person, the other based on the lives of many women in France at that time.

So many books have been written about World War II, you may tend to avoid reading more. But this is one you don't want to miss. (less)

What a sweet story! And it’s all true. It wouldn’t be believable if it were fiction.

A recovering heroin addict, James, finds a cat on the streets of London. They become best friends. James names the cat Bob, and they go on to experience together a hand-to-mouth life. A STREET CAT NAMED BOB Is James’ account of those experiences until Bob becomes a famous cat on YouTube.

James says that, because of Bob, he has changed his life around. Bob gave him a purpose and a sense of responsibility.

If you shy away from books about animals because, in the end, they always die, don’t worry. Bob doesn’t die.

Also, if you enjoy movies based on books you have read, you’ll be glad to know that "A Street Cat Named Bob” is now a movie.

I am reading James Herriot's well-known series of books out of order. The five books are about his life as a veterinarian, mostly of large animals such as cows and sheep, in England. EVERY LIVING THING is the last book in the series. I read the third book in the series first and loved it so much that I grabbed EVERY LIVING THING when I found it on the shelf in a used bookstore. This book, too, is wonderful.

Each chapter of the books in this series contains a separate incident, an example from Herriot’s everyday life. Although I do not normally care for books of short stories, in the case of this series, the stories are at least in chronological order and they are so touching they’ll make you wish you could hug Herriot.

The stories in EVERY LIVING THING took place during the 1950s. Happily, by this time, antibiotics and other new drugs were now being produced. So veterinary medicine was more advanced by this time than it was in the earlier books in his series, and Herriot continued to learn. Also, his assistants, new veterinarians just out of college, knew more than he did when he graduated from college, also helpful to his practice.

Although EVERY LIVING THING is the last book in the series, Herriot, thankfully, does not end it with the end of his career. That would have been too sad.

Don’t believe any fewer-than-four-star reviews of THE WITCH ELM by Tana French. It really deserves five stars for its many layers and thoughtfulness. Maybe they just don’t get it.

Toby has always been a lucky guy. Then two burglars break into his apartment, steal a few things, and beat the living daylights out of him. But he lives. So people say he is, again, lucky.

The worst of Toby’s injuries is to his head. Some readers may not realize that his limp and other physical manifestations are results of his head injury. But Toby's messed-up brain is also controlling his memory and language skills.

Because of all this, Toby is having to deal with a new life. His thoughts are constantly going here, then there, then there. Plus the reader can see signs of PTSD all over the place. But he doesn't look as bad as he is.

So this is the Toby who goes with his girlfriend to live with his dying uncle. While they are there, a skull is found inside the trunk of a tree in the garden, and later the police find more. Toby deals with detectives and gradual revelations from his cousins as they insinuate that he might be guilty of murder. He can't remember.

While all French's novels are very good, both in characterization and plot, THE WITCH ELM is one of her better ones. It is full of intelligent introspection, and it takes you places you don't expect.

Although I don’t believe that someone my age should waste her time reading a dull book beyond page 50, I continued reading MOTHER MAY I even though it was still boring me at that point. But sometimes, if you stick with it, books get better. In this case, that turned out to be true around page 90.

An old woman kidnaps Bree’s infant son, motivation unknown. Of course, her husband is out of town and she cannot go to the police. I say “of course” because this is so common in mysteries/thrillers, too common and too convenient (for authors).

Joshilyn Jackson, the author, lets the reader know early on what’s going to happen with two important characters. That is, the mystery is predictable.

As I say, though, the story will grab you beginning somewhere around page 90, if you can wait that long. After Bree tries to follow the kidnapper’s instructions, she finally enlists the help of two people, one a former cop and the other a lawyer. This is when the story gets good, and I applaud Jackson for not doing what too many authors do: insist their main characters keep secrets. (She still doesn’t go to the police, though, but could Jackson have written this book if she did?)

The former cop, Marshall, is (another “of course“) in love with Bree. But he is (of course) a master at finding kidnapper and kidnappee. It still wouldn’t be nice, though, if he took Bree away from her husband, would it? Can you predict what will happen? I could.

The end, too, is convenient and predictable. Jackson could have stopped sooner.

If you haven’t read a Michael Sherer book yet, MISTAKEN IDENTITY would be a good place to start.

This is, essentially, a story of a great chase from Washington DC to Wisconsin. That description, though, it’s quite a simplification of a novel that presents itself from several different points of view, with more than one pursuit to keep track of.

Jenny, a veteran and an FBI agent put on leave for unfair reasons, is temporarily leaving her home in Washington DC for the home where she grew up in Wisconsin. Her father and brothers are all policemen, and her mother and another brother are dead. She has a husband but hasn’t seen him or her family in more than 10 years. You’ll learn snippets of her background throughout the book, but you won’t know her whole story until you get closer to the end.

Then there is Dana. She noticed that someone was stealing money from the charitable foundation she worked for, so she made copies of the files and decided to get out of town with them. This is how Dana and Jenny are on the same train. And this is where the mistaken identity begins.

Dana is a witness to a murder on the train. But the murderer, Sykes, mistakes Jenny for Dana. So, in his attempt to rid himself of the witness, he and his chauffeur chase after Jenny. Eventually, a couple of Russian thugs join the chase.

At the same time, Dana’s former boss,Toby, is after her. We learn more and more about the two of them as the chase continues.

You should know that MISTAKEN IDENTITY is the second book in a series. The first is STOLEN IDENTITY, which you may wish you had read first, although MISTAKEN IDENTITY can easily be read as a standalone.

MY HUSBAND’S WIFE is a difficult book to review because I changed my mind about it so many times. I was bored at first, then it was absorbing, then everything was tied up too neatly.

But one really great thing to say about this story is that you will change your mind over and over about who is good and who is bad. This is what will keep you reading to the end.

First Carla is a nine-year-old and Lily is in her 20s, a newlywed. You will feel sorry for Carla because she is bullied in school. Then you will see how she manipulates the adults around her. In that, she is much like her mother.

Next is Lily the lawyer, who is married to Ed and cannot quite believe how she got so lucky. She is new to the law and allows herself to be taken in by (and taken with) her client, a prisoner arrested for murder.

Carla and her mother live in the same apartment building as Lily and Ed. Every Sunday Carla‘s mother claims to have to go to work when she leaves Carla with Lily and Ed.

Cut to about 12 years later. Carla and her mother have been living in Italy, but Carla has returned to England. She has a plan to find Lily and Ed and hit them up for money. At this point, the book didn’t bore me anymore.

So the lives of four characters, Carla, Lily, Ed, and Lily’s client, who never goes away, are forever intertwined. And the reader won’t be able to decide whether each of them is good or bad as evidence keeps mounting.

I am in a similar dilemma about the book. That is, for the most part, I guess, it’s good but not great.

In preparation for the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit," I read THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT first. But I don’t play chess, don’t even understand the game. And I don’t normally enjoy books involving coming of age. Yet THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT is full of detailed descriptions of games of chess and a chess player growing up and into a chess champion. Even so, I did enjoy it.

Beth is an eight-year-old orphan when she comes upon a janitor quietly playing chess by himself in the basement of the orphanage where she lives. She is intrigued and picks up on the game just by watching him regularly. Eventually, he teaches her more and more, and she finds that she can easily analyze a game in her head and predict another player's moves.

So begins the story of a chess prodigy. After Beth is adopted and her new mother discovers that Beth’s talent can make them money, the two of them travel around the country (at Beth’s expense) to chess tournaments. (And Mom gets 10 percent of the winnings.) She is still a teenager when she is competing, and winning, big-time in spite of drugging and drinking that just about fries her brain before she is even 20.

If you haven’t seen the Netflix series yet, I suggest that you, too, read THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT first.

Don’t get me wrong. ANYWHERE FOR YOU is a book I would have liked very much when I was in eighth or ninth or even tenth grade. But nearly 50 years later my taste has evolved. Now this is not for me.

I won this book through librarything.com, but I don’t think I requested it, at least not deliberately. Sometimes, with my iPhone, I accidentally press buttons that I don’t mean to. That’s what must have happened because I would not deliberately request a romance book, which I think ANYWHERE FOR YOU is. But I’ve won so many great books through librarything.com, I felt I owed it to them to read and review this one, too.

Turns out, this book is a mystery as well as a romance. Mary and Jim have been living together for six years when he suddenly disappears. Why and where did he go? Is he alive? Even after seven years, Mary still hasn’t given up on him. But her friends Alice and Kit believe she deserves an answer so look for him.

If I had been Mary, I would have assumed that Jim had either died or did not love me anymore. But, if I had thought he was alive and still loved me, I would have gone looking for him myself. But, if my friends had looked for him, I could have predicted everything that happened.

Although the romance in this book isn’t for me nowadays, the mystery is. Or, at least, it would have been if it wasn’t so darned predictable. But I give it a thumbs-up because I'm sure this book will generate lots of book club debate/conversation.

A FAINT COLD FEAR is the third book in a series by Karin Slaughter. I, however, read it out of order. And I enjoyed it. That is one of my tests of whether an author is a good writer: can their books in a series also be read and enjoyed as standalones? Slaughter passes my test.

Because I had read the first book in this series, I was already familiar with the main characters: the chief of police in a small town in Georgia; his ex-wife, a doctor; and his former employee who is now in Security for the college in this town. Put simply, college Security, headed by a creepy man, and his new employee, Lena, the former police detective, have called the police to come to the scene of a crime at the college. Someone has either committed suicide or was murdered. Soon other murders occur as well, and the police race to solve these and prevent more.

Jeffrey, the Chief of Police, suspects that Lena knows more than she is saying. Unfortunately, Lena has anger issues and is not forthcoming when police question her. Sara, Jeffrey‘s ex-wife and the medical examiner in town, sometimes acts as a buffer between them. She is seeing Jeffrey again but is not ready to remarry him.

Of course, there are many side stories involving others in town. These add mysteries to the main story.

Although I enjoyed this book as a whole, I did not enjoy Lena‘s anger issues and misbehavior. I hope these do not continue to be a problem later in the series.

Harlan Coben’s books are such a pleasure to read, all of them, including THE BOY FROM THE WOODS. Even better, Coben does not shy away from including characters who are capable, smart, and gutsy senior citizens. This is unlike most other popular fiction, as if anyone over 40 could not be interesting.

No spoilers: the boy from the woods, Wilde, is a grown man now, looking into the disappearance of a teenager at the request of the teenage son of Wilde’s best friend, the now-deceased son of Hester. You’re probably already familiar with Hester if you’ve read any of Coben’s other books, especially those in his Myron Bolitar series. She is the lawyer who has made appearances in Coben’s books for years. In THE BOY FROM THE WOODS, Hester is now a senior citizen and one of the main characters.

As usual in Coben’s books, THE BOY FROM THE WOODS has so much going on. Another teenager, same age, same school, also goes missing. Hester and Wilde both become involved in these cases, which are first one thing, then another, then another. Somehow, a politician who works with the father of one of the missing teenagers is also involved, and that’s another story. There are twists and turns and more to the stories right to the end.

I wonder if I missed something, though: what about the guy in Sing Sing?

THE BOY FROM THE WOODS is a standalone book. I’ve read suggestions that Coben make this the beginning of a new series with Wilde. But it looks to me like Coben made that unlikely. Still, he did leave something about Wilde hanging in the wind. That's not like him.

Of the five Lisa Jewell novels I have read, I think THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS is probably my favorite. Not that it’s a nice story. You could definitely say it is sickening. But it is so absorbing and quite a page turner.

Libby learns that she has inherited a home worth several million dollars. But she also learns, little by little, what went on in that home and who her true family really is.

Libby hears about the rich family—mother, father, son, daughter— who lived there back in the 1980s. And she learns the story about another family who moved into their attic bedrooms— temporarily, they said. But the people upstairs stayed and stayed. Not only did they not leave, the father of the family upstairs, David, took control of the lives of everyone in the house.

So what does this have to do with Libby? Is she the baby left behind? She will discover all this and how she is related to these people.

Rachel Hawkins has written several young adult novels. THE WIFE UPSTAIRS is her first attempt at an adult novel. But I found its reading level to be YA with lots of swearwords and a little sex added to make it adult.

"Jane" has a secret. First of all, that’s not her real name. Little by little as the book goes on, more and more of her secret is divulged.

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to like Jane or if she is a joke. She works as a dog walker in a very swanky neighborhood, where she resents all her clients because they have more than she does. Apparently, she feels that a dog walker should make as much as a business owner. Whatever.

She does manage to snag a man who lives there, though. Little does she know, this is a guy with an even bigger secret, a wife upstairs.

As the book continues, it is sometimes told from Jane‘s perspective and sometimes from the perspective of the wife upstairs. Whenever we hear from Jane, she is usually proclaiming her bitter resentment of everyone who lives in the neighborhood where she has chosen to live herself.

Sometime after Chapter 30, we finally hear from the man with the wife upstairs. And this is the point where the book gets interesting.

Obviously, I am not impressed with THE WIFE UPSTAIRS. It is too full of silly resentment of people who can afford to live in a nice neighborhood. Boo-hoo.

If you heard that this book is modeled after JANE EYRE, forget about it. It’s not even close.

I won this book through bookclubcookbook.com.

I read THE PARIS LIBRARY because it is historical fiction, but I thought it would be written for an adult. It seemed, however, to be a lower reading level, closer to what I would have liked when I was in the eighth or ninth grade.

Some chapters of this book are about 1939 Paris; the other chapters are about 1983 Montana. I found both to be boring.

In 1939 Paris is young Odile, who works at the American Library in Paris. This part is boring mainly because it is so, so slow. We hear about every little bit of her life and are left to wonder, when will something happen, for too long.

The Montana chapters are told from the perspective of Lily, a junior-high-school-age girl, who becomes a friend of her next-door neighbor, Odi?e, now an older woman. These chapters, too, are slow and made me wonder, what is their purpose, for too long.

I cannot recommend this book to most adult readers. However, I do recommend it for some teenagers.

I won this book from Atria Books.

Why don't authors of, especially, historical fiction put their "Notes" before, rather than after, the story? Most seem to follow some rule that author "Notes" go at the end.

WHERE THE LOST WANDER follows that seeming rule. But I learned through experience to check the back of the book for "Notes" so learned right away that two characters in the book really did exist. Knowing this while I read it made the story more interesting.

Most of WHERE THE LOST WANDER is about members of a wagon train headed west for California, told from the viewpoints of Naomi and John. Naomi is traveling with her family and one of the wagons; John, part White, part Indian, did not intend to go all the way to California but changes his mind. Naomi and John take turns telling the story of their trip, incidents that happen along the way. That is until their experiences are no longer with the wagon train.

By the second half of WHERE THE LOST WANDER, Naomi and John have married. One of Naomi's little brothers accidentally kills an Indian. The Indians retaliate by attacking the wagon train and taking Naomi and her newborn baby brother prisoner. Now this book is more than just incidents.

Will John be able to find Naomi? Can they get the baby back?

After reading three undesirable books in a row, I hit gold with Alice LaPlante's TURN OF MIND. It's not a happy book. It may even break your heart. But it's well written, and its subject matter, at least some of it, hit home and should concern anyone who has a mother.

TURN OF MIND is such a unique literary thriller. It is told from the point of view of Dr. Jennifer White, a 64-year-old orthopedic doctor who specialized in hand surgery. White is now unlicensed because she is suffering from dementia. (Sixty-four seems like early onset to me, but what do I know?) Some days are better than others, but it's getting progressively worse, horrifyingly worse.

White's good friend and neighbor, Amanda, has been murdered. Also, for some reason, four of her fingers have been removed in a surgically precise way. Of course, this points to White. But two other members of White's family, her son Mark and daughter Fiona, both adults, also may have had reason to murder Amanda.

Throughout TURN OF MIND, we learn more and more, through White's sporadic remembrances, about Amanda, Mark, and Fiona. Who is guilty of Amanda's murder, and why did they do it? Why were her fingers removed? Does White ever remember?

More than that, the reader sees the story as a dementia victim, one who is getting progressively worse,would see it. White's remembrances are always confused, and she can never articulate them, at least not so they are understandable.

What will become of White?

My only criticism of this book is its lack of quotation marks. There is no good reason for this. LaPlante italicizes when someone other than White is speaking. It was sometimes difficult for me to tell whether White was speaking or thinking. In my opinion, quotation marks add to a book's readability, and it is rude for an author not to use them.

TURN OF MIND is LaPlante's first. She wrote it a few years ago, so you may have already read it. If not, do.

DEAR EDWARD refers to a boy who used to go by “Eddie.” He was Eddie before he was the lone survivor out of 191 passengers on a jet that crashed in Colorado. While he is in the hospital and after he comes to live with his aunt and uncle, he decides to go by ”Edward," instead. The accident is the dividing line: one life before, another after.

Ann Napolitano does a fabulous job describing how Edward deals with his new life. But I don’t think of this as a single story. Rather, this is many stories, all Edward’s.

Most of those stories involve Shay, the girl who lives next door to Edward‘s new home. Shay keeps him sane right from his first night there. And she helps him read and respond to all the letters that the other passengers‘ families send to him (thus the "dear” before “Edward" in the title).

In spite of its sad beginning, DEAR EDWARD turns out to be a story of kindness.

Although Rebecca Serle did not intend IN FIVE YEARS to be a young adult novel, it still has a YA feel to it. The main characters, although adults in their late 20s, early 30s, refer to each other in YA terms (e.g., "best friends,” "besties"), and their circumstances almost always concern their love lives (also very YAish). That may put off some adult readers.

The real problem with this book is what, at first, seems like a good thing because it sparks your interest and draws you in.

Dannie has a dream that seems very real. Probably nothing will come of it, but maybe it was a premonition. So the entire book leads up to that particular day. And for the entire book you will be expecting an explanation of the dream/premonition. If it is a premonition, how and why did it happen?

That, alone, kept me interested in this story. Otherwise, IN FIVE YEARS is just a typical live-with-her-boyfriend-for-five-years-and-look-forward-to-marrying-him YA book. But there is that dream/premonition that sets it apart.

In the end, though, the story is unsatisfying. I still have questions and don’t feel like anything was explained.

If you are familiar with Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series, then you know Lena Adams. She’s a police detective in Grant County. She’s in the small town where she grew up with her blind sister and her addict uncle. This is where most of the story takes place, not Grant County this time.

Jeffery Tolliver, the police chief of Grant County, has come to Lena’s rescue as she sits in a jail cell, suspected of murder. Jeffrey has brought Sarah, his wife, with him. You should also be familiar with these two characters, who have also been part of the Grant County series.

Of course, Jeffrey and Sarah get themselves involved in Lena‘s troubles. They begin with her uncle, who has been trying to clean himself up. But the meth business has been going on for too long in the small Georgia town. And they got him again.

Who has been involved with this awful business, and who is willing to murder to keep it going? Everyone in this town is suspect.

Again, Slaughter has written a thrilling story of secrets and lies and good guys and bad guys. This series is so well written that you’ll even enjoy it if you read it out of order.

I must admit, though, I had a little trouble, at first, understanding that Lena’s chapters occurred before Jeffrey’s and Sarah‘s. Don’t be confused. Lena's chapters explain how she came to be in jail.

Why do all the reviews I’ve read for THE MAIDENS by Alex Michaelides praise this book? I kept reading it after the first 100 pages of boredom only because I did not want to miss whatever won over so many other readers. I have now finished reading it, and I still have not found an answer to my question.

Right from the start the reader is made aware that the main character has decided that Edward Fosca is a murderer. But as I read more and more of the novel, I wasn’t so sure.

Mariana, a widow and a practicing psychotherapist, has a niece, Zoe, she dearly loves who is going to school at Cambridge University. When Zoe calls Mariana because she is distressed that her friend was murdered, Mariana leaves the next day for Cambridge to console her. But her plan to spend just one night there changes when Zoe tells her something that makes her suspect Fosca. Now she has to play Nancy Drew, and one night becomes more.

Another murder, then another occur at Cambridge, and Mariana is equally sure that Fosca is guilty of these. And so the novel continues with her insistence of Fosca’s guilt. She drives people crazy, including the police. But this is not why I disliked the book.

THE MAIDENS is slow, s-o s-l-o-w. Between the few things that happen is so much of Mariana's thinking and remembering and repeating and repeating.

I do applaud Michaelides' insertion of so many other possible murderers into the story. Even though I suspected early on that Fosca was not guilty, several characters seemed like they might be. So I never did decide who the true culprit was until the end of the story.

THE SUSPECT is the third book in a series about journalist Kate Waters. Although all three books are good, this one is certainly Fiona Barton’s best.

Although Kate is English, most of this story takes place in Thailand. Two English girls are there visiting but have not been in touch with their parents. Something must be wrong. Kate goes there to cover the story during the slow month of August. Bob Sparks, an English police detective and another regular in this series, also goes to investigate at the request of one of the girls' mothers. Coincidentally, Kate's oldest son, Jake, has been living there, too.

Turns out, an English boy/young man is accused of murdering the two girls. He is in a Thai prison, and, of course, Kate beats Bob there to interview him. It is at that point in the prison that this story becomes full of twists and turns and some surprises.

I enjoyed this book as I did the two previous books in the series. But I liked this one more partly because Kate steps out of her journalist role here. She’s a mother.

Also, I think you’ll agree with me that the twists and turns are more twisty-turny, the surprises more surprising in THE SUSPECT.