Fall Preview 2014: Part Five

It's been so warm I can barely remember what it's like to put on a sweater. I'm looking forward to the day my lemon cookie needs a hot tea rather than an iced tea accompaniment. Then I'll pick up my tea, a cookie, and one of these books, and head for the comfy chair.

I have a bone to pick with Random House, American publisher of English novelist David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. Why do we get the kinda boring cover at the right, while the Brits get Sceptre's feast-for-the-eyes cover below?

The Bone Clocks has already been long-listed for the Booker Prize, but it must dog paddle across the Atlantic before arriving on our shores next Tuesday, September 2nd. It is apparently very ambitious and the "most Cloud Atlas-y" novel Mitchell has written in the last 10 years. Publishers Weekly's starred review even asks, "Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque?" Yikes! Sometimes "ambitious" seems to be code for "You're going to have to force yourself to finish it so you can discuss it around the water cooler," but Mitchell's books are invariably interesting even if somewhat maddening.

Like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is long (640 pages), with six overlapping narratives. The story is told by five narrators, including Holly Sykes, whom we first meet as a feisty 15-year-old girl running away from home in Gravesend, England, in 1984. Holly isn't a typical teenager. She has heard voices she dubbed "the Radio People," and she's somehow become involved in a spiritual war between these "soul-decanting" Radio People and the "Horologists" of the Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, who are trying to stop them. This is a genre-straddling novel of sci fi/horror/fantasy/realism about free will and destiny. By the time it winds down, we've observed Holly for 60 years.

It's been a few years since I read Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist (see review here). I'm pleased to see the next one in the series, For the Dead (Soho Crime), will be out on November 4th. These books feature American writer Poke Rafferty, his Thai wife, Rose, and their adopted-off-the-streets daughter, Miaow, now in junior high.

Life is going well for the Raffertys, and they are preparing to welcome another member into their family. Then Miaow and her boyfriend, Andrew, buy a stolen iPhone and discover it contains pictures of two disgraced and murdered police officers. This discovery jeopardizes the lives of the entire family, since the Bangkok police investigation of the officers' deaths is not on the up-and-up. For their safety, the Rafferty family may need to depend on someone who has betrayed them in the past. The warmth of feeling between these characters and Hallinan's plotting, witty descriptions, and knowledge of Bangkok make this an unusual and appealing series.

Don't you love it when you unexpectedly come across something new by a writer whose previous book you enjoyed? Anybody who has ever been involved with house-sitting would appreciate the surrealistic Care of Wooden Floors, by journalist Will Wiles, in which our narrator, a nameless British copywriter, house-sits a gorgeous apartment for old friend Oskar, a somewhat obsessional classical musician. Oskar has notes for Nameless everywhere, but there are three major rules: don't play around with the piano, take good care of the two cats, and don't let anything happen to the French oak floors. Do I need to tell you Nameless breaks all three rules in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way? Then things really spiral out of control.

That book is Kafkaesque, and so is Wiles's next, The Way Inn (Harper Perennial, September 16, 2014). Neil Double would have flummoxed everyone on the old TV series What's My Line?. He's a conference surrogate, hired to attend a business conference so someone else won't have to. Wearing a cheap suit, staying in an anonymous hotel room (his favorite hotel brand-name is the Way Inn), listening to boring speakers, and eating tasteless food suits Double's personality and life philosophy just fine, until he makes the mistake of mentioning his occupation to Tom Graham at a Meetex conference about––wait for it––conferences. Graham works for Meetex, and he takes great umbrage about Double's doubling in for the legitimate conference attendee. Double's life assumes the quality of a nightmare. There is no guarantee the answer to his problems is the mysterious Dee, a woman who hints to him about strange secrets in the Way Inn.

It's hard to think of a crime-fiction writer more versatile than Donald E. Westlake. He wrote under his own name and several pseudonyms, and his series protagonists ranged from the comic, unlucky crook Dortmunder to Parker, a cold-hearted and violent professional thief. Westlake also wrote screenplays, such as Payback and The Stepfather. When he died at age 75 in 2008, Westlake had won lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the British Crime Writers Association. And he was still going to his office, where he typed all his manuscripts on his manual typewriter.

As a Westlake fan, I cannot wait to read The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, edited by Levi Stahl, with a foreword by Lawrence Block (University of Chicago, September 24, 2014). This is a compilation of material, such as previously published and unpublished essays, pieces from an unpublished autobiography, a history of private-eye fiction, letters, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, some recipes concocted by his characters, an essay by his wife Abby, and more. Westlake was insightful and funny. Even people who have never read his fiction would likely enjoy this book.

Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Coffee House, distributed by Consortium; September 1, 2014) won the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It's McBride's first novel, and it looks like a doozy. It's about a nameless girl, born into a poor, rural Irish family with an older brother she adores, a very abusive Catholic mother, and an absent father. The brother's operation for a brain tumor leaves him with physical and mental deficits and also deeply affects his family.

We follow the girl through her childhood to college, and there are upsetting aspects involving sexuality. She narrates the whole 227 pages in an Irish lilt, in what is less a stream of consciousness than an interior monologue with ungrammatical sentence fragments or a word or two. Most punctuation, except for periods, is missing. Reviewers say the effect is thoughts too inarticulate or rapid for complete sentences. Here's an example:

Suddenly. She's all here mother. She. With scalding prayers. Forgotten her old lash phone calls. Am I not here? I. Give me a good punch on my face. Stop. It's fine now. It's fine now isn't that why you came? To pick up. Bits and pieces. Let her do her thing. Name of the father but shhh. Lead us not into temptation. That's right. All very well. I. So I won't utter a single. No. I will. Do this. I will do this for you because. I can."

This book is definitely not for everyone, but it sounds like an unforgettable read.

Turn up the reggae music and light one up if you've got one, because I'm going to tell you about Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Hardcover, October 2, 2014). It's a 560-page epic, set primarily in Jamaica, as well as in New York, covering several decades of violence, poverty, and corruption. Although Bob Marley isn't mentioned by name, one can assume he's "the singer" whose attempted assassination in December 1976 is prompted by a political rivalry. Marley, his wife, and his manager are lucky to escape, and the wounded singer goes into exile in England. The novel's headcount and dozen narrative voices (Marley's isn't one of them) are hardly affected.

The major characters are low-level thugs and big baddies, such as hit man John-John K and Copenhagen City gang kingpins Papa-Lo and Josey Wales; politicians from the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP); CIA agents worried about the spread of communism; journalists, including one from Rolling Stone; and Nina Burgess, whom PW calls "undoubtedly one of this year's great characters." Nina begins as a Kingston receptionist, sheds one identity after another, has an affair with the singer, and ends up in New York before the book ends.

Mathematicians work their tails off on problems that have stumped their predecessors for centuries, and what happens when they solve them? An outer-space alien from Vonnadoria kills Andrew Martin of Cambridge after Martin solves the Riemann Hypothesis, and then the alien takes Martin's place so all evidence the Hypothesis was ever solved can be obliterated (Matt Haig's The Humans).

In Stuart Rojstaczer's The Mathematician's Shiva (Penguin, September 2, 2014), Rachela Karnokovitch, a brilliant mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, reportedly solves the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, but then dies of cancer and takes its solution to her grave. Her meteorologist son, Sasha, hopes to bury her with dignity; however, dozens of mathematical geniuses arrive in Madison, and, instead of sitting shiva with the family, do everything they can think of to discover Rachela's secrets, such as ripping up floorboards and holding a séance. Excerpts from Rachela's memoir of fleeing Poland as a child during WWII are shown in flashback.

Author Rojstaczer is a former professor of geophysics at Duke, and his book looks like a lot of fun, even for those of us who started formulating excuses for missing homework as soon as our math teachers assigned those terrifying problems with the two trains leaving the station at different times and traveling at different velocities. PW calls Rojstaczer's book "hugely entertaining."

Have you read Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games? It's an epic centering around two men: Inspector Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikhs on the Mumbai police force, and his pursuit of the Indian gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. This 928-page doorstopper even has a glossary of Mumbai slang in the back. It's a great read, and I've been looking forward to reading whatever else Chandra might write.

Finally, here it is. Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press, September 2, 2014) is "part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir" of traveling from India to the United States and of working as a programmer before becoming a writer. Chandra explores the connections between the worlds of technology and art, and the cultures of code writers and artists. This is a must read for me.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at more books Sister Mary is putting on her list for fall.

And the Nominees Are . . . .

It's awards season, and I've got awards on the brain. The Golden Globes, honoring movies, were awarded last Sunday. The nominees for this year's Edgar Awards will be announced by the Mystery Writers of America sometime around Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, January 19th. If I could, I'd nominate some of these book characters for an award:

Most people are content to leave grave digging to the professionals, but sometimes fate intervenes. For best do-it-yourself burial: Jason Getty, in Jamie Mason's debut, Three Graves Full (Gallery Books, 2013). Although you could say the man was asking for it, Jason didn't mean to kill him. No matter, now Jason has little choice but to bury him on his property. Preparing the burial site and wrestling the corpse into it are comically macabre—entertaining for the reader, but not for poor Jason. His nightmares are only beginning, because one of his landscapers uncovers a body—just not the one Jason planted. This brings the police, who unearth yet another body—again, not Jason's. Then the police promise to bring over a dog in a few days, and a woman searching for her fiancé shows up. Jason is also in the running for best portrayal of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

They're a closeknit duo: Marnie and her "wee bit touched" younger sister, Nelly, who live on the Hazlehurst housing estate in Glasgow, Scotland. Marnie begins The Death of Bees, by Lisa O'Donnell (Harper, 2013), with these words: "Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." In fact, Izzy and Gene were much more into booze and drugs than they were parenting their kids. Now, as Marnie says, at least she and Nelly know where they are. In one year, Marnie will be of legal age to care for herself and Nelly. In the meantime, to keep out of the authorities' clutches, all they have to do is lie. They face questions by Lennie, the kind old man who lives next door; their friends; Gene's drug dealer; and the authorities. It's a coming-of-age tale that's narrated by eccentric characters Marnie, Nelly, and Lennie, and it's both funny and moving. Marnie and Nelly could join Jason in his nominated category, but let's nominate them instead for best navigation of a sticky situation.

Let's look at a nominee for best at being royally screwed. Lynn Coady's Gordon Rankin ("Rank") is a gentle, sensitive giant, who has used his hulking size to advantage as a goon and brutal hockey enforcer. In college, Rank poured out his soul to geeky Adam, who has now turned around and used what Rank told him to write a satirical novel based on Rank's life, featuring "a dangerously unbalanced thug with an innate criminality." The angry Rank spends three months writing unanswered emails to Adam in The Antagonist (Knopf, 2013), an original epistolary novel that examines a male friendship. Like Caroline Graham's excellent novel featuring a writing circle, Written in Blood, The Antagonist also weighs who owns a life—a writer or the man his character is based on.

If Irwin Dressler says to Junior Bender, "You're working for me," then that's what Junior will do—if he knows what's good for him. Despite his old age, Los Angeles gangster Dressler is still feared. Junior is a professional burglar who occasionally does private investigations for fellow crooks. The case in The Fame Thief, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Press, 2013), involves former starlet Dolores La Marr. Dolores was once called the most beautiful woman in the world, but her career stalled in 1950 when she was arrested after partying with gangsters in Las Vegas. While others arrested went free, Dolores was forced to testify before the Senate subcommittee on organized crime. At one time, Dressler was the power behind Hollywood studios, and now he wants to know who set up Dolores and ruined her career. So Junior digs. We'll nominate Junior, who's clever and always pushing the envelope, for best at getting out from under. It's the third book in this witty, character-driven series, and it's a pleasure to hang out with Junior and revisit the Hollywood Dolores knew.

Kathleen Kent's The Outcasts (Little, Brown & Co., 2013), is set in 1870s Texas, but it's not a simple western. It's historical fiction, an adventure, a treasure hunt, a chase, and a lot of fun. It features a lawman with a pure heart and a woman without one. We meet conniving Lucinda Carter as she flees a Fort Worth brothel, bound for Middle Bayou, Texas, where Lafitte's gold is supposedly buried. She has arranged the cover of a teaching job in order to await her lover's arrival. While Lucinda makes nice with the folks there, brand-new lawman Nate Cannon tracks down two experienced Texas Rangers, Capt. George Deerling and Dr. Tom Goddard, to notify them that their old nemesis, William McGill, has killed again. The lawmen, noses to the ground, give chase. The two story threads meet in Middle Bayou with a bang, but this tale is neither predictable nor sentimental. Let's nominate Lucinda and Nate for those we'd most like to see in a Sam Peckinpah movie.

We'll keep a lookout for the Edgar nominees this weekend. Now I need to saddle up and git to work.

Review of Timothy Hallinan's Little Elvises

Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan

Don't get me wrong. I'm an Elvis fan; a big fan, even though I'm not one of those people who make pilgrimages to Elvis's old stomping grounds at Graceland, or have an Elvis shrine in the bedroom. I love his movies (my fav is Jailhouse Rock), and there's nothing I enjoy more than crooning "Love Me Tender" or belting out "It's Now or Never" in the shower. So when I spied a book titled Little Elvises by one of my go-to authors, Timothy Hallinan, I was on it like a flea on a hound dog.

When the book begins, Los Angeles cop Paul DiGaudio is in an interrogation room stuffing his face with Halloween-size Tootsie Rolls, while he tells crook/narrator Junior Bender he knows Junior didn't commit the Hammer job. That job was a robbery in which the elderly Mrs. Hammer was pistol-whipped. Junior has an alibi and, besides, he's smart enough not to pack a weapon when he burgles, so he can avoid a robbery-under-special-circumstances charge. Junior's innocence doesn't matter to Paulie. Paulie is aware that Junior is a crimebuster for people "on the other side of the fence." (If you don't already know this, you can read Georgette Spelvin's review of the first Junior Bender book, Crashed, here.) Paulie's Uncle Vinnie is a suspect in the killing of Derek Bigelow, the kind of journalist who writes for The National Snoop, and Paulie is going to force Junior to help Vincent L. DiGaudio prove his innocence.

We've all noticed how American pop culture makes copies of anything original that makes money. Rina, Junior's 13-year-old daughter, wrote a school paper focusing on Philadelphia's Little Elvises, "who were churned to the surface in the wake of Elvis Presley." A few of them, such as Bobby Angel, could sing. None were as hard on the ears as Giorgio, yet he was so beautiful he was popular up until his disappearance in 1963. The man behind all the copycat singers with pompadours and tight pants who appeared on American Dance Hall and sold many records for a month was Paulie's Uncle Vinnie. This isn't good for Junior. The job Paulie wants him to do not only involves murder, it may involve the Mob.

Reading about crime is well and good, but when vivid writing makes laughs snort out of your nose, that's even better. It's one of the reasons I like Timothy Hallinan. Let's put Uncle Vinnie on the back burner while I show you Marge 'n' Ed's North Pole, a seedy motel at the north end of North Hollywood. Junior is divorced and he moves around a lot to thwart fellow criminals with a beef against him. This month's motel is a fantastic pick because no one would think Junior could sink so low. It's always Christmas at the North Pole and Junior is in Blitzen, where the cord to the blinkie-lights is glued to the outlet and "for good elves only" is engraved on the table. The carpet had been "a snowy white fifteen or twenty years ago, but was now the precise color of guilt, a brownish gray like a dusty spiderweb, interrupted here and there by horrific blotches of darkness, as though aliens with pitch in their veins had bled out on it."

There is no more 'n' Ed but there is a Marge, who has a cigarette screwed into a corner of her mouth and an economy-size jug of Old Igor's Private Stock vodka glued to one of her hands. She is smart enough to recognize that Junior, while not checking into the North Pole with a body in the trunk of his car, is not entirely law abiding. He's a mensch who might be able to find her daughter Doris. Marge hasn't heard from Doris in a few weeks, and what she saw when she stopped by the rented dump where Doris had been living with Mr. Pinkie Ring scared her.

Junior now has two detective job offers he can't refuse and he sets to work. Assisting him are his precocious daughter, Rina, Paulie and criminal pal Louie the Lost. They and the characters at the opposite end of the magnifying glass are so colorful they could stock a box of human Crayolas. For example, there's Popsie, the woman who answers Vinnie's door, with calves so muscled they look like "they'd evolved to hold the planet still while she walked." Vinnie's hair is dyed "a dead black that ate light without reflecting any" and he has a little soul patch that "clung uncertainly to his lower lip, like a misplaced comma." There's a neighbor who's "eighty, eighty-five, and so wrinkled it looked like he had enough skin for three people" and his hair is as "white as processed flour." There are people trying to stop Junior's investigation and a hired killer is so unusual and brilliantly drawn my stomach trembled. Somewhere in between Junior's friends, enemies and suspects is Bigelow's non-grieving widow Ronnie, who has lapis blue eyes and baby-fine blond hair twisted into a rope and held in place on top of her head by an inserted fork. She has a thing for bad men.

At its heart, Little Elvises isn't a purely comic novel, even though there are many funny touches and scenes that made me laugh. It's full of characters wounded by loss and bad luck. Musicians make music despite drug habits and poverty. Junior misses his daughter Rina and, during his investigation, he meets abandoned women who make him feel guilty about the divorce from his wife Kathy, whose current relationship with a hunter named Bill gives Junior little mental flare-ups of homicidal rage. At the same time, it's impossible to imagine Junior living the crime-free life that Kathy wants because he's not only good at being a crook, he gets off on it too.

I liked Hallinan's unusual protagonist, Junior. Being unconstrained by the law sure comes in handy for investigating crimes and dealing with criminals. I enjoyed Hallinan's riffs on the themes of love in its many guises, how the still waters of society and individuals run deep, the meaning of prejudice and the price of fame and survival. Hallinan obviously loves music and knows Los Angeles well enough to give us a criminal's-eye view of the city and its nearby desert. Sometimes I wondered if one of the two threads of Junior's investigations was about to get lost while he messed around, but that not only didn't happen, the suspense rose to a terrific finish. There are few better ways of spending a lazy evening than hanging out with resourceful Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender.

Note: Thanks to Read Me Deadly reader Bonnie Riley, who pointed out this book to me. I received an advance review copy of Little Elvises, published earlier this year by Soho Press.

Book Review of Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist

The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan

Trouble is Poke Rafferty's expertise. Before he arrived in Thailand, he had written two off-the-beaten-path travel books, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines and Looking for Trouble in Indonesia. But Poke doesn't need to look for trouble in Bangkok. It has no trouble finding him. In Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist, trouble runs him down outside a Bangkok paint store.

Poke's wife Rose, a beautiful former Patpong dancer, and their adopted 12-year-old daughter Miaow have left Bangkok to visit Rose's family. While they're gone, Poke is going to paint their apartment. Apricot Cream for Rose; Urban Decay for Miaow. He is walking out of the store carrying the paint when some pedestrians run past. A "once-tough" American or German man in his sixties knocks him down. Poke hears noises like the cracks of a bat hitting a ball. Before they can stand up, the man whispers three words and dies. Almost instantly, policemen and a TV crew appear. The police hustle Poke away. The blood is just a nosebleed, they say. The man will be fine. Right.

Poke is interrogated by a suspicious Major Shen of Thai security, who alludes to Poke's past brushes with trouble. Shen demands to know Poke's relationship with the man outside the paint store and what he heard. Poke remembers that it was a woman's name and a city, but he can't recall it exactly. After Shen reluctantly releases him, Poke kicks in a door to see his observers behind the surveillance mirror and discovers a familiar American Secret Service agent, Richard Elson, who looks frightened. Poke doesn't recognize the older American in the room, "a ball of fat topped by a thatch of unruly reddish-gray hair that's been slapped any old way on top of a fat red face.... Protruding from each nostril is a tuft of red hair so substantial that Rafferty imagines himself grabbing them in his fists and chinning himself on them." It's Haskell Murphy, formerly associated with the infamous Phoenix Program, designed to fight terror with terror in Vietnam. In no way is he a good man for Poke to cross.

In predominantly Muslim southern Thailand, Buddhists are being beheaded, run over, and bombed on a weekly basis. The response of the government to this terror and the riots it has spawned has been as ineffective as its muddled and contradictory response to Thailand's worst monsoon season in 60 years. In fact, the weather is the perfect metaphor for Poke's situation: if the city drowns, or if Poke is killed by the Americans or the Thais, it's just collateral damage. Poke needs to run.

Poke looks for help from a colorful assortment of characters that includes his 17-year-old half-sister Ming Li; Arthit, a Thai cop and Poke's best friend; Dr. Ratt, who runs a mobile clinic of doctor-nurse teams in Toyota Corollas; and an unreliable former Russian agent named Vladimir, whose voice is "liquid and heavy and saturated with melancholy," as he fondly recalls a CIA friend of Poke's, "I try to kill him many, many time." Vladimir is not sanguine about Poke's chances. If a snake tells Poke he's a horse, Poke will probably look for a saddle, Vladimir scolds.

When Poke arrived in Bangkok, it was "just one jaw-dropper after another."

But Poke is less naïve than Vladimir thinks. Poke has spent years in the company of powerless people who do what they say they do, but he recognizes the evil that happens in the dark, when the rich and powerful's acts don't match their words. The danger of the "Age of the Spook" is a theme of The Fear Artist, as well as the responsibility a parent has to a child and how that parent shapes a child. Various parent/child relationships are examined: the longing Poke has for the absent Miaow, who's going through a normal phase of rebellion; the unsettling attention Murphy bestows on his troubled 12-year-old daughter Treasure; the skills Poke's father Frank, who once worked for a Chinese Triad, taught Ming Li; the conflicted relationship Poke has with Frank; and the formality of the love between Miaow's best friend Andrew and his Vietnamese diplomat father. Children and women––young, blind, deaf, working the sex trade or addicted to drugs––are shown as both vulnerable and resourceful.

Timothy Hallinan

Like writers Colin Cotterill and John Burdett, Hallinan sets his series in an exotic foreign location and then writes with insight, style, and wit. Hallinan has a gift for creating memorable characters, a turn of phrase, dialogue, and descriptions that merit re-reading. (Faces in a dark bar patronized by spies are "pasteurized by the gloom," and "the bartender lifts his chin in a silent query, as though the sound of his voice is classified.") There are some disturbing scenes of torture appropriate to the plot. Suspense builds to a clever ending.

The Fear Artist is the fifth book in the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated Poke Rafferty series. It's not necessary to read previous books before reading this one, because author Hallinan divulges enough to bring a reader up to speed without ruining earlier plots. That said, you'll probably want to read the others; the first is 2007's A Nail through the Heart. Simply put, this is a first-rate series, and The Fear Artist is a superlative read.

Note: I received a free digital copy of Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist. It was published in July 2012 by Soho Crime.

Best Books of 2011

I read very few books hot off the presses, since I like to keep the best of what I read, so I wait for the trade paperback in most cases. With these, I can store more for future rereading. So my best reads for 2011 include only a rare 2011 publication. I have not separated books into mystery and nonmystery, because great books transcend genre. These are the books that hit the target:

The best I read: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

I started 2011 out in a good way when I read this book a year ago. The medical background of the book interested me, but I really was drawn in by the history of Ethiopia and I was even compelled to add to my knowledge of the geography and history of the area. I picked up Evelyn Waugh's Waugh in Abyssinia. I also read Verghese's book The Tennis Partner and highly recommend it.

Every Bitter Thing, by Leighton Gage, was another of my favorites. Mario Silva is at his best in this mystery. The title of the book is taken from the Bible: "To the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet" (Proverbs 27:7). There are bitter and sweet throughout this book: in the descriptions of Brazil, in the solving of the crime, as well as in the feelings one has when the last phrase is reached.

The book that swept me off my feet: In All My Sad Dreaming by John Caulfield.

This is a mystery set in Cape Town, South Africa, during a violent modern era. Captain James Black is a member of the Police Service and part of the serious violence unit. He is just leaving the hospital after having been there for a considerable time suffering from two gunshot wounds. The story is filled with musical references that go back to the '70s. The prose itself is musical in many ways. There is a tone of foreboding overlying In All My Sad Dreaming that reminds me of Alan Paton.

The best new-to-me series that I began in 2011: Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series, which begins with A Nail Through the Heart.

This series takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, and introduces us to a fine cast of characters who are making a life that is intended to obliterate all the poverty and evils of their past lives. At the end of the story, I felt I had a nail through my heart.

And coming in second is The Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. This book has some subtle, sly digs that perhaps take an adult to appreciate.

The book that best tickled my funny bone was Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel. This book has some broad, sometimes crude, humor but it was laugh-out-loud time for most of the story. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid came in second and I found Simon Brett’s Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter hilarious.

My favorite character was Walt Longmire in the Craig Johnson series. I really looked forward to reading Junkyard Dogs and I was not disappointed.

The book I most looked forward to reading in 2011 and the only book I bought before the printing press cooled was Chris Grabenstein’s Rolling Thunder. You just can’t beat John Ceepak and his partner Danny Boyle for a solid mystery with a soupçon of humor.

The best book I read that I chose by its cover was The Definition of Wind by Ellen Block. It was a perfect summer read.

The best book I finally read years after publication: Beau Geste by P.C. Wren.

The book that took me the longest to read was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

The book that stirred me the most was Bamboo and Blood by James Church. At a time when we are celebrating holidays characterized by plenty of food I think of this book and the people in this country, North Korea, who treat each other to a cup of hot water––which they serve cold, because they have no fuel.

This is the third in the Inspector O series, but it is a prequel beginning in the winter of 1997. North Korea is in the midst of a famine that is devastating the country. The very young and the very old are dying and only people of strong will are likely to survive until the spring. The country is hiding its desperation from the rest of the world, so it is a great surprise to Inspector O when he is asked to play host to an Israeli agent who is able to come and go seemingly at will into society. Beautifully written by an author using a pen name, James Church is the pseudonym of a former member of a western intelligence organization.

The book that awakened my righteous spirit the most was Desert Wives by Betty Webb. The book begins: "What do you call a dead, sixty-eight-year-old polygamist? In the case of my thirteen-year-old client, you call him your fiancée."

The book that surprised me the most was one that seemed to land on my door by itself, and I loved it: The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras by J. Michael Orenduff. I immediately put all of his books on my wish list. The main character makes a living in the Southwest by finding native American pots that are salable. Hubert is a likeable protagonist who lives on huevos rancheros and margaritas and is studying Pythagoras in order to figure out how the ancient potters could manage to space 17 design elements evenly around a pot. This pot thief studies Ptolemy and other great scientists, so you can always brush up a bit on your science when reading Orenduff.

Since 2012 promises to be an excellent reading year, I am always on the look out for the special books. I would rather hear your opinions than look at any best-seller list. The date of publication is of no interest to me, because my feeling is that just because something is new that doesn't make it better!

Pass Me the Good Books and Mashed Potatoes, Please

My kitchen desk is a cascade of notes written with ever-increasing numbers of exclamation marks and capital letters. The notes reflect this week's chaos as my family counts down the minutes to our Thanksgiving trip to Grandma and Grandpa's house. My husband's parents live in Florida and it seems odd to me to visit them at this time of year. For me, fall is fires in the fireplace, piles of leaves to shuffle through, the honking of wild geese as they fly south and seeing my breath when I go outside. More than those things, however, the holiday of Thanksgiving is a time for being grateful, sharing with others and getting together with family and friends. Today, let's look briefly at books that examine ties that bind families and friends within the context of their larger societies.

From the first sentence in Assassins of Athens ("Andreas Kaldis once read or heard somewhere that the chatter never stopped in Athens."), we're taken into the mysterious social network of powerful old families and their influential friends who control Greece. The body of a teenage boy from a wealthy Athens family is discovered in a dumpster behind a nightclub. The investigations of homicide detective Kaldis take him to the heights of Athens society as well as its shadowy underworld and he finds friends in unlikely places. This is the second of an outstanding three-book series set in Greece written by Jeffrey Siger. It's even more fun if you've begun with Murder on Mykonos, although it isn't necessary. 

American writer Poke Rafferty has married his Rose. The "they-lived-happily-ever-after" ending for them and their adopted daughter, Miaow, whom Poke saved from life on the streets, is threatened by the appearance of a very bad man from Rose's past as a Patpong bar dancer, in Timothy Hallinan's The Queen of Patpong. This is a sumptuous literary thriller and the fourth book in a series set in Bangkok, Thailand. You don't have to read the series in order, but you'll deny yourself a treat if you don't. The first book is A Nail Through the Heart, in which we meet these characters and learn about Thailand through Poke's eyes.

When the eccentrically groomed and dressed Lucy Bellringer walks into the office of Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, he is reminded of a beautiful but tattered old bird of prey. Miss Bellringer insists that the death of her dear friend, retired school teacher Emily Simpson, could not result from natural causes and she's right. Barnaby and his sidekick, Sergeant Troy, put their noses to the trail and discover the relationships and events that led to this homicide. The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham is the first book in a well-written traditional English mystery/police procedural series and is a fine book to read in a chair by the fire.

Eliot Pattison is a wonderful writer with three mystery/historical fiction series, all of which provide good reading. In the first Duncan McCallum book, Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America, McCallum's friend Adam Munroe is one victim in a series of killings onboard the Ramsey Company ship transporting indentured prisoners to colonial America. Because of his medical training, McCallum is asked to examine the evidence, but the crimes remain unsolved when the ship reaches America. McCallum's efforts continue against the background of the French and Indian War. This is a masterful book that depicts the struggles of individuals and conflicting cultures in the New World.

Gabriel Du Pré is of Métis ancestry (Cree, French and English) and he works as a Montana cattle brand inspector in a series written by Peter Bowen. In Coyote Wind, the first book of the series, Du Pré assumes the sheriff's role when the sheriff is shot in a case involving a long-ago homicide. This book is enjoyable due to Bowen's unforgettable characters and his knowledge of Cree culture and rural Montana. Du Pré is a warm and honorable man who doesn't break stride dealing with his lover and his two daughters, each more than a handful. Compared to Du Pré's friends and family, dealing with criminals is easy.

Helen Simonson's 2010 debut, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, is not a mystery but it is such a good book I'll mention it anyway. I read it at the suggestion of Sister Mary Murderous. When Major Ernest Pettigrew's younger brother dies, the 68-year-old Major develops a friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani shopkeeper. Their small English village, Edgecombe St. Mary, buzzes at the unsuitability of this relationship between two widowed citizens. The Major and Mrs. Ali are dignified, insightful, and completely endearing as they interact with their problematic families, the villagers and each other. I'd like to meet them in person, but meeting them on the page was a joy, in part because they both love books and have interesting things to say about them.

American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea Saénz  has been termed "sweet noir" by some of its readers. Mario Alvarez, an unemployed English teacher, arrives at the rundown Hotel California in La Paz, Bolivia, with a roundtrip airline ticket to the US, furnished by his adult son, who lives in Miami. Unfortunately, Alvarez has no visa and it's clear it won't be easy to get one. Fortunately, Alvarez is familiar with the enterprising characters of noir fiction so maybe that visa won't be impossible to obtain after all. I'm reading this book now and enjoying it very much. This is a creative writer who is new to me and I hope to find his other books available in English.

It's always a pleasure to share good books with family members and friends who love to read. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, do you have a book you could share?