Spring Preview 2015: Part 13

I've had a bout of flu and apologize for the tardiness of these last previews. On Friday, we'll show you covers of interesting-looking books and that will conclude our look at upcoming books for spring.

By 1980, Mickey Spillane had written seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the United States. Spillane introduced his tough-guy New York City detective Mike Hammer in 1947's I, the Jury, with a case involving the murder of Hammer's Marine buddy Jack. Hammer vows to Jack's corpse, "I'm going to get the louse that killed you. He won't sit in the [electric] chair. He won't hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button." After a steamy and sadistic investigation, boy, does Hammer deliver on that pledge.

The last of Spillane's 13 books was published in 1996, when the author was near 80 and the popularity of his fast-paced, sex- and violence-filled series had waned. Black Alley finds Hammer awakening from a coma. All he really wants to do is avenge the death of an old army pal and marry his girl Friday with the "million-dollar legs," Velda Sterling. But he discovers he's mixed up in a search for billions in missing mob money. After Spillane's death, writer Max Allan Collins is continuing the series. He challenges Hammer with a kidnapping case involving a priceless archaeological find and Islamic terrorists and Israeli extremists in The Goliath Bone. Six books later, it's the mid-1950s in Collins's Kill Me, Darling (Titan, March 24). Velda has abandoned Hammer with a one-word note. Hammer responds with a four-month bender. His best friend, NYPD captain Pat Chambers, tells him Velda has been seen running around Miami on the arm of a notorious gangster. Of course, Hammer pulls himself together and hits the road for Florida to rescue his girl. I'm excited about this book because early reviewers say it's superb. It's based on an early unfinished Spillane manuscript and reportedly you can't tell where Spillane's writing ends and where Collins's begins. Publishers Weekly reports, "He even matches Spillane's colorful turns of phrase (e.g., 'My bullet shattered his smile on its way through him and out of the back of his head.')." This looks like a sure bet for Mike Hammer fans.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches for civil rights. It's a great time to begin Greg Iles's trilogy, starting with the Steel Dagger-nominated Natchez Burning (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2014). Dr. Tom Cage, beloved father of Penn Cage, the former Natchez, Mississippi prosecutor and current mayor, has been charged with the murder of Viola Turner. Turner was a terminally ill black woman who worked as Tom's nurse in the 1960s. At her death, she was under Tom's care. Tom refuses to defend himself against these charges and Penn's investigation goes back to the Civil Rights era in Natchez to discover why. It's an ambitious and moving thriller involving complex characters during a time of social upheaval.

The trilogy's second installment, to be published by Morrow on April 21, is another 800 pager. The Bone Tree takes up where Natchez Burning ends. Iles delves into the 1960s history of his hometown of Natchez, linking real and imagined local and world events to his Cage family saga. The first two books have received excellent Goodreads reviews. The final one, Unwritten Laws, is due next spring.

Paul Beatty's The Sellout (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March 3) takes another look at race relations in the United States. It's not a white man's investigation into how past wrongs haunt the present but a satirical look at "post-racial" America with a black narrator from southern California whose last name is Me. We meet Me as he sits in front of the Supreme Court, openly smoking a doobie. He is there because actions he has taken to put his hometown of Dickens, California on the map have violated the 13th and 14th Amendments and the case has gone all the way to the country's highest court.

After Me's father, a psychologist, was murdered by the police, embarrassed people refuse to admit the town exists and it is literally taken off the map. Me and the town's best-known citizen, former Little Rascals star Hominy Jenkins, begin a campaign to make the town incapable of being ignored. Farm land is turned over to marijuana. Me enslaves Jenkins (at Jenkins' request). Dickens adopts "the Lost City of White Male Privilege" as a sister town and re-segregates its local schools so only minority students can attend.

That's the plot, but as the Boston Globe puts it, it's only "gloriously skeletal, sometimes misplaced and forgotten, and often there so that Beatty (and his narrator) have an excuse to riff on the things that matter most to them: race, politics, music, television, Los Angeles." The buzz about this novel, Beatty's fourth, calls it a comic masterpiece.

The moon explodes to begin a book Kirkus Reviews calls "[w]ise, witty, utterly well-crafted science fiction," Neal Stephenson's Seveneves (William Morrow, May 19). Nobody knows what caused the moon to self-destruct so Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D. springs into action. "Doob" (I hope his mom calls him "Doobie") and his fellow scientists figure the debris will eventually form rings around Earth like Saturn's but "hard rain" will in the meantime destroy the planet's living creatures. The International Space Station can house some Earthlings but obviously there isn't room for many. At the book's halfway point, it's 5,000 years later. Then, Stephenson takes us into deep space with seven human races, descended from the seven fertile women who survived the end of life on Earth.

Neal Stephenson blends history of science, sociology, math, cryptography, and technology into twisting and turning, dark-humored post-cyberpunk fiction. His books feature large casts of characters and elaborate multiple plot lines. If writers Tom Robbins, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson merged, Stephenson might be the result. Some of his best-known novels include Reamde (see here), Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and the multi-volume Baroque Cycle (see here). It's a body of thought-provoking books and I strongly recommend reading them.

I'm neither Roman Catholic nor a biblical scholar so I'm not the person to analyze religious-based criticism of Ian Caldwell's The Fifth Gospel (Simon & Schuster, March 3). I'm a fan of suspense and looking forward to reading the book that follows The Rule of Four by Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. That 2004 book centers around a long-lost diary that may be the key to a Renaissance text called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Its discovery poses danger to two Princeton friends, Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris. It reads as a hybrid of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Since collaborating on The Rule of Four with Ian Caldwell, his best friend since childhood, Dustin Thomason wrote the thriller 12.21, based on the doomsday prediction of the ancient Mayan calendar. With The Fifth Gospel, Caldwell creates a thriller featuring a married Greek Catholic priest, Alex Andreou, and his brother, Simon Andreou, a Roman Catholic priest and diplomat. It's set within and around the Vatican and involves a controversial museum exhibit about the Shroud of Turin. Publishers Weekly describes it as "another superior religious thriller, notable for its existential and spiritual profundity.... An intelligent and deeply contemplative writing style, along with more than a few bombshell plot twists, set this one above the pack, but it’s the insightful character development that makes this redemptive story so moving."

Boston Strong––In Mysteries Too

We don't flatter ourselves that we can express anything new or particularly insightful about Monday's bombing at the Boston Marathon and its aftermath. Like everyone, though, we have Bostonians very much on our minds and believe in the sentiments of the city's new slogan: Boston Strong. Of course, our thoughts always eventually turn to crime fiction, so we thought we'd write about a small selection of Boston-related mysteries.

Among all the great crime fiction set in Boston, it's hard to pick one or two. I'll start with Robert B. Parker's Spenser, a tough private eye with a heart of gold in the mold of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Spenser is as synonymous with Boston as baked beans and Harvard Square.

Mortal Stakes is the third book in this series. Spenser hasn't settled into the character he becomes over Parker's 35 years of writing; however, we see the personal code of ethics, the wisecracks, and the plotting that made Parker's early books so fresh and entertaining. Here, Spenser is hired to investigate Marty Rabb, the ace Red Sox pitcher who is married to a former call girl and is suspected of throwing games, but this book is more about loyalty and justice than it is about baseball. The action builds to a tremendous climax that has a lasting impact on Spenser.

We'll now leave the hardboiled Boston of Mortal Stakes for the bizarre Boston of Russell H. Greenan's 1968 book, It Happened in Boston? If you read my review of Greenan's The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, you already know that Greenan writes highly original suspense, featuring black comedy, eccentric characters, and very odd—albeit fascinating—philosophical ideas. He's a master at creating logically complex worlds, often set in Boston, where Greenan has lived since the 1950s. (At one time, he owned a Harvard Square bookstore named The Cat and Racquet, after the story by Honoré de Balzac, and he mines this experience and his knowledge of Boston for his books.) His poor characters don't deserve what's coming to them, but there's nothing a reader can do other than to watch, cringe, and laugh.

In this particular book, our narrator—an extremely talented and paranoid artist—wishes to meet God and hold Him accountable for the world's evil. Not for everyone; however, definitely for readers who enjoy dark humor coupled with wordplay and imaginative, complex murder mysteries.

Speaking of imaginative stories Georgette, right now I'm listening to Neal Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle. Book One, Quicksilver, begins in Boston, as Enoch Root arrives from England to ask scientist (or, as then called, "natural philosopher") Daniel Waterhouse to return to England to try to make peace between his old friends, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.

The book leaves Boston for England in short order, but lingers long enough for us to take a ferry trip across the Charles and meet some scholars from Harvard, who don't have very complimentary things to say about their rivals from that upstart, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of the Technologickal [sic] Arts. Stephenson impressively entertains, while pouring out huge beakers full of information about science and the history of science.

If you're in the mood for Neal Stephenson, but maybe something shorter than the Baroque Cycle (three volumes of eight books), and with a lot more Boston in it, try his second novel, Zodiac. Zodiac is a thriller about Sangamon Taylor's battle against companies polluting Boston Harbor.

"S.T.," as he's called, isn't above a few shenanigans in his battle, like stopping up pipes pouring effluent into the harbor, and the notoriety his antics gains him also makes him a target for a classic fit-up job. S.T. needs to scramble out of sight so that he can clear himself and get the goods on the bad guys. Zodiac is told in the first person, which gives us the full benefit of S.T.'s wisecracks and caustic sarcasm.


Boredom is impossible when you're reading a thriller featuring Boston Police Detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles. In Vanish, Tess Gerritsen's fifth series book, they tackle a case concerning the sex trafficking of young immigrant women. The subject matter brings to mind Stieg Larsson, but this book is much faster paced.

Vanish opens with the account of such a woman before we join Maura in the morgue, where we're startled to find an unidentified woman's corpse is still breathing. The woman is rushed to the hospital, and shortly thereafter, all hell breaks loose. Nine-months-pregnant Jane Rizzoli is taken hostage and her husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, becomes involved. It's a suspenseful and thought-provoking book with feisty female protagonists and it's perfect when you're too antsy to settle down with just anything to read.

Some summers ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a few days in Boston. I brought along a book to read that was based in Boston. It was Matthew Simon's The Chosen Few, which introduced me to ex-policeman, now PI, Max Lovely, as well as to the flavor of several different Boston neighborhoods.

This week, it seemed appropriate to reacquaint my self with the area, and I turned to another Max Lovely case, as chronicled in That's What Little Boys Are Made Of. Max is called into an elite private high school in the Back Bay, after a member of the student body dies unexpectedly of an overdose at a party. The headmistress, Mrs. Penrose, is not convinced that this was an accident––despite the fact that Will "Stoner" Stoneham was known to all his friends as a habitual user of all kinds of drugs and alcohol, and was frequently to be found passed out at parties. Mrs. Penrose had seen Stoner in a furious and secretive confab with another boy, who was not a friend of his, just days before his death.

Beacon Hill

Max Lovely and his associate, Eliot, begin an investigation that leads them to all parts of the city. They pass through many of the well-known areas, such as Beacon Hill where Oliver Wendell Holmes had a domicile. Another place they visit is Mount Vernon Street, which the novelist Henry James named the "only respectable street in America." Lovely must find a trail that connects one kid to another in order to make any sense of the case, but days pass, and before he can make the critical connection, another boy is dead and Max is the one in the crosshairs.

John Quincy Adams Projects

Laced with dollops of Boston history, the story and the trail lead through Roxbury to the John Quincy Adams Projects, and the reader gets a vivid idea about the different facets of Boston society. I was fascinated to read that the Boston area's first European settler was the Reverend William Blackstone, who came with 2000 books and a Brahman bull. When the next group of colonists followed, he left the area––perched on his bull.

Don't jump to conclusion that the term "Boston Brahmin" arises from the tale of Blackstone's decampment. It was coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the Supreme Court Justice) to describe the region's upper crust. In India, a Brahmin is "a member of the highest or priestly caste among the Hindus," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. By applying the term to his native Boston, Holmes was describing a more secular, but equally powerful, group.

The story has a dark subject matter that might bother some readers. In the end, drugs, kids and death is an appalling triad, but for me, the trip through Boston made the read worthwhile.

Mount Vernon Street

The news this past week has been horrible. The bombings in Boston and ricin-laced letters sent to politicians, the intransigence of some of our elected representatives who vetoed the explicit wishes of the voters who elected them, the massive industrial explosion in Texas and even nature's springtime revels, a/ka/ the flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest; the hits just keep coming. With the rest of the country, we at Read Me Deadly grieve for these victims and their families.

My own usual response to disaster is cowardice. Heading for the hall closet to whimper in peace, stiff drink in hand, I was astonished find it already occupied. "Hi," I said uncertainly. "Who are you?"

"Get in," she hissed. "And shut the door!" As I hastily obeyed, I glanced up. A few dusty and forgotten novels of the late Boston author Charlotte MacLeod, whose farcical and convoluted mysteries are lovingly set in and around that city, lay on the shelf.

In the author's The Silver Ghost, Back-Bay Brahmin Bostonian Sarah Kelling and her art detective husband, Max Bittersohn, are attending Nehemiah ("Call me Bill") and Abigail Billingsgate's Renaissance Revel. While ostensibly just guests, they are actually working undercover to try to recover their host's antique Phantom Rolls Royce, stolen from his very secure climate-controlled garage.

Upper-crust guests at the annual event (costume required) quaff mead made from the homegrown honey produced by thousands of happy bees from Abigail's apiary. When a second antique vehicle goes missing and one of the servants is found slathered in honey and stung to death, Max steps out of character as Shylock and gets to work. As is usual in MacLeod's work, the characters are charming and the ludicrous situations they find themselves in irresistible. I will savor this welcome and affectionate taste of Boston very slowly this weekend.

This is not the first time the streets of Boston have been stained with the blood of the innocent––nor I fear, the last. But out of one such incident arose something entirely new under the sun: a nation ruled not by a king or military cabal, but by rule of law established of the people, by the people and for the people. Boston may be down right now (in fact, as I write this on Friday morning, the entire city in in lockdown) but it is not, now or ever, out. Its world-renowned Marathon will be run again, with more runners and spectators than ever. We are America, and that's how we respond to terrorism.

Boston's unofficial anthem, the Standells' "Dirty Water":

Beach Reads from the Material Witnesses

Happy Independence Day, everyone! It's the day we celebrate the founding of our country, but let's face it: July 4th is also the unofficial kickoff of real summer. (Despite the fact that the nation's average temperature the last week of June was already about a thousand degrees.) Summer makes some people think about barbecues, baseball and swimsuits. We think about those things, too, but most of all we think about summer reading.

Reading at the beach is one of the best treats I give myself. If I have plenty of time––which happens on those occasions when I am lucky enough to be staying by the ocean––what I enjoy most is a longer story that can really take me away. The moronic part of this is that I already am where I want to be; go figure. But a book like Amagansett, by Mark Mills, takes me away in time and place, but still keeps me by an ocean.

Eastern Long Island in 1947 is that distant location. It begins one fine day in July. Conrad Labarde, a Basque fisherman, and his partner, Rollo, are hauling in their net along the beach, but the familiar twitch of the line is absent. And where are the pulls and tugs against the twine, or a flicker of a surface break? They both know that they have an inert load beneath the pewter skin of the sea, and there is nothing else to do but bring it in. It is what they hoped it wasn't: a corpse; a dead woman, still beautiful, but sea-washed and deceptively peaceful looking.

The setting for this mystery is the south fork of Long Island at Amagansett, near East Hampton and not far from the easternmost part of New York, Montauk Point.

The power of this story comes from the depths of the characters and their backgrounds. Conrad Labarde, who served in an elite unit during World War II, impressed me but, like most veterans of that conflict, he never spoke of his wartime experiences––except for one time. He said war showed that you aren't one thing or another, but all things at the same time; i.e., brave, cowardly, and selfless, but also cruel, compassionate and heartless. The only question is, which bit of you would show up next?

Right Whale

This book brought back memories of my own of a visit to Montauk Point with friends in the early '60s, and watching the breakers of the Atlantic crash on the shore as we looked out from what seemed like land's end. Mills also uses the language of the sea beautifully, and it was like a foreign, but lyrical, language to me as he spoke of longshore sets turning and right whales bound east'rd inside the bar. I loved it.

Most of the time I am not alone at the beach, and I have to pull my nose out of my reading to be social. On these occasions, the best read is my trusty Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I received the new issue of the latter a few days ago in the mail. It includes short stories by Martin Limón and Georgette Heyer, two of my favorite authors. Heyer's story is a classic called "Night at the Inn." I can't wait to read these.

This year, for the first time ever, I don't plan to take a suitcase full of books to the beach or on trips. Instead, I will plastic-bag my e-reader and take an entire library! My favorite beach reads are usually light. Sun, surf, and beachcombing don't mix well with 800-page tomes that require much concentration. I fall asleep! A recent email from a favorite mid-list publisher listing summer price reductions and first-in-series freebies introduced me to several interesting, new-to-me detectives who seem like ideal company for long, lazy afternoons dabbling my feet in the surf.

Sister MM first introduced me to Kerry Greenwood's sophisticated flapper Phryne Fisher awhile ago, but I hadn't had a chance to follow up on the acquaintance until now. I have downloaded several books in that series, as well as three of another of Greenwood's series featuring Corinna Chapman, a contemporary accountant-turned-baker in Melbourne, Australia. That should keep me in cozies––and in Australia for awhile. It's the only way I'll get there, at least this year!

In the line of things I'd rather read about than do, a starred review in Publishers Weekly compared John R. Corrigan's Bad Lie to "Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis at their best." When the father of the protegé of PGA pro and sleuth, Jack Austin, is brutally murdered, Austin jeopardizes his career to find the killer in this fair-play noir mystery. Hmm, if it's half as good as Francis, I'll enjoy it.

Chris Cleave's Gold was released July 3, and features cyclists in this summer's Olympics in London. Very timely. Then I'll need one good long meaty book to dip in and out of for continuity. Revolutionary history is an interest, so I may try David A. Clary's Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship the Saved the Revolution. The story is told largely in letters between the two, and reading other peoples' mail sounds just right for a bit of summer snooping.

It's still up in the air, though. Any recommendations?

Not too many classic British mysteries would be considered beach reads, but I just read one: Michael Gilbert's Anything For a Quiet Life. Successful, middle-aged solicitor, Jonas Pickett, decides he's saved enough money from his north London practice to support him for the rest of his life, and that qualifies him for semi-retirement somewhere more relaxing. He takes himself off to Shackleford, a quiet beach town not far from Brighton, and sets up a practice that he hopes will only be successful enough to keep him from getting bored.

Picket has his acerbic secretary, Claire, his super-competent but somewhat contrary partner, Mrs. Mountjoy, and his general factotum (and occasional bodyguard) Sam, all of whom sometimes seem to be conspiring to turn the new practice into a full-time job. So what makes this a beach read? Well, it's set at the seaside, for one thing. Better yet, it's a collection of nine interconnected stories, each of which can be read in about the time one's attention span usually lasts when reading on the beach. Michael Gilbert's dry humor is in good supply, the stories are entertaining and not too mentally taxing, the good guys are vindicated and the bad guys vanquished. What's not to like?

I know some people like to take a big brick of a book on vacation and chip away at it day by day. I've got one of those to recommend too, this one in the thriller genre. It's Neal Stephenson's Reamde. Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, Islamic terrorists and bears (oh my!) are just a few of the perils facing Zula Forthrast in this hyper-modern version of The Wizard of Oz. Well, that is, it's a version of The Wizard of Oz if you go along for the ride with a Dorothy (Zula) who is an Eritrean orphan refugee adopted and raised by an Iowa farm family, a Wicked Witch who is a black, Welsh, university-educated Islamic terrorist named Abdullah Jones, and a set of Dorothy sidekicks that includes a couple of Chinese 20-somethings, a huge and hairy Hungarian computer whiz and a retired Russian soldier-turned-"security expert."

Throw in a massive multiplayer online game called T'Rain, various methods of computer and internet wizardry, agents from MI-6, survivalists, a lot of extremely violent action sequences, and locations ranging from Xiamen (China), Iowa, Seattle, British Columbia, the Philippines, and London, and you've got a ride like a beachfront roller coaster.

Could it have been shorter? Definitely. Just for starters, I could have lived without a level of detail so extreme that it includes a discussion of the psychological implications involved in whether a secondary character adjusts his car seat. And it's not as if the book is nearly as impressive as Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle, or has the kind of grand themes they have.

Yet, amidst all the shoot-'em-up action, there is a deeper meaning. It's in the way so many people care enough about others to risk their lives to help a young woman whom many of them had never previously met, and to defeat the murderous plans of nihilistically brutal terrorists. But even if you take it as just a nonstop action/adventure with a large cast of eccentric, but engaging, characters, and go along for the ride, it's a whole lot of fun.

Note: Versions of my reviews appear on the Amazon product page under my Amazon user name.

Pismo Beach, California

Reading at the beach is routine for me, because I live on California's Central Coast, minutes away from several beaches. Even so, any time I can read with the crash of waves in my ears and the grit of sand between my toes is a pleasure.

Parallel Stories, written by Péter Nádas and translated into English from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein, is my suggestion to people who relax with Proust or Thomas Mann, but who also love crime fiction. At 1150 pages, it's definitely literary fiction you can sink your teeth into. It opens in Berlin when the Wall is cracking. A body, half-buried in the snow, is found. The protagonists are three men who served as Communist spies in the West; their stories parallel and link to each other from the spring of 1939 to 1989. I'm reading it now and enjoying it very much.

If you liked Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall, you should take the 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, and stuff it in with your beach blanket and sunscreen. It's Cromwell's take (fictionalized, of course) on Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII. Not a happy ending for poor Anne, but a great read.

Peregrine falcons nest on Morro Rock so no climbing is allowed

Like rollicking tales of adventure while you're basking in the sun? Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road features the Frankish apothecary Zelikman, a "fair-haired scarecrow from some fogbound land," and Amram, an Abyssinian ex-soldier, whose air of stillness "trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road." In A.D. 950, Zelikman and Amram escort a prince of the Khazar Empire over the Silk Route to Atil to reclaim his throne. These characters are straight outta central casting for the Arabian Nights, and their tale is sheer entertainment. Perfect for reading aloud.

Elephant seals in Morro Bay

I've found that summer books can be particularly relaxing if I read in unexpected directions; say, a sure-fire air conditioner such as Ice Run, by Steve Hamilton. It's set in frigid mid-winter in Paradise, Michigan, but ex-cop Alex McKnight's heart isn't feeling the chill. He has fallen in love with Canadian cop Natalie Reynaud, and this will cause him a world of trouble. Or, whisk from the beach to barmy horror like Jeffrey E. Barlough's Dark Sleeper, a Dickensian tale set during the Second Ice Age in the port city of Salthead, which is very much like Victorian London if you include mastodons and saber-toothed cats. It is the home of metaphysician Titus Vespasianus Tiggs and his associate, Dr. Daniel Dampe, who operate like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. They're needed on a case of spectral images haunting Salthead's residents––a headless drowned sailor, a ghost ship, and a rabid mastiff. Or, from the sanity of your blanket on the sand, question your ideas about identity and paranoia with David Czuchlewski's The Muse Asylum. Andrew Wallace and The Manhattan Ledger's Jake Burnett are former Princeton classmates once tied by their interest in the same woman. Now Jake tries to track down the reclusive author Horace Jacob Little, while his old classmate Andrew, confined to a psychiatric facility, writes confessions about his own interactions with Little.

I should reserve a spot in my beach bag for Mark Mills's Amagansett. I bet my husband and I would both like it. Space limitations mean we often share books while on summer vacation. Our last shared saga was 950+ pages: John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun. (Yes, the indie filmmaker also writes good books. His first, Pride of the Bimbos, is about a traveling circus baseball team that plays in drag and stars a midget. Believe it.) A Moment in the Sun is set shortly before the end of the 1800s and reminded me of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime in the mix of real and fictional characters, the scope of its story, themes and connections between seemingly disparate characters. Reamde sounds like another big feast we'd enjoy.

In August, we're going to the lake. I want to take a genre bender, Quantum Thief by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi. Publishers Weekly says that "Rajaniemi melds a caper novel, New Wave aesthetics, and theoretical physics into a stellar debut. Broken out of a quantum prison in which he'd been forced to play endless games of prisoner's dilemma, often against himself, master thief Jean le Flambeur is forced to take a job working for the mysterious and beautiful Mieli. They travel to Oubliette, a moving city on Mars where time and memory are quantifiable and transferrable goods, and privacy is paramount." Whew. I like traveling to other places from my beach towel and Mars would be a trip.

My husband's choice for our August vacation? Adam Brent Houghtaling's This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music. It's due to be published on August 7. It's a comprehensive tour through sad music of all kinds. Doesn't that sound like fun? As an antidote I'm going to pack our most cheerful CDs.

I'm copying a page from Sister Mary's playbook and taking some classic English mysteries. If they're set at the seashore or the characters are on vacation, that's a plus. One example I've already read is P. M. Hubbard's High Tide. It features a man, Curtis, just released from prison where he was serving a sentence for manslaughter. Curtis is taking a trip when he's waylaid and asked about his victim's last words. He doesn't remember then, but later he does. They were: "High tide at ___." Curtis wonders if this means something that may be to his advantage, so he investigates––and so, unfortunately, do some villains. Beautiful coastal cliffs of Devon setting. Hubbard writes books that stick in the mind like sand in your wet swimming suit.

Another classic English mystery for vacation reading is Suicide Excepted, by Cyril Hare. Every year, an elderly Englishman makes the same trek that ends in the same room in the same hotel. One year, his vacation ends with his death in the same hotel bed. The police and coroner rule it a suicide. His children initiate their own amateur investigation when the insurance company refuses to pay on his policy. A drunken private eye and Inspector Mallett are also on hand. Like all of Hare's books, it's a little dry but very wonderful––like a martini.

I've taken P. G. Wodehouse to the lake in the past, and enjoyed the company of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster by the water. Robert Barnard and Carl Hiaasen are good, too. I like reading James Swain books about gambling during the day. His Mr. Lucky is Ricky Smith, who wins half a million at a casino in Las Vegas, scratches a winning lottery card, successfully bets long shots in a horse race at Belmont Park, and wins a vacation when ping pong balls are drawn out of a hat at a local celebration. The Las Vegas casino finds it impossible to believe in luck of this magnitude and hires Tony Valentine, an expert at detecting gambling fraud, to investigate. It's unfortunate that Valentine can't improve my poker when we play with friends in the cabin at night. You could call me Ms. Unlucky with a deck of cards.

Have you ever struck it lucky with some books you've taken to the beach? If so, we're all eyes and ears.