Summer Preview 2014: Part Fourteen

Summer reading has to compete with so many other activities, like travel, ritual events such as graduations, wedding, beach trips and, perhaps, baseball games. So I am always on the lookout for the sure-thing read. Usually this boils down to the latest offering in a series by a favorite author. There is no shortage of those.

Last year, a new author, Robert Galbraith, had his real identity revealed to be the famous J. K. Rowling. (By a loosed-lipped and soon-to-be heavily-fined lawyer in her solicitors' office.) After all that brouhaha following the publication of The Cuckoo's Calling, Rowling is still using the pseudonym in her second crime fiction novel in the Cormoran Strike series, The Silkworm (Mulholland Books, June 24, 2014).

After a somewhat desultory start to his career in private detection, which eventually leads to a smashing victory, Cormoran Strike settles into a lifestyle a few steps up from the hand-to-mouth existence of his past. His assistant Robin Ellacott has also gotten more comfortable in her new position; comfortable enough to cut some of the strings that were tying her down. These two become a dynamic duo, of sorts.

Calling at Strike's office is an aggravated wife, who says that her husband has gone missing––again. She is Mrs. Quine, and while she believes that her husband is simply on one of his usual walk-abouts, she wants him back. The missing man is a well-known novelist who takes full advantage of his artistic temperament to be self-indulgent where his family is concerned.

Strike begins the investigation and he soon realizes that there is more to Owen Quine's disappearance than is obvious to his wife. It appears that the author has just completed a manuscript that is full of rockets aimed at almost everyone he knows. These poison-dipped barbs may be considered lethal to many of the people in his crosshairs. It is easy for Strike to surmise that there are several individuals who wouldn't mind silencing the writer. When Quine is finally found, it is as a brutally murdered corpse. Cormoran Strike has a military background and he has seen many horrible things, but this bizarre killer is unlike anything Strike has encountered and the race is on to catch him.

It is always fun to read stories about writers, by writers, and The Silkworm promises to be a nice second entry in the Galbraith series.

There is another not-quite-as-dynamic duo, the inimitable Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury and his sidekick Sgt. Wiggins, handkerchief in hand and throat lozenges at the ready, who are making their 23rd outing in Vertigo 42 (Scribner, June 3, 2014), by Martha Grimes.

Vertigo 42 is a fancy bar on the 42nd floor of an office building in London's financial district. Tom Williamson is meeting Jury here to convince him that his wife, Tess, was murdered 17 years ago. The police at the time felt that Tess fell down a steep flight of stairs at her country house, precipitated by a dizzy spell. They also had no problem considering as a mere coincidence the death of a nine-year-old girl who fell into an empty pool of the same house five years before. The fact that the girl died at a party Tess was giving had little bearing on Tess's fatality, they concluded.

And talking about coincidences, consider this––one night when Jury and his buddies are dining in a pub in Devon, a woman falls to her death from a nearby tower. At the same time, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night.

Commander Brian Macalvie, a colleague and friend of Jury's whom he first met while investigating the murder of three children in Help the Poor Struggler (series book No. 6), gets in on the action, and you can count on him to stir things up with his fiery temper. The entire gang of Melrose Plant and his Jack and Hammer associates also put in some appearances to move the story along with a few twists and turns along the way.

I am going to save The Bone Seeker (Viking Adult, July 24, 2014) by M. J. McGrath for a scorcher of a day in July, because this is a mystery set in the Canadian Arctic on Ellesmere Island.

Edie Kiglatuk falls into the category of feisty female protagonist. Half Inuit and half outsider, Edie, a former polar bear hunter, has been earning her living as a guide, but in the warmer weather she works as a summer school teacher.

When one of her students is found dead in a nearby lake, Edie promises the Inuit family that she can help ferret out the cause of the death, and convinces Sergeant Derek Palliser to pursue the case. There had to be a reason for the dead girl's presence at the lake, and local lawyer Sonia Gutierrez thinks she might know what it is.

These are the days of the midnight sun and that gives this trio 24 hours a day to unearth secrets long frozen over.

Even though the subject matter of Ace Atkins' The Forsaken (Putnam Adult, July 24, 2014) is something I will no doubt find disturbing, I admire this series, which features Quinn Colson, an army ranger who has returned home from Afghanistan and who finds a new career as a law enforcement agent in rural Northeast Mississippi. The first two books in the series, The Ranger and The Lost Ones, were both finalists for the Edgar Award for Best Novel.

Now County Sheriff, Colson finds himself dealing with the cold case of a lynching, which happened decades before. A not-unfamiliar story is the tale of a homeless black man who came to Jericho just in time to be accused of a rape and murder, and then suffer the effects of mob rule. A gang hunted him down and lynched him, a fate not uncommon at that time in the deep South.

When new evidence is found that suggests this unfortunate man was indeed innocent, Colson resolves to find those responsible for the lynching. What he isn't suspecting, though, is how far some people will go to keep dirty secrets from seeing the light. The table is turned in a Mark Fuhrman-like scenario from the O. J. Simpson trial. Colson finds himself accused of horrible crimes, smeared with just enough mud to stick.

This is the kind of story that may make me resort to some antacids, an extra blood pressure pill and some Xanax. But what else can you expect from a hero who some compare to Jack Reacher, and others to as written by Elmore Leonard? It surely will shake up the summertime doldrums.

I always enjoy reading the first in the series, and for this summer's reading a good choice promises to be Sarah Hilary's Someone Else's Skin (Penguin Books/Penguin Group (USA), June 24, 2014), which introduces Detective Inspector Marnie Rome.

I am not sure what intrigues me about people with place names like football player Joe Montana, singer John Denver or fictional Alex Delaware, but it seems as if these names confer a special aura. Certainly Marnie Rome is an unusual character. She battled her demons to recover from the murder of both parents, but she keeps secret most things about her past. It remains to be seen whether these secrets will keep her safe or destroy her.

So far, she is on the fast track in the police department. She is very good at her job, is considered dependable by her peers and she is fierce when going after the lawless. One fine day, Marnie and Detective Sergeant Noah Jake visit a women's shelter to interview one of the women living there, and find instead a man lying on the floor, stabbed. The stabbing victim turns out to be the husband of one of the shelter's residents. Question number one: What was he doing there, considering this is a refuge for abused women? Question number two: Is anybody here telling the truth?

Stories about domestic abuse are never pretty, and this story about the darker side of human nature is sometimes hard to take, but Marnie provides enough excitement to keep the plot moving along with some unexpected twists and nice surprises. Happy reading!

Summer Preview 2014: Part Thirteen

Summer seems to demand an assortment of books, because good weather opens up many places and times to read. I don't want the same book for reading on the porch in the evening that I want when I'm broiling on a beach towel. When I'm on the train, my book isn't the one I read in snatches on a camping trip. As fall approaches, I want to be ready with a book that makes me think. Publishers understand all this, and there's a terrific variety of books coming in the next few months. Here are some that caught my eye:

Wow, props to the cover artist of Megan Abbott's The Fever (Little, Brown and Co./Hachette, June 17, 2014), although cover and title alone don't earn the reviews praising its slow-burning fuse or explain the long queue already waiting for this book at my library. The Edgar and Barry Awards-winning Abbott must have been a hyperaware teenager, because her depiction of competitive high school cheerleaders in 2012's Dare Me is uncanny.

In her new suspense novel, The Fever, Abbott returns to teenage drama and its unsettling blend of vulnerability and emerging maturity at suburban Dryden High, where Deenie Nash, Lise Daniels, and Gabby Bishop are the "Trio Grande" of popular girls. Deenie is close to her dad, Tom, a teacher, and her older brother, Eli, a hockey-team standout. Tom and Eli are as nonplussed as everyone else when Lise's seizure during class is the first in a series that spreads mysteriously among the girls at Dryden. Is it a virus, mass hysteria, a bad vaccine? As rumor and contagion crank up tension at school and in town, Deenie tries to figure it out.

Best-selling Canadian writer Linwood Barclay gives us another thriller to read this summer. His No Safe House (New American Library Hardcover, August 5, 2014) revisits the Archer family seven years after the events of No Time for Goodbye. In this 2008 book, it is 25 years after troubled 14-year-old Cynthia Bigge woke up to discover her father, mother, and brother have vanished. Cynthia survived that and is settled down. She's happily married to Terry Archer and is the mother of a young daughter, Grace, when suddenly, the past threatens the family's survival.

It's not necessary to read No Time for Goodbye to enjoy No Safe House. Terry and Cynthia are still married, although living apart. Fourteen-year-old Grace is rebellious. When she does something dumb, Grace unwittingly opens the door for a lethal nightmare to walk in––and for us to enjoy Barclay's corkscrewing thriller, which places an ordinary family once again in an extraordinary predicament.

Dan Fesperman is well-known for his award-winning nonseries espionage books (see Stephanie DePue's guest review of his The Double Game) and his Vlado Petric series, about a police investigator in war-torn Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Knopf is publishing a nonseries book, Unmanned, on August 12th. I couldn't find any early reviews, but I'd say the book looks promising based on my previous reading experience, Fesperman's reputation, and the timeliness of its plot. Darwin Cole lives and drinks in a trailer in the Nevada desert. He has plenty of time to contemplate his career as an American F-16 fighter pilot, particularly a drone he was "piloting" when he saw a little Afghan girl fleeing on the drone's display screen. Power and money are at play in the military-industrial complex, and Darwin knows he's pinning a bull's-eye on his back when he teams up with three journalists to discover the identity of the anonymous intelligence operative behind that drone mission.

A year and a half ago, Dennis Lehane's beloved beagle, Tessa, was in the news. She was microchipped but not wearing her tags when she jumped the fence on Christmas. Despite Lehane's campaign to find her, as far as I know, she was never found. I thought about Lehane's love for his dog when I read his short story, "Animal Rescue." That short story is the basis for Lehane's hardboiled screenplay for Twentieth Century Fox. The movie, The Drop, stars James Gandolfini (in his last on-screen performance), Tom Hardy, and Noomi Rapace, and is scheduled to be in theaters this September. On August 19th, William Morrow will release The Drop as a paperback original. It's the story of former small-time criminal Bob Saginowski, who tries to turn his life around when he finds an injured pit bull puppy in his neighbor's trash, and meets a young woman named Nadia. Things are looking up; however, the neighborhood's Chechen mafia, a police investigation, the puppy's former owner, and Bob's own past threaten to bring him down.

I loved living in a small New Hampshire town, and I'll return there any way I can. Sue Miller offers a chance with The Arsonist (Knopf, June 24, 2014). In this book, she examines the fault lines exposed between Pomeroy, New Hampshire, residents and its summer people when a series of set fires burns down summer homes in the mid-1990s. Miller also takes a look at aging, how one defines a well-lived life, family, community, and the very idea of "home" when Frankie Rowley, now in her 40s, returns to the US from Africa, where she worked for 15 years. Her parents have now retired to their summer farmhouse in Pomeroy. The night Frankie arrives in Pomeroy is the night of the first fire. Frankie begins an affair with Bud Jacobs, the local newspaper editor transplanted from a job covering politics in Washington, DC. While Frankie and Bud try to figure out their next steps, the fires erupt, neighbor eyes neighbor suspiciously, and Frankie's mother worries about her father's declining mental status.

It's always good to identify books you can rely on to keep you on an even keel. Are you so cheerful you're beginning to irritate your spouse and friends? Drag yourself back to cold reality with a neo-noir writer such as Benjamin Percy. Down in the mouth after your World Cup team went nowhere? Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender, the Los Angeles pro burglar coerced into private investigations for other crooks, is your man. In his fourth appearance, Herbie's Game (Soho Crime, July 15, 2014), the resourceful Junior is roped into an investigation by Wattles, a heavy hitter in the criminal world of the San Fernando Valley (I'm wondering if these crooks have their own version of Valley Girl Speak). Someone stole Wattles' list detailing the human links in a chain that separates Wattles from the professional hit he orders and the money he's paid for it, and people in the chain are turning up dead. Junior immediately suspects his old mentor, Herbie Mott, must be the list thief. Unfortunately, Herbie is in no position to answer Junior's questions, so Junior puts himself through the wringer, questioning his life choices and career and looking for the killer.

If you haven't yet met Junior, you're missing a treat. He's both honorable and willing to dispense his own justice if necessary. Hallinan's writing is witty, vivid, and philosophical; his descriptions and the predicaments he creates for Junior are laugh-out-loud material.

We all have them––series we've been meaning to try, but somehow haven't––and I'd be curious to hear about yours. One of mine is Rhys Bowen's Royal Spyness mysteries, featuring Lady Georgiana Rannoch, a distant cousin of George V, and 34th (or 35th?) in line for the British throne. I've heard these books, set in 1930s England, are charming and light-hearted entertainment. One might be just the thing to read outside on a break from work or to tuck into a tote for the beach. Queen of Hearts (Berkley Hardcover, August 5, 2014) is the eighth book in the series. Georgie's mother needs a quickie Reno divorce in order to remarry. Husband-to-be Max is paying, so Georgie joins Mother on a cross-Atlantic trip to America. Aboard ship, Georgie becomes involved in a jewel theft investigation headed by her beau, Darcy, while Mother's charms lead movie mogul Cy Goldman to cast her in his next movie. Sidelined from Reno, Mother and her party arrive at Cy's Hollywood home, only to have Cy fall out of character as a host and into character as a corpse. It's a good thing Georgie knows her role as sleuth, because she'll investigate his death.

Martha Woodroof's Small Blessings (St. Martin's Press, August 12, 2014) is a book about second chances and the meaning of family. Its protagonist, Tom Putnam, is a very kind man, a college professor whose life revolves around his academic department; the college bookstore, where an attractive new manager, Rose Callahan, has just arrived; and his neurotic, emotionally fragile wife of 23 years, Marjory. Tom had a brief affair with a visiting female poet 10 years earlier, but he faithfully cares for Marjory with the help of her no-nonsense mother, Agnes, who moved in to help him. Then Tom gets a letter from his ex-lover announcing their son is on his way to stay with him. This is the clarion call to change for these quirky characters, and man, do things take a bizarre turn. I'm not saying anything more, because you don't want to read anything approaching a spoiler. I cannot wait to read this book, Woodroof's first, which early reviewers pronounce "charming," and recommend to readers who enjoyed Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

Here's a book of historical fiction set in San Francisco shortly before World War II. Lisa See's China Dolls (Random House, June 3, 2014) features three young women: Helen, Grace, and Ruby. They meet at an audition for performers at the Forbidden City Nightclub and grow to depend on each other. We follow their stories, which each of them narrates, over a course of 50 years. Each woman has obstacles to overcome and her own secrets. Helen comes from a respected, traditional Chinese family in San Francisco's Chinatown, while Grace is an American-Chinese women who fled an abusive father in the Midwest. Ruby, from Hawaii, is Japanese, but she tries to pass as Chinese to remain employed as the US prepares for war with Japan. After the bombing at Pearl Harbor, the lives of these women change. Word from reviewers is that the book is rich in atmosphere and period details. See's depth of characterization makes the reader care about these women.

Have you read Australian writer Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish? It's a highly original epic of 19th-century Australia, set at a Tasmanian prison colony and recorded in a mysterious taxonomy of fish by forger and thief William Gould.

Flanagan's upcoming novel is The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Knopf, August 12, 2014). The book was published in Australia in 2013, by Knopf Australia, and hailed in reviews as "a masterpiece, the crowning achievement of Flanagan's career so far." In it, we follow the life of one man, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, from World War II, when he is imprisoned at a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai, to the present.

Flanagan took 12 years to write this novel and completed it on the day his 98-year-old father, Japanese POW no. 335 and a survivor of the Death Railway, died.

Summer Preview 2014: Part Twelve

Our friend and regular guest blogger,
Lady Jane Digby's Ghost

Summer is the time of the blockbuster film releases, and it's the same for books. I mean, who wants to lug War and Peace to the beach or the pool, when you can take the new Jacqueline Winspear, The Care and Management of Lies (Harper, July 1, 2014) with you? But you should know that Winspear has deviated from her Maisie Dobbs series with this latest, which is a standalone. In The Care and Management of Lies, also set in the Great War, Winspear looks at the women left to keep the home fires burning for their soldiers in France and Flanders.

Charles Todd, that mother/son team of writers, also has a new book coming out in the Bess Crawford series. In An Unwilling Accomplice (William Morrow, August 12, 2014), Bess continues her nursing/crime-solving career in France.

It's summer again, and so time for another in Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series. This one, called The Heist (Harper, July 15, 2014), stars art restorer/spy/killer/lover Allon, along with his achingly beautiful wife, Chiara, and, probably, his foxhole characters/aides in Israeli intelligence. The publisher has been sparse with info about the plot of this book––though I know it involves a Caravaggio and spying . . . and a heist.

One summer novel I'm looking forward to reading is Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm (Quercus, June 13, 2014). Set in Bavaria, it is the fictionalized account of the murder of a whole family in a farm setting. It sounds a bit like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (but nothing can be that good), with the author looking at the case from many different angles. It's received mixed reviews, but it sounds interesting, so I'm game.

Author James R. Benn is returning, just as summer comes to an end, with another book in his Billy Boyle series. The Rest Is Silence (Soho Crime, September 2, 2014) features Boston cop-turned-World-War-II-soldier/sleuth Billy on another mission for his "Uncle Ike," a certain general. Billy has turned up all over the European Theater in the previous books in the series. Benn is turning into quite a good writer, and Billy and his wartime buddies are fun to follow. The reader may also learn a thing or two about the war, as Benn has written about little-touched-upon topics in his previous books.

Norwegian author Karin Fossum is releasing a standalone novel (not in her Inspector Sejer series) in August, called I Can See in the Dark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August 12, 2014). It's about a man accused of a crime, who knows he's innocent of that crime, but he is guilty of another crime the police don't seem to know about. So, how does a guilty/innocent man defend himself? It's an intriguing idea, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Fossum does with it.

Also coming out in June is an interesting book titled FaceOff (Simon & Schuster, June 3, 2014). Twenty-two popular authors have paired up to write stories contrasting their characters. An example––and most interesting to me––is John Rebus versus Roy Grace in "The Nick of Time," by Ian Rankin and Peter James. The other match-ups also look interesting. It'll be fun to read a book of short stories by these master writers and see how their characters face off!

And, finally, I'd like to recommend a book that I enjoyed very much. It's a graphic novel by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, called Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant: A Memoir (Bloomsbury USA, May 6, 2014). The book recounts the last few years of her aging parents' lives and, while it sounds rather gloomy, it really isn't. Chast has insights about the aging process and how both she––an only child––and her parents coped with aging and death. I know it isn't a mystery or thriller, but I thought it might be of interest to some of the readers here.

Summer Preview 2014: Part Eleven

The Discovery of King Tut exhibition is being displayed in selected cities across the country. I had the misfortune to miss it completely when it was in Philadelphia, because I heard about it just before it left town. Way to go! This is a remarkable presentation of perhaps the greatest archeological discovery of the twentieth century. This exhibition is somewhat unusual in that the more than 1000 artifacts are actually reproductions of the treasures discovered by Howard Carter within King Tutankhamun's tomb in November of 1922.

The exhibition presents the actual excavation at the exact moment of its discovery, and the public can appreciate the magnificence of all the artifacts without harming the fragile sensitive originals, which are no longer allowed outside Egypt.

Amelia Peabody and her cohorts may have been there only on the sidelines in Elizabeth Peters' Tomb of the Golden Bird, but Sally Beauman in The Visitors (Harper/HarperCollins, July 1, 2014) tells the tale from the point of view of an eyewitness, young Lucy Payne, who has been sent to Egypt to recover from typhoid fever. Her governess, Miss Mack, accompanies her. Lucy narrates the story, which includes the events during her stay in Egypt, her return to Cambridge, vacation in Hampshire and her eventual return to the Valley of the Kings.

One of the first people she meets in Egypt is eight-year-old Francis Winlock, who is in the Valley of the Kings with her archeologist father. These girls become fast friends, because they are both staying at the American House, where many archeologists live. This is 1922, and the mood in the house is electric because everyone is expecting a rare new discovery.

Lucy and Francis bond nicely, because they are both trying to understand the adult world and their place in it. Lucy was only 11 years old when she first visited Egypt, and she spends the rest of her life dreaming about her time there, and in her old age she reminisces about it. But she revealed her memories reluctantly to curiosity seekers, because there are some things about those days she would rather forget.

Beauman weaves together both fact and fiction, as she incorporates real people in her story. Howard Carter is the well-known archeologist whose claim to fame was the discovery of the long-looked-for burial site of Tutankhamun, and Frances' father Herbert Winlock was a real American archaeologist and field curator of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's excavations near Luxor. Some of the lesser archeologists involved in the dig are represented, as well as the foreman, Ahmed Girigar.

The King Tut exhibition is in Kansas City for the summer, and then it will move on to San Diego. I am not sure where it goes after that, but if it comes back my way I won't miss it again.

While you are mentally in Africa, you might consider a side trip to British East Africa. In the early part of the last century, it was at first sight a place of extraordinary beauty; that is, before the inequalities and iniquities of the human conditions come to light. Annamaria Alfieri's African tale, Strange Gods (Minotaur, June 24, 2014), is a novel that will please fans of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika as well as the small gem of a TV series about a policeman in Kenya, Heat of the Sun.

In England, Justin Tolliver would merely be the second son of an earl, but fortunately for him he is excited and thrilled by Africa and he wants to make a life there. Farming, the normal livelihood of the expats in the area, is out of the question because he has little money, so he takes a job as a police officer.

His job is made difficult by the fact that there are rules for the British and different ones for the Africans, but he settles in well and he even meets a girl who attracts him. She is Vera McIntosh, a young Scottish girl who has also come to love Africa. She came to Africa with her family and an uncle, Dr. Josiah Pennyman, who has been forced to leave Scotland because he had wandering hands that he laid too often on his female patients.

British East Africa is where the pervert doctor comes by his just desserts, as he is found with a native Kikuyu spear in his back. Everyone believes that the native medicine man is his nemesis, and Justin Tolliver is expected to wrap up the case without much more ado. But Tolliver is still idealistic enough to believe that the British law should be applied equally to everyone, and he sets out to discover the truth, with the help of a tribal lieutenant, Kwai Libazo. The first thing they discover is that the spear is actually Masai––and the list of suspects grows.

Strange Gods is the first in a new mystery series, which entices us with the beauty and peril of the wilds of Africa, and set in the colonial days that are complicated by the imposition of a foreign culture on an indigenous people.

Continuing on this world tour of summer reading is going to take me to Spain; Barcelona in particular. Last summer I was reading The Summer of Dead Toys, by Antonio Hill, which ended in a cliffhanger, and I have been eagerly waiting for the next in the series. I don't have to wait much longer. The Good Suicides (translated from the Spanish by Laura McGloughlin; Crown, June 17, 2014) will be out soon.

Transplanted Argentine Inspector Héctor Salgado, as acerbic as ever, is suffering through a cold snap in Barcelona. His wife is still missing and Leire Castro, his partner, is on maternity leave. He is assigned to a case in which all the senior staff of the Alemany Cosmetics Company have returned from a team-building retreat in a remote country house and received a disturbing email with the strange message, "Never Forget." Then, these same people begin committing suicide, one by one. The clock is ticking, as Salgado rushes to unlock the puzzle that is causing these young executives to choose death over life. On the other hand, Leire is bored and continues to try and solve the case of the missing wife––and ends up causing more problems than she solves.

Hill tells the stories from various points of view and then zigzags through twists and turns that will keep your pulse pounding. I have mixed feelings, because the saga closes again with an ending that leaves the reader up in the air so that we have to wait another year for some resolutions.

My last selection today is not reachable by any cruise ship because, even though the locale is the USA, it is a different world.

Chris Bohjalian's Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (Doubleday, July 8, 2014) takes us back to a year ago, when there was a meltdown in a power plant in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Emily Shepard was a 16-year-old almost-senior in high school the day Reactor Number One exploded. Both of her parents worked at the reactor, and both were killed. What made this disaster even worse for Emily was that the disaster might have been Emily's father's fault. She worries that he might have been drunk.

Thousands of people were forced to leave their homes, the rivers and forests were destroyed and what isn't destroyed is at least contaminated. Since it happened on a school day, all the students were bused to a safe zone, where they would wait to picked up by any remaining family members.

Emily feels that as the daughter of the most reviled man in America, her life is in danger. She sneaks away from the evacuation site and makes it to Burlington. Here, she finds refuge among the homeless and lives in an igloo made of garbage bags.

In order to keep her identity secret, she takes on a new persona and survives by stealing. Her solace in this terrible time is the works of Emily Dickinson, which are balm to her aching soul. Eventually she makes a few friends, but she realizes that she can't outrun her past and can't hide forever, so she needs a plan. She has to decide between suicide and survival.

This story is a bit of an emotional roller-coaster and it will make you happy that it's summer in our world––and we can use garbage bags for summer detritus and not building materials.

I have a few more good summer reads to tell you about in a few days. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy more Material Witness suggestions.

Summer Preview 2014: Part Ten

This is my definition of "nightmare."

My ideas about the ideal summer don't match those of our boys. They've been breathlessly poring over roller coaster websites that rank the world's roller coasters according to height, speed, length, inversions, steepness and public opinion polls. Or, in other words, how close these rides come to a few minutes of pure hell.

One that comes very close is the world's tallest and second-fastest roller coaster, Kingda Ka, at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey. A hydraulic launch mechanism rockets the train to an unbelievable 128 mph (206 km/h) in 3.5 seconds. The train climbs and zooooms down the 456-foot main top hat tower (look at that sucker, it's on the right in the picture below). If riding Kingda Ka isn't enough to get the blood thrashing in your veins, you can also step onto the brand-new drop tower ride, Zumanjaro: Drop of Doom (my dream job = naming amusement park thrill rides), at 415 ft (126 m) the world's tallest. Then you essentially free-fall three times to the tune of 90 mph (140 km/h). I don't know if the ticket price includes an ambulance ride home afterward.

This amusement park is where my boys' hearts are set on going this summer. My husband is agreeable, but the world may not have enough money to pay me to ride Kingda Ka. I tend to divide the world into the sane, who don't go on rides like this, and the insane, who do. We'll see. In the meantime, I'll seek my warm-weather thrills on the written page.


















Now, Elizabeth Little's Dear Daughter (Viking Adult, July 31, 2014) is the kind of book I'm looking for in a "summer-weight" thriller. Its protagonist/narrator is Janie Jenkins, a former "It Girl," though it sounds like there's a brain under that it-ness and her voice is snarky and smart in addition to weary. Janie is 27 and fresh out of prison, where she spent 10 years for the murder of her philanthropist mother. Based on snatches of conversation she overheard the night her mother was killed, Janie goes undercover to small-town South Dakota to ferret out the truth. We're all familiar with OJ Simpson's search for "the real killer" but Janie's may be sincere. She isn't sure. (Note to self: Janie may be a tad untrustworthy.) Blurbs from Kate Atkinson and Tana French ("This is an all-nighter . . . The best debut mystery I've read in a long time.") and the author's expertise in disappearing languages intrigue me. I've put this on my list.

I've read a few Dave Gurney series books by John Verdon. My gut is slightly quivering, wondering if I'm going to read another. Yes, I am: No. 4 in the series, Peter Pan Must Die (Crown, July 1, 2014). Gurney is a former top NYPD homicide investigator, now a PI. His old partner, Jack Hardwick, is working on an appeal for Kay Spalter, already convicted of shooting her politician husband, Carl, as he delivered the eulogy at his mother's funeral. Hardwick asks Gurney for help in investigating the prosecution's case. The Mafia had reason to want Carl Spalter dead, and no doubt others did too. Gurney is an engaging sleuth and these books are good warm-ups for riding a world-class roller coaster like Kingda Ka.


















Did you read Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park (St. Martin's Griffin, 2013)? It's a book about two misfits who find true love and it's so fresh and witty it's impossible not to cry while reading it. It's one of those books, like John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, written for teens but done so well that adults also enjoy it. Rowell's 2014 book for adults looks at a mature, battered love that needs a rebooting. In Landline (St. Martin's Press, July 8, 2014), TV writer Georgie McCool cancels the upcoming family Christmas trip when she's offered the chance of her own pilot. Fed up with the workaholic Georgie, husband Neal takes their children, Noomi and Alice, to Nebraska without her. Lo and behold, when Georgie tries to call Neal, she doesn't get the present-day Neal on the line. She gets the young Neal, the cartoonist Neal from college. As the clock ticks down to Christmas for Georgie, I'd like to listen in on their phone conversations.

David Ignatius writes a twice-weekly foreign affairs column for the Washington Post and his expertise in the field of intelligence makes his best-selling spy thrillers feel authentic. His upcoming book, The Director (W. W. Norton, June 2, 2014), is a standalone book of espionage inspired by leaker Edward Snowden. The CIA's conscientious new director, Graham Weber, is barely on the job before he takes on an operation involving whistleblowers and cyberterrorism. I always enjoy Ignatius when he writes about the culture and history of the CIA, and I'm looking forward to a detailed delving into hacker technologies and motivations.


















Andrew Lewis Conn's O, Africa!: A Novel (Hogarth/Random House, June 10, 2014) is a book with some of the same themes of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: how art can transform both creator and audience. In this case, twin brothers Micah and Izzy Grand, Jewish-American sons of immigrants, have made their name making silent slapstick movies in the 1920s. Micah is the mercurial director/producer, while Izzy is the quiet man behind the camera. Other characters include some real-life people. The brothers decide to go to Africa to make a movie advancing civil rights. This comes about when talking movies appear and Micah gets into trouble for gambling and carrying on with a black woman. The brothers' association with the Malwiki people in Africa changes them unexpectedly. This is reported to be less a hilarious story than a very ambitious and moving story, populated by fully formed but less than completely likable characters.

Hey, fellow dystopia lovers, focus your eyeballs here. Edan Lepucki was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I expect she puts her knowledge of that city to good use in her first novel, California (Little, Brown and Co., July 8, 2014). Los Angeles is in ruins. Cal and Frida, whose perspectives appear in alternating chapters, have put that world behind them and moved into the wilderness. It's safe there, but hard. When Frida discovers she's pregnant, they venture out, looking for a suitable group of other survivors to join. These vestiges of civilization aren't what I'd call utopias, and Cal and Frida must decide whom and what to trust. I'm not sure they can even trust each other. Onto the TBR list this one goes.


















Read this first line of the Kirkus review and then tell me you don't want to read Lauren Owen's novel, The Quick (Random House, June 17, 2014): "An elegantly written gothic epic that begins with children isolated in a lonely manor house; takes a spin through the velvet-draped salons of late-Victorian literary London; then settles in to the bloody business of an outbreak of evil magic." Well, then. It's 1893 when shy orphan James Norbury comes down from Oxford to lodge and write poetry in London. When he vanishes, his resolute sister, Charlotte, leaves Yorkshire to find him. Her efforts lead her to the shadowy Aegolius Club, where some of England's richest and most powerful men hobnob. This is a 544-page, "extraordinarily polished" first novel that should be read without reading spoilers.

The sisters of L. Alison Heller's The Never Never Sisters (New American Library Trade, June 3, 2014) are Paige Reinhardt and her older sister, Sloane. Paige, a marriage counselor, hasn't seen Sloane since she left rehab 20 years ago. Now Sloane returns to the family she left in Manhattan. Accompanying her is Giovanni, her fiancé, and the little dog, Bandito. It seems all would be well were it not for the moodiness of Dave, Paige's attorney husband, who has been suspended from his law firm for reasons that aren't clear. Determined to find out, Paige hires Giovanni's best friend, Percy. Reviewers love the book's witty dialogue.


















Herman Koch's The Dinner (translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett; Hogarth/Random House, 2013) was one of last year's most-talked-about novels. One of its major themes is how thinly the veneer of civilization covers human nastiness. Koch has a very dark sense of humor and a talent for deviousness, and I have high hopes for his upcoming Summer House with Swimming Pool (translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett; Hogarth, June 3, 2014). Dr. Marc Schlosser's prescribing habits lead to a booming practice with famous patients. Then high-profile actor Ralph Meier dies under Marc's hands. Meier's wife Judith wants answers and Marc, our questionably reliable narrator, looks back at the previous summer when he, his wife and their young daughters stayed with the Meiers family at their summer house on the Mediterranean. Also there were Judith's mother and film director Stanley Forbes and his girlfriend. What happened there reached fingers into the future. Whether they killed Ralph Meier is a question we must read the book to answer.

I liked the imaginative virtual world, the Carnivia, created by British writer Jonathan Holt in his crime fiction trilogy's first book, The Abomination (Harper/HarperCollins, 2013). Now Kat Tapo, a captain in the Venetian Carabiniere, and Second Lieutenant Holly Boland, US Army intelligence analyst, are back in The Abduction (Harper, June 3, 2014). The daughter of a US army officer is kidnapped from the base in Venice. It's not a matter of a simple ransom when dark Italian secrets from the War intrude and Kat and Holly join forces with Daniele Barbo, webmaster and creator of Carnivia, to find her.

These books should provide plenty of entertainment and thrills and I don't have to be strapped into my chair to read them. We'll see you again tomorrow, folks.