A Longer Fall

This is the 2nd installment in Charlaine Harris' "Gunnie Rose" series; I posted about the first one, which I read about a year ago, An Easy Death. See that post to get filled in on the background for this alternative history setting and some of the main characters. In this book, Lizbeth Rose, a well known "gunnie" at the tender age of 19, has joined a new crew to guard a crate that is going to the territory of Dixie. She knows the crew's leader, Jake, only by reputation and doesn't know any of the other members who are accompanying the crate of unknown contents on the train ride to its destination . But before they arrive, the train tracks are blown up, the train derails,  and thieves invade the wrecked train to steal the crate. Several of her new crew members die and the crate disappear. Lizbeth herself is wounded. She is surprised to find Eli, the wizard she was hired to guard in the first book, at the site of the wreck and he drives her to the nearby town of Sally. Being Dixie and not Texoma, he insists she needs to wear women's clothes and buys them for her so she won't stand out as they are trying to find the crate and the person/ people who were supposed to accept the crate. Lisbeth quickly realizes just how different a world it is in Dixie. Women are subservient to men, and Blacks are subservient to everyone and treated essentially as slaves. Eli and Lizbeth pretend to be a married couple, again to try and avoid drawing unwanted attention to themselves while they investigate;  they resume an affair initiated at the end of the first book.  Of course trouble finds them nevertheless. I won't spoil it by telling you what was in the crate... I continue to enjoy these characters and the world building in this alternate version of the United States. Engaging review from Kirkus,  and a much less laudatory one from Publishers Weekly.

Smoke Bitten

I just finished this latest comulsively readable installment in the "Mercy Thompson" series by author Patricia Briggs (see lots of reviews in my blog for the earlier books). Native American VW mechanic Mercy Thompson has a shop in the Tri-cities area of Washington state. She was trained by the previous owner of the shop, Zee, and prides herself on never driving a new car. Mercy is also a shape-shifter, the daughter of Coyote, the bringer of chaos. She can turn into a coyote at will. But as this series evolves, Mercy is continually discovering new powers. Mercy is surrounded by supernatural beings--the Fae, vampires, witches, werewolves, goblins--and she is in fact mated to the head of the local werewolf pack, Adam Hauptman. Mercy is also unique in being able to smell when magic is being used, and is apparently immune to its effects. Oh, and she can see ghosts and talk to dead people. Enough background.
Mercy discovers that her former neighbors, an elderly couple, have been murdered and that magic was involved. Then she is attacked by a crazed rabbit and nearly dies. Turns out  the rabbit's body had been taken over by a creature variously referred to as the smoke beast or the smoke dragon, which has escaped from Underhill and uses its possession of various beings to gain greater power for itself when the beings die. When two of Mercy's friends are also bitten and possessed, she realizes that she may be the only one who can hunt down and destroy this monster. In the meantime, a rogue band of werewolves are openly threatening to take over Adam's Columbia Basin pack. Adam is also struggling with the aftereffects of a witch's dying curse. Although you would enjoy reading this book on its own, you really have to start with the first book (Moon Called) to get the full flavor of all the characters and relationships

The Grace Year

It's been decades since I read Lord of the Flies, but at times this felt like a female version of that story. It is also reminiscent of The Power (which I started recently but never finished). Author Kim Liggett actually opens the book with quotes from Lord of the Flies and Handmaid's Tale. Booklist also ties the story line to The Hunger Games...so lots of young adult angsty stuff going on in this speculative fiction about a world where women are both deprived on any real power, but seen as so terrifying in their potential power that they are sent away for a year to rid themselves of their destructive magic and purify themselves. Many don't return, captured by poachers who sell their body parts to unscrupulous buyers seeking miracle cures. The ones who do seem permanently altered--and not in a good way. Sixteen-year-old Tiernay has never aspired to the role of wife/mother that is designated for the lucky women who are picked by a man prior to the Grace Year. She would prefer  to live out the life of those who are not selected, working in the fields or workhouses. But her childhood friend picks her at the selection ceremony and she feels betrayed. When the women are marched off into the woods and left at a crude compound, Tierney, with skills learned from a tomboyish childhood, tries to organize cleaning the filthy quarters and building rain barrels for fresh water instead of the murky green stuff that comes out of the camp's well. But she has a powerful enemy in the person of a young woman, Kiersten, who wanted to marry Tierney's betrothed. And that woman eventually turns the rest of the women against Tierney. How Tierney will survive on her own is the meat of the story.
Reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. 

Run Away

I have read and blogged about a number of Harlan Coben's thrillers (search his name in my blog). They are always rich with well-drawn characters and often very twisty plots.
Here is the  basic story line from Booklist:
"Coben, once again, shows a well-constructed, lucky life blown open by fate. Financial analyst Simon Greene and his wife, a pediatrician, are well-off Manhattanites with three children. The chasm in their lives was caused by their 21-year-old daughter, Paige, being seduced into drugs and a vagrant lifestyle by a man 10 years older. Simon discovers Paige panhandling in Central Park one day, tries to talk with her, punches her slimy boyfriend, and is arrested and charged with assault. This starts the suspense spiral of the book, which only grows more tense when the boyfriend is found murdered, and Simon becomes the chief suspect."
Simon is determined to find his daughter, who disappears after this encounter. What he finds instead is a string of murders that all seem to be tied to his daughter, or at least to her drug dealing boyfriend Aaron Corval. There are two additional story lines, one involving a professional assassination team and the second follows a private detective, also looking for a different missing person. To get more detail on all the story lines, see the review from The New York Journal of Books. Intricate plot with  two big surprises at the end. Totally engrossing read for those who enjoy thrillers.
More reviews available from Publishers Weekly,  Kirkus, and USA Today.

Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan came to town as part of our libraries' "Author! Author!" series this spring, and our book group also decided to read this book. Pollan was funny and fascinating. The book is both sickening and encouraging. Pollan traces some of the foods we commonly eat to their sources and follows them until they reach our table--at least when he was not prevented from actually viewing some steps in the process as happens with most of our meat production. His is a very scientific as well as subjective approach; he provides facts and figures, but also spends a lot of time ruminating about the title. We are capable of eating anything, so how do we go about choosing the best things for us to eat?
Probably the most horrifying aspect of the book was his expose of the industrial ramp-up of corn production, which has led to countless problems with the environment, our food chain, and ultimately our health.  He also talks about the industrialization of the "organic" food trend, which basically uses the same environmentally unsustainable farming practices, minus the poison of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. On the bright side he describes some small efforts of farmers to hew back to nature in how they produce food, using the animals themselves to keep a healthy balance. He spends a week at Polyface Farms, which is incredibly inspiring. I went right out and joined our local farmers' cooperative.
His statistics about the nutritional value of corn-finished beef will make you realize we are basically killing ourselves with this kind of food production & consumption. If you must eat beef, eat only grass-fed and finished animals. Start looking for and avoiding the ubiquitous addition of high fructose corn syrup in processed foods you buy. Read this book and change the way you think about your food forever.

The Imaginary Corpse

First off, a catchy title for this inaugural novel by Tyler Hayes. Add to that a narrator who is a plush yellow stuffed triceratops named Tippy the Detective. How could anyone resist?! The Stillreal is a world inhabited by Ideas, Nightmares and imaginary Friends that are too big to die once their creators can no longer make use of them. As Tippy describes it to Stillreal initiates, "Here are the two things you absolutely need to know. First: in case you didn't know, you're an idea. Im' not sure if youre an imaginary friend or a novel's protagonist or a mascot or what. But if you're here, you"re an idea. Second: You were loved. You were loved enduringly and unequivocally, and that made you capital-R Real. Not an idea; an Idea. A Friend."
 There are multiple communities in Stillreal and Tippy happens to be a well-known and respective detective familiar with many of them, although his home is in Playtime Town, where he shares an apartment with Spiderhand, who loves tea parties and plays a mean piano. Tippy himself is very PC, always asking what pronouns to use when first meeting a new arrival; he shuns all curse words (his creator was an 8-year girl), and slugs rootbeer from a flask like the best hard-boiled detective.
In the Stillreal, no one ever dies, even if they get killed in a fight; they just renew themselves. Until the day the Man in the Coat comes to the Stillreal and starts killing the inhabitants permanently. When Tippy witnesses one such "murder" up close and personal, he makes it his mission to find out who this newest Nightmare is and put a stop to his activities. Friends are dying and that just isn't allowed to happen! Publishers Weekly calls this fantasy tale of tracking a serial killer "an affectionate, lightly mocking homage to noir tales." It is also a sweet tale of finding courage in the face of fear and standing by your friends through thick and thin...a timely tale in our world at war with a viral pandemic. Imaginative world building and interesting variety of characters you will cheer for.

The Holdout

This novel by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Graham Moore deals with a highly sensational murder trial that takes in Los Angeles in the spring and summer of 2009. A part-time English teacher is accused of killing a 15 year old female student because they had been socializing outside of school and somewhat incriminating texts were found. There was also some of her blood in the front seat of his car. The teacher, Bobby Nock, is black and the missing girl (for no body has ever been found), Jessica Silver, was white and the daughter of a very wealthy real estate developer.  One member of the jury, Maya Seale, is not convinced he is guilty and thinks race is playing a significant role in both the trial and the jury's deliberations. She holds out and eventually convinces or badgers the other 11 jury members into returning a verdict of not guilty. Although the jurors were sequestered, their names were leaked and, after the trial, the public vitriol against them damaged their lives.
What Maya took from this experience was a desire to better understand the justice system and so she went to law school and is now, 10 years later, a practicing attorney. Another member of the jury, Rick Leonard, with whom Maya had an affair while they were sequestered for the trial, and who is black, takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of Jessica's murder. In a book he writes, he pillories Maya as the driver behind the jury's verdict. When a true-crime TV series decides to do a special on the 10th anniversary of the trial, Maya is initially adamantly opposed to participating. But her law partners think it will add cachet to her reputation and convince her to attend. Rick Leonard is promising to reveal information he has turned up in his investigation that will settle the question of Bobby Nock's guilt. But, on the first night the former jurors are reunited at the original hotel of sequester,  Rick and Maya get into a heated argument over a drink in her hotel room and she leaves to cool off. When she returns, it is to find Rick dead in her room and herself accused of killing him. Maya, thanks to her partners and her reputation, is let out on bail and decides she must figure out what information Rick had that probably got him killed. And the person who would know that is Bobby Nock, if only she can find him.
Moving back and forward in time, various chapters reveal  each individual juror's thinking during the time of the trial. This is a very twisty plot that raises the important question of whether or not justice is always served by the legal system.
Reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and The Guardian.

Disappearing Earth

This "thriller" from Julia Phillips got such a glowing review from Kirkus that I really wanted to read it. But I found the minimal connections of each chapter's story and characters to the original crime to be increasingly frustrating. As I occasionally do when the light at the end of the tunnel seems to grow ever dimmer in a book, I jumped to the last chapter, and subsequently abandoned the book half-way through. I am including the review from Kirkus so you can see why I had such high hopes.
"A year in the lives of women and girls on an isolated peninsula in northeastern Russia opens with a chilling crime.

In the first chapter of Phillips' immersive, impressive, and strikingly original debut, we meet sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, amusing themselves one August afternoon on the rocky shoreline of a public beach on the waterfront of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia's remote Kamchatka peninsula. They are offered a ride home by a seemingly kind stranger. After he drives right past the intersection that leads to the apartment they share with their mother, they disappear from their previous lives and, to a large extent, from the narrative. The rest of the book is a series of linked stories about a number of different women on the peninsula, all with the shadow of the missing girls hanging over them as a year goes by since their disappearance. Another young girl with a single mom loses her best friend to new restrictions imposed by the other girl's anxious mother. The daughter of a reindeer herder from the north, at college in the city, finds her controlling boyfriend clamping down harder than ever. In a provincial town, members of a family whose teenage daughter disappeared four years earlier are troubled by the similarities and differences between their case and this one. The book opens with both a character list and a map—you'll be looking at both often as you find your footing and submerge ever more deeply in this world, which is both so different from and so much like our own. As the connections between the stories pile up and tighten, you start to worry—will we ever get closure about the girls? Yes, we will. And you'll want to start over and read it again, once you know.

An unusual, cleverly constructed thriller that is also a deep dive into the culture of a place many Americans have probably never heard of, illuminating issues of race, culture, sexual attraction, and the transition from the U.S.S.R. to post-Soviet Russia."

The Library at Mount Char

This book by Scott Hawkins is so strange and so big in scope that I sometimes found myself dazed and confused, especially in the first half. But for some reason I persisted, hoping that clarification would eventually ensue. And it does and it was worth the wait and the effort. In this fantasy novel, we meet twelve "adopted" children whose parents all died in some unexplained catastrophe and are now the children of "Father," a nearly omniscient and omnipotent being. He has assigned each of them to master the knowledge accumulated in his library, 12 sections in all. Carolyn, our narrator, is in charge of languages--but not just all the languages ever spoken or written by humans, she must also master the languages of creatures and storms. Her "brothers" and "sisters" are charged with learning about medicine and mathematics and war and animals, etc. They all inhabit a world that is not really connected to existence as we know it, but when Father disappears, the children (now grown) seek to find him before someone or something more terrible than Father steps in to fill the void.
Margaret must look for him in the world of the dead, another sibling searches for him in the various possible futures. Carolyn is selected to search the world as we know it--America is where we meet her--since her command of the English language is the best. But Carolyn's search is only a cover for an elaborate plan of her own, we eventually learn. And when she ultimately succeeds, she will discover that the prize has some definite down sides. Hawkins' work has been compared to that of Neil Gaiman (Library Journal). Kirkus describes it as "A wholly original, engrossing, disturbing, and beautiful book." The Dallas News has a spot-on review; more from Publishers Weekly, and an interview with the author on HuffPost in which he admits he found it fun to "write it so that some of the lines have a slightly different significance when you know what’s really going on." So really, you would have to re-read the whole book to get it all, kind of like the experience I had with the movie The Sixth Sense.