ASH WEDNESDAY by Ethan Hawke (2002)

Protagonist Jimmy is AWOL from the US Army chasing his girlfriend Christy whom he recently ditched for no really good reason. At least he has the decency to realize he made a mistake and does his darndest to rectify the gaffe and finally make a real commitment to someone he surely loves.

Christy is pregnant with Jimmy's child (though it's a bit of news she's kept to herself so far) and is determined to make it home from Albany to the heart of Texas come hell or high water.

Jimmy catches up with Christy and the two embark upon their shared journey in a souped-up wreck-of-a-Chevy Nova and along the way are transformed from obsessed lovers to real family.

Hawke captures the energy and excitement and fear on the precipice of building a life together, come what may.

THE HOTTEST STATE by Ethan Hawke (1996)

I recently watched the Richard Linklater film BEFORE SUNSET and was reminded of Ethan Hawke's subtle performance and noticed his name in the screenwriting credit.

THE HOTTEST STATE is his debut novel coming-of-age novel about William, a 20-year-old Texan now living in New York and trying to make it as a stage actor. William falls in love with an unlikely woman and becomes obsessed with the idea of building a life together.

With disarming emotional honesty, Hawke captures the transitional moments of late adolescence/ early adulthood when life and love seem rife with wonder and restlessness.

GIRLS IN TRUCKS by Katie Crouch (2008)

Sarah Walters is a Charleston debutante whose perfectly beautiful and smart older sister has fallen off the rails at Yale, planning to run off with a brilliant grad student who looks and acts like an African prince.

Although Sarah tries to adhere the code of decorum prescribed by the Camellias (the deb society to which she belongs as her mother did before her and so on through the generations of genteel Carolinians), she finds it difficult what with the hormonal complication of summer romances with wild Island boys.

When she leaves the South for college and then a career in New York City, Sarah discovers a world very different from the one she was raised to believe in. A particularly toxic affair with a blue-blood called Max leaves Sarah alone to find her way back to who she truly is. On her journey of self-discovery Sarah also discovers truths about her mother that were loosely veiled all along.

GIRLS IN TRUCKS is a delightful and assured debut novel that will have me turning the pages of Katie Crouch's next books.

THE DEVIL'S TEARDROP by Jeffery Deaver (1999)

It's New Year' Eve 1999 and an early morning attack on the Washington Metro leaves dozens dead and fear rippling through the streets. In a written message to the mayor's office a criminal mastermind demands $20 million by midnight or he will unleash the robotic killer to slay many more innocent people.

In a quick twist, the extortionist is snuffed out in a freak accident and the sociopath who does his bidding prepares for the midnight massacre.

Enter Special Agent Margaret Lukas of the FBI who calls upon Parker Kincaid, a retired agent and top forensic document examiner, to help track down "the Digger." There are three more deadlines and as each is met, more civilians are slaughtered in public places as they are in the midst of welcoming in the New Year.

The forensic document detailing had me captivated throughout this 400+ page turner.

BREAK NECK by Erica Spindler (2008)

Detective M.C. Riggio and her partner Kitt Lundgren are on the trail of a faceless predator who leaves bloody corpses of seemingly innocent victims in his wake, including a clean-cut college boy with no criminal record, a good-hearted lawyer and then one of Riggio's cousins, a student who earns extra cash by doing the books for a few local businesses.

The key to finding this emotionless killer lies in the stolen computers of all of his victims that lead to a burgeoning network of false identities and the surprising hub of a centre for troubled youth run by a kind-hearted philanthropist.

After Riggio's fiance and cousin are slain, the stakes are raised and trapping Break Neck becomes all-consuming. Riggio may lose her job, her best friend and her life.

GIRL CRAZY by Russell Smith (2010)

In his trademark elegant prose, Smith tells the story of Justin, a dissatisfied community college instructor, who happens to find himself in the role of Good Samaritan to a sexy young woman who seems to be hemorrhaging in a Toronto park. Justin insists on accompanying Jenna by ambulance to hospital where he knows his friend Andrew is working as an emergency room physician.

Jenna is unlike any of the other women Justin has dated and it is her heady mix of sexuality and danger that both thrills and terrifies him as he tries to build a lasting relationship with her. Soon Justin realizes that his obsessive desire to be with Jenna may destroy him as he is sucked into a world of gambling and drugs in order to protect her.

The ambiguity of the title suggesting both that Justin is crazy about women (which indeed he is) and that the girl herself might be crazy (as could easily be demonstrated by Jenna's inability to really connect with other people) is perfect.

If you are a fan of 19th century storytelling tradition, but also like to read about authentic and hot sex, this just might be THE book for you out of all of the new fiction titles in 2010.

A PERFECT EVIL (A MAGGIE O'DELL NOVEL) by Alex Kava 2000

This thriller was in a stack passed along by my friend Pat who reads voraciously and widely. I picked it up last night and flipped through in one sitting--with only a break 300 pages in to walk my lab.

A PERFECT EVIL opens with a death row admission of a convicted killer who before receiving last rites tells the elderly priest that he only killed one of the boys, not the three everyone else has believed. Yes, he is capable of atrocity, but so is somebody else who will not be executed that night. Father Francis, the priest, knows this to be true because earlier in the week, the real killer of the other two boys confessed to him those very crimes in every lurid detail.

The citizens of a small town in Nebraska are paralyzed by another recent copycat murder of a little boy, whose remains are found by the river with terrifying wounds. Sheriff Nick Morelli is in charge of the crime scene, but he is soon joined by psychiatric criminal profiler Maggie O'Dell who is on loan from the FBI. O'Dell quickly figures out that this killer will strike again and soon. He does again and again. When the pattern becomes personal and Morelli's only nephew goes missing, the stakes are raised.

Kava's narrative travels along at breakneck speed with just enough red herrings to have you doubt your instincts and although she and Morelli do determine the identity of the perfectly evil serial killer they do not do so before he is able to disappear again, this time to serve as a missionary in Chile where the children mispronounce his name as Father Killer.

CURIOSITY by Joan Thomas (2010)

In the early 19th century, 40 years before Darwin published Origin of Species, a young woman named Mary Anning discovered important fossilized remains in Lyme Regis. She began collecting "curiosities" as a child, following her father along the water's edge, and sold them to seaside tourists in order to help feed her siblings. Because she was a woman and a poor one at that, male paleontologists took credit for her work and exhibited her finds under their names.

Henry de la Beche, a gentleman son to parents who own a slave-run plantation in Jamaica, becomes one of the members of the established scientific community to take advantage of Mary, though not before he admires her passion for fossils and their origin and finds himself falling in love with her. Because of class differences, Henry and Mary cannot possibly end up together, yet both dream of doing so.

Considered a pariah for believing that the fossilized creatures discovered in Lyme Regis predate Noah and the Flood, Mary is unsurprisingly ostracized by the community that raised her.

THE REDBREAST by Jo Nesbo (trans. 2006)

Because I read this Norwegian thriller at the gym over a few weeks, the narrative felt fragmented. THE REDBREAST begins with the 1999 U.S. State visit of then-president Bill Clinton , who is never referred to by name, but rather as someone with a multiple personality disorder: "a psychologist thought his normal personality was not aware that the other one, the sex beast, was having relations with all these women."

Harry Hole, part of Oslo's murder squad, has been assigned to the presidential visit. When Hole makes an embarrassing error, he is reassigned to mundane surveillance tasks, including monitoring the local neo-Nazi activities. That work draws him into a mysterious past when members of Norway's government willingly collaborated with Nazi Germany.

I felt that there were too many narrative threads at times (trying to be a little too clever at implying connections with 1943 and 1999) and with the recurring idea of multiple personality disorder, all the more confusing and that confusion did not add to the tension. There are also predictable romances at the heart; however, I will still pick up another Nesbo novel in order to give the intriguing Harry Hole another chance.

SANCTUM by Denise Mina (2002)

Trained as a criminal defense attorney, but now writing novels full-time Denise Mina provides authentic detail of prison life in each of her books where the Scottish landscape is also a character.

In SANCTUM, stay-at-home Dad Lachlan Harriot is shocked when his wife Susie, a respected forensic psychiatrist, is convicted of the murder of serial killer Andrew Gow, one of her former patients. Lachlan is sure of his wife's innocence and is determined to do his own sleuthing through her personal papers and computer files in order to prove so and find grounds for an appeal. However, Lachlan's quest for the capital T truth raises more questions than it answers.

With more twists than the last 15 minutes of Casablanca, SANCTUM messes with your expectations and establishes Denise Mina as a fearless storyteller in the crime fiction genre.

IF NOBODY SPEAKS OF REMARKABLE THINGS by Jon McGregor (2002)

In this startling first novel it's a quiet Sunday afternoon at the end of summer and several ordinary citizens are going about their ordinary daily lives. A young man is taking photographs, a young woman two doors down is packing up her belongings to move home, another neighbour is painting his house and a some siblings are playing cricket.

I loved the clever narrative structure and the way McGregor was able to withhold the details of the tragedy the unites all of the characters until the last twenty pages.

The story made me question how I am complicit in my own life in not addressing out loud the remarkable things. And, how much is lost to that silence.

212 by Alafair Burke (2010)

In this third NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher novel, Megan Gunther, a sophomore, finds herself the target of threats on a campus website dedicated to gossip. Someone knows her daily routine in unsettling detail, but even when she goes to the police, they tell her there's nothing they can do until there is an actual physical threat made.

When Megan is brutally murdered in her own apartment and her roommate is hospitalized as well, Detective Ellie Hatcher and her straight-talking partner J.J. Rogan take the case. They soon discover a connection between Megan's murder and another one involving a real estate agent who had been living a dangerous double life. The stakes are raised when Megan's surviving roommate disappears and Det. Hatcher realizes that she must be found before yet another young woman dies.

With twists and turns and compassion doled out in equal measure, 212 is a satisfying read that has me eager for Burke to pen the next in this intelligent and topical series set in contemporary New York City.

CITIES OF REFUGE by Michael Helm (2010)

This third novel by Michael Helm is his best to date and the two previous ones made it to the short list of the top fiction prize in Canada, the Scotiabank Giller. I expect no less of this one, except I dare to hope that it be selected the 2010 winner.

In CITIES OF REFUGE subtle Russian nesting doll narratives and meditations on loss and violence set it apart from other literary novels, though paradoxically Helm's stylistic restraint is reminiscent of Coetzee's. If you've read the Nobel Laureate's DISGRACE, you'll know what I mean.

In spare and haunting prose, Helm both unravels and weaves the stories of 28-year-old Kim and her estranged father Harold, an historian of Latin America. Both Kim and Harold have come face-to-face with blind violence and it is that untenable bond that cleaves them.

CITIES OF REFUGE is also a novel about illegal immigrants and the people who try to help them find new lives when there may be absolutely no reason to hope. And, it is a love letter to Toronto neighborhoods, to a dying mother and to those with the power to save or condemn. Expect to be challenged morally and intellectually by this worthy and moving book.

HEART AND SOUL by Maeve Binchy

Fans of Binchy's novels will feel the Dublin familiarity of the posh neighborhood restaurant Quentin's in this most recent tale about a middle-aged cardiologist who is raising her 20-something daughters by herself while her estranged husband begins a second family with his twenty-something girlfriend.

Many of the relationships are cliche and the almost-tragedies predictable as the folks with the hearts of gold face obstacle after obstacle before realizing that not all nice guys and dolls finish last. There is class tension thrown in for good measure to show that the Anglo-Irish aristocracy really isn't consigned to the past. New prejudices form with the influx of cheap labour from Eastern Europe and a priest who is being stalked by a sociopathic parishioner.

Binchy's compassion rings true nonetheless and she manages to show that even the most unlovable among us are worthy of love.

THE WONDER by Diana Evans (2009)

I absolutely loved Diana Evans' breakout novel 26A (winner of the Orange Award for New Writers) and this sophomore effort is equally as engaging.

THE WONDER follows adult siblings/orphans Lucas and Denise who share life aboard a boat moored on the Thames, the same narrow skiff on which they were raised by their eccentric mother. Denise is the responsible older sibling who runs her own floral business while her younger brother Lucas is mostly adrift, though he occasionally writes bit pieces for a magazine.

Trying to figure out who he is and where he's come from, Lucas plumbs the depths of his father's past and discovers that he was at one time an extraordinary dancer/choreographer who steered the once-respected Midnight Ballet, a modern dance company of mainly Black dancers in England in the 1960s.

Meeting one of the lead dancers as well as a dance critic who knew his father intimately, Lucas manages to unravel truths that help him forge his own identity.

Because Evans was a dancer before she became a writer and a critic, this novel hums with authentic dance-world detail.

SO MANY WAYS TO BEGIN by Jon McGregor (2006)

Named by GRANTA as one of the top writers under 30, Jon McGregor hits all of the marks with this second novel. As its title implies, there are so many ways to begin: relationships, careers, love.

Protagonist David Carter learns quite unexpectedly through the unintended disclosure of a secret by his mother's longtime friend, his Aunt Julia, (who thanks to early onset Alzheimer's no longer knows how to distinguish the past from the present) when he's twenty-something that he is adopted. His understanding of who he is and where he's come from falls away and he becomes obsessed with finding out who he really is.

Ironically, David's day job is as a curator and archivist at a local Coventry museum, so he is well-equipped to research the past. At the same time, David is struggling with the emotional loss of his wife Eleanor, who is wrestling with difficulties in her own past, one that she knows only too well.

What is interesting about the way that McGregor unravels their stories is his use of artifacts to drive the narrative. For example, we peer into their individual and shared lives by examining items such as "Shoebox of assorted domestic goods, bullets, shrapnel, 1953-60;" "b/w photograph of Albert Carter, defaced, c.1943;" Hospital admissions card, 1945 (discovered 1976);" and "Envelopes with Aberdeen postmarks, occasional 1984-2000." The tangible detritus of personal histories make David and Eleanor seem just like you and me.

I am looking forward to getting my hands on copies of McGregor's other books: IF NOBODY SPEAKS OF REMARKABLE THINGS and EVEN THE DOGS. He had me captivated from the opening page right through to the end.

TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM by Paul Auster

My neighbour loaned me this little novel--the first I've read of Auster's-- because he said that Auster is his favourite American novelist. I can understand why, knowing that he is also a fan of Camus and St. Exupery.

Mr. Blank is the protagonist, an elderly man who seems either to be suffering from early Alzheimer's or brainwashing. He is kept in a sterile room that might be a prisoner's cell and every moment of his life is recorded by video and sound. There are a variety of supporting characters who come and go from his room, claiming to be doctors, lawyers, former colleagues, possible lovers. Because Mr. Blank is never quite sure of their identity, neither are we.

To help pass the time he reads a manuscript in loose leafed paper that sits on his desk next to a pile of framed photographs that are supposed to trigger memories of relationships past, most of which haunt him.

The book is unsettling and induced in me panic, which I'm sure was entirely the point, but if TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM is typical of the kind of stories Auster tells, I won't be reaching for another one anytime soon.

JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby (2009)

Most recently Hornby's screenplay for "An Education" was nominated for an Academy Award, but JULIET, NAKED revisits earlier interests of his previously explored in HIGH FIDELITY and FEVER PITCH: the influence of pop culture and loving relationships.

Annie and Duncan have been together for fifteen years and think they love each other. They are both keen on literature and the arts and music, but Duncan has become obsessively interested in a washed up 80s singer/songwriter called Tucker Crowe; both the real and imagined Tucker drives a wedge in Duncan's relationship with Annie.

Using email and blogposts in addition to the third person narrative creates an immediacy to the characters' voices and propels the narrative forward in a satisfying way. JULIET, NAKED is also a cautionary tale about trust and intimacy for contemporary times.

THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG by Alan Bradley (2010)

In this second whodunnit by Bradley , eleven year-old chemistry whiz and neighborhood snoop Flavia de Luce finds herself muddling her way through another mystery in 1950 Bishop's Lacey--the sleepy English town where she is to the manor born.

There are two deaths that demand Flavia's sleuthing attention: a 5 year-old hanging of a young boy and the likely electrocution of a famous visiting puppeteer who expires in full view of his audience.

While she pieces together the clues, Flavia is faced with the irritating teenish behaviour of her older sisters Daffy (Daphne) and Feely (Ophelia) that temporarily distracts her, though she is reassured in her quest by her father's faithful servant Dogger who acts as her conscience.

Again, Bradley has wound a tale that is intriguing and playful and mischievous: Flavia's precocity is just what the doctor ordered.

THE VINTAGE CAPER by Peter Mayle (2009)

This fly by night light read was perfect for the gym. Flitting from the excesses of Hollywood to the braggadoccio of the French Riviera, Mayle's wine heist caper is a vacuous and frothy tale about vacuous and frothy folk.

Entertainment lawyer Danny Roth has the ego to match his unmatchable wine cellar which he flaunts in a feature article published in the LA Times. While Roth is away at another home in Aspen over the holidays, the best bottles in his collection are stolen: 3 million dollars worth of wine, on the lam.

The insurance company hires Sam Levitt, a former corporate lawyer and wine connoisseur, to track down the missing vino. His journey takes him to Paris, then Bordeaux, then Provence and into the home of an eccentric billionaire collector who just might have had the wherewithal to spirit Roth's bottles away.

Though the plot is entirely predictable and the characters stock, I enjoyed learning about special vintages and being reminded of the splendour of the south of France. You'll enjoy it all the more with a piche of chilled vin rose within arm's reach.

ONE GOOD DOG by Susan Wilson (2010)

If you are a fan of Cesar Milan and his dog-whispering ways, this novel is for you.

Adam March is on the fast track to corporate fiefdom as the next in line for the CEO position. His daughter Ariel jumps horses. His wife Sterling spends her days planning the next best party and shopping for her designer-label wardrobe: it's a full life, rife with materialistic excess.

However, a telephone message Adam receives one morning, scribbled on a pink scrap by his PA essentially unhinges him and his made-for-tv lifestyle unravels in the blink of an eye.

Enter a pit-bull cross with a sweet disposition and an uncanny knack for knowing he's on death row at the local shelter. Chance, as Adam later names him, saves Adam as he spirals, but so does the new community at the homeless shelter where Adam has been ordered by the courts to do 6 months of service. Salvation comes in the unlikeliest of places.

SUMMERTIME by J.M. Coetzee (2009)

The South African Nobel Laureate ( and novelist most famous for Disgrace) has written a gem of a book in his third installment of his fictional memoir.

Summertime finds a young British biographer working on a book about John Coetzee focusing on the years between 1972-1977 when the not yet world-famous writer was sharing a run-down home in Cape Town with his widowed father.

The book consists of a series of interviews given in the recent past (2007-2009) with some of the women in Coetzee's life including relatives and lovers. What is especially engaging to me is the remarkable emotional objectivity with which he describes himself in third person through these female perspectives. It feels almost like a very clever extended inside joke.

POINT OMEGA by Don Delillo (2010)

Framed by the viewing of a video installation called 24 Hour Psycho in which the film is slowed down to play over the course of a full day without any sound, this compact novel turns its inner eye on Richard Elster where he has retreated to the American desert. There, filmmaker Jim Finley joins Elster, a former government consultant who specialized in troop deployment and counter insurgency, intent on documenting his experience. Finley hopes to get Elster's permission to make a one-take film along the lines of Russian Ark, but instead of a sweeping pic, it would be singularly about Elster: "about a man and a wall."

Elster's daughter Jessica shows up part way and the three of them form an odd sort of family until Jessica disappears. It's her disappearance that provides the novel its narrative drive and its ambiguous conclusion.

FEBRUARY by Lisa Moore (2009)

I read this novel in one gulp, marveling at the gorgeous prose and pacing every page that I turned. I can't believe that FEBRUARY was not on all of the book prize short lists in 2009, because Lisa Moore's style is breathtaking and her capacity for description and characterization unmatched by most of her peers.

Moore uses the events of Valentine's night in 1982 when all 84 men aboard the oil rig Ocean Ranger off the coast of Newfoundland died as the through line that unites her narrative that switches seamlessly from present to past as Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband drowns, reveals how she has endured in the quarter century since her grief began.

Richard Ford calls Moore "an astonishing writer....[with] a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells and an unswerving instinct for what's important in life."

Don't wait any longer. Get yourself a copy of FEBRUARY and prepare to be astonished.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by Stieg Larsson (2006)

In this sequel to the immensely popular and riveting THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Mikael Blomkvist has decided to run a controversial article in his magazine about sex trafficking in Sweden that will expose well-known and highly-regarded members of the establishment including journalists, government officials and dirty cops.

On the eve of the publication the two collaborating journalists are murdered execution style in the comfort of their own flat and they aren't the only ones--a lawyer who just happens to be the guardian of Lisbeth Salander is also slain in his bedroom, by his own gun, the smoking gun that is discovered in the stairwell of the building where the murdered journalists are found. And, the circumstantial evidence points to Salander as the killer.

While the first book in this Millenium trilogy found Blomkvist indebted to the peculiar and brilliant and socially challenged Salander for literally saving his life through her own determined brand of justice, the tables are turned in this equally adrenaline-filled sequel that left me gasping for breath on the final page.

THE FIFTH WOMAN by Henning Mankell (2000)

In this Kurt Wallander mystery, there are two murders that baffle and appal the inspector. An octogenarian bird enthusiast and self-published poet is impaled on sharpened bamboo poles in a ditch near his secluded home and the atrophied corpse of a missing florist is discovered strangled and tied to a tree where he is found by a runner.

As clues, Wallander has discovered a skull, a diary and a photo of three men taken in the 50s or 60s and it seems that at least one of the recent dead is implicated in former mercenary activity. Just as the team begin to understand what is happening, there is another corpse, this time a university researcher who is drowned in a hemp sack, and the pathologist is certain that he was alive when the bag hit the water.

What becomes clear is that each of these victims shares a sordid past and that in the present there is someone determined to expose those horrors, but not before a distinct brand of justice is served.

What I continue to appreciate in Mankell's storytelling is his ability to weave narratives so that each has a definite and important weight.

LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor (2009)

This is the most recent novel by the prolific Irish treasure William Trevor.

It takes place during the middle of the past century in a small Irish town. A stranger cycles through Rathmoye asking for directions to the burnt out cinema which he plans to photograph. He happens to meet Ellie, a foundling raised by nuns who is newly married to her employer, the widower Dillahan, a man who is responsible for the deaths of his first wife and child, though we never discover how or why.

A romance blooms and then dies, leaving Ellie devastated as Florian arranges for a passport, sells his family home and tells her that they were only meant to have the summer.

LOVE AND SUMMER is a quiet gem-of-a-story that romanticizes farm life.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS by Lorrie Moore (2009)

Marketed as a post-9/11 novel, A GATE AT THE STAIRS follows mid-Western university gal Tassie Keltjin as she navigates her way through the words and action of a post-racial America.

She is excited to have escaped the farm life of her upbringing to study Chaucer, Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir and finds herself taking a job as a part time nanny for a quirky middle-aged couple who are in the process of adopting a biracial toddler. Tassie peels away the layers in her relationship with her new employers to discover a dark and disturbing past at the same time that she worries about her younger brother who is considering enlisting in order to avoid his future as a farmer or a truckdriver, the only two options that seem available to him.

I read this book in one gulp, even though there were moments that I was ready to hurl it across the room because of the preciousness of some of the bit players, which I realize is entirely the point that Moore is satirizing.

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth (2001)

Having been so disappointed by THE HUMBLING, I reached for an earlier Roth novel to remind myself what it was that I so admire about his writing.

THE HUMAN STAIN follows that tragic (though not unexpected) trajectory of Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor who is forced to retire for allegedly racist comments he makes in one of his classes. The irony of this dismissal is not lost on Coleman or on the reader who quickly discovers the heart of Silk's secret that he has protected for 50 years.

There are the predictable Roth fixations like aging sexuality and contemporary American politics (it is the height of the White House scandal involving Monica Lewinsky and then-president Bill Clinton) that keep the plot simmering, but more importantly Roth unravels his protagonist's tragic self-awareness.

Nadine Gordimer called THE HUMAN STAIN Roth's "best novel," because in it "the impact of society on himself and the people around him, world contemporary mores, beliefs, prejudices, have come to full realization."

CAT'S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut

On a recent trip to Germany, I ran out of reading material and borrowed this Vonnegut from a student while I was stuck in a hotel ministering to a different one with the flu.

Of course I'd devoured all Vonnegut books in my twenties, but reading this one in my forties gave me a renewed appreciation for his satiric wit. I was also happy to refamiliarize myself with Vonnegut's voice before returning to Toronto because I had tickets for the new George F. Walker play AND SO IT GOES which features KV as the protagonist's imaginary shrink.

Not that I'd pick Vonnegut for my own shrink--I'm more liable to take advice from Tina Fey or Mel Brooks.

LIT by Mary Karr

What an adrenaline-pumping ride Mary Karr's most recent memoir is. LIT is a kick-in-the-ass, quick-upper-cut-of-a- read that had me gasping for breath in awe at its direct, unselfpitying tone and clean prose style.

Forget Hemingway: Karr is my new stylistic guru.

THE THIN MAN by Dashiell Hammett (1933)

I read THE MALTESE FALCON years ago when I was obsessed with all things Humprey Bogart, but only got to THE THIN MAN fairly recently.

What I loved about this book was how the language play between Nick and Norah Charles reminded me of my grandparents and their expressions like "tight" or "pansy." Though, how this glamourous couple managed to get anything done between all of the Manhattan high balls or martinis that they consumed is really beyond my ken.

THE FOREVER WAR by Dexter Filkins

Until I read this book, I'd only had a vague idea about the horrors in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Filkins is a top-notch New York Times journalist who manages to ground each piece in the ordinary, reminiscent of the fiction of Carol Shields.

He doesn't shy away from the honest truth about circumstances in which new normal includes children who run skittishly across minefields because that's the quicker route, the exploded ground-zero flesh of innocent civilians or the puppyish American soldiers who are meant to serve and protect.

I have a better understanding how covering war zones becomes a compulsion and causes irrevocable damages.

This is a brave and shocking book.

THE HONEY LOCUST by Jeffrey Round (2009)

Photojournalist Angela Thomas and videographer Andre Riel meet in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, chronicling the horrific civil war between the Croats and Serbs which they file for a Canadian daily newspaper. They are both committed to telling truthful stories, no matter how upsetting, and are driven to exposing the awful reality of ordinary people under siege. For a time, their flak jackets and UN affiliation manage to protect them from physical harm, but that good luck cannot endure.

The backstory involves Angela's complicated relationship with her mother and is as satisfying to witness unravel as the main plot on the war front. I especially liked the way that Round re-imagines an alternate ending from Angela's perspective, a notion that is used as a motif beginning with the moment that Andre manages to get Angela's Leica back from an army guard by offering him a pack of cigarettes wrapped in a little cash.

This is a literary novel that is a real departure from Round's previous books, campy mysteries featuring Bradford Fairfax.

HALF BROKE HORSES by Jeannette Walls (2009)

Because I was enthralled with Walls' memoir THE GLASS CASTLE, I couldn't wait to read this "true novel" about her grandmother Lily Casey. Although the cover has one of Dorothea Lange's famous Depression-era photos taken for the Farm Security Administration setting the tone, the inside sections have actual photos of Lily and her relatives including her hardworking husband Jim, her Hollywood-dreamer sister Helen and her daughter Rosemary (Walls' mother who so memorably opens her memoir rummaging through a NYC dumpster).

Lily is certainly a character worthy of the tale that her granddaughter pens for her. This bildungsroman stretches from Lily's Texan upbringing on a ranch where she learned to break the horses of the title to the two-bit towns she served in as a schoolteacher (including a remote settlement where when she educated the Mormon girls in her care about the wider world she was run out of town by the patriarch), to the dizzying excitement of being a flapper in Chicago, to the massive ranch where she and her husband raised their two children and she takes flying lessons with the hope of becoming a bush pilot to bring a much-needed income to support her family through more tough times.

In the Epilogue the story loops around to focus on Rosemary and Rex and their loose ideas about raising their own children and the certain difficult times ahead for them all. Lily's voice is resolute, however: "No way in hell were Rex and Rosemary cutting me out of the action when it came to my own grandchildren. I had a few things to teach those kids, and there wasn't a soul alive who could stop me."

THREE DAY ROAD by Joseph Boyden

I've read several wonderful novels set on the front during WWI including Pat Barker's REGENERATION trilogy and Timothy Findley's THE WARS, but none of them matches the exquisite detail and narrative triumph of THREE DAY ROAD.

With the convincing authentic voices of Xavier Bird (a Native sniper in the Canadian division on the front at Vimy and Ypres and Passchendaele) and his last remaining relative Niska threading together in the cyclical tradition of Native storytelling, Joseph Boyden weaves together stories that hurt, resonate and matter.

Using the legend of the windigo as a through line, THREE DAY ROAD will open your eyes once again to the human capacity to endure man's inhumanity to man and our desire for healing through the balm of storytelling.

BEIJING CONFIDENTIAL by Jan Wong

If you've read her column, you know that Jan Wong is no shrinking violet when it comes to asking tough questions. But, did you know that Wong was the first Canadian to be permitted to study at Beijing University after the Cultural Revolution, or that she was a dewy-eyed Maoist who laboured idealistically at Number One Machine Tool Factory in the 70s, or that she convinced the Beijing police to return her stolen car that they'd equipped with a red siren to her during her stint as the Globe and Mail's correspondent decades later?

BEIJING CONFIDENTIAL is Wong's journey back to Beijing with her husband "Fat Paycheck" and two teenaged sons in tow in the summer of 2006 with the single purpose of trying to find a woman she'd betrayed to the authorities in the 70s, a woman whose life she had most certainly ruined.

Wong reported on the Tian An Men Square massacre in 1989, has spoken openly about the "tank man" and has long been a voice against human rights violations, a national shame. However, her personal shame forces her to make this very personal journey to try to reconcile with a woman named Yin, if she can find her. Beijing is a modern city now. Few of its million cellphone users are listed in its phonebooks and a geography that was once familiar is perplexing as the government gears up to save face and welcome the world at the 2008 Summer Olympics

THREE DAY ROAD by Joseph Boyden (2005)

I've read several wonderful novels set on the front during WWI including Pat Barker's REGENERATION trilogy and Timothy Findley's THE WARS, but none of them matches the exquisite detail and narrative triumph of THREE DAY ROAD.

With the convincing authentic voices of Xavier Bird (a Native sniper in the Canadian division on the front at Vimy and Ypres and Passchendaele) and his last remaining relative Niska threading together in the cyclical tradition of Native storytelling, Joseph Boyden weaves together stories that hurt, resonate and matter.

Using the legend of the windigo as a through line, THREE DAY ROAD will open your eyes once again to the human capacity to endure man's inhumanity to man and our desire for healing through the balm of storytelling.

DEAD CONNECTION by Alafair Burke (2007)

When I started this book after a dinner party last night, I didn't expect to have it inform my dreamscape, but it did, and I woke up, heart racing, worried that my identity had been stolen.

NYPD Rookie detective Ellie Hatcher goes undercover on the Internet dating scene when it seems the murders of two young women exactly a year apart could be related to First Date, a NYC site for singles looking to hook up. Handpicked by maverick detective Flann McIlroy, Ellie finds herself navigating the high tech world of identity theft and discovering that the sociopathic behaviour of the suspect is all too familiar.

Being the reading geek that I am I especially enjoyed the moment where Ellie contacts a New Iberian detective Dave Robi.... to follow a lead about the past of one of the victims. What fun for Burke to have her father's most famous detective Dave Robichaux implied in the background investigation!

DEAD CONNECTION is a first-rate thriller that will have you cheering for Ellie Hatcher as she navigates her way through the mess and heartbreak to expose the greed and horror at the core.

CLOSE CASE by Alafair Burke (2005)

This is the second Samantha Kincaid novel I've read and it's cemented my urge to read every novel by Alafair Burke, herself a former deputy district attorney in Portland. There is a credibility to her storytelling that convinces me that everything is plausible.

In the opening pages, star investigative reporter Percy Crenshaw is bludgeoned to death in the carport of his tony neighborhood where his Mercedes with its vanity plate "Snoop" fits right in. Everyone says what a good guy Percy was and how generous he was to the extended community, especially to those who were so frequently marginalized by poverty.

Two young men seem easy suspects, especially when one of them confesses as much, only later to recant citing coercive police tactics. Complicating the tension is the fact that Kincaid's live-in beau, Chuck Forbes, is one of the detectives involved in the investigation. He is torn, of course, between protecting his love and supporting his partner Mike, who has a questionable past of his own.

Faced with a bull-terrier defense counsel and new evidence that brings her case under question, Kincaid finds herself wondering who she can trust, including herself. With the help of a fledgling reporter determined to interpret Crenshaw's notes, Kincaid follows the path of clues that leads her to the truth, but not before other innocent victims are slain in its wake.

RAIN GODS by James Lee Burke (2009)

Although I am a committed reader of Burke's Dave Robichaux novels, RAIN GODS is the first that features sheriff Hackberry Holland (a war vet with horrors of his own to exorcise) and his deputy Pam Tibbs (who has more than a little crush on her boss). Set in a tiny Texas town near the Mexican border, the novel offers a lens on the lives of the lost, the vulnerable, the wounded and the corrupt who people this desperate place in desperate times.

Holland's discovery of the shallow graves of nine illegal aliens leads him to the heart of organized crime and face to face with memorable villains like Hugo Cistranos, Nick Dolan and Bible-thumping sociopath "Preacher" Jack Collins all of whom want to kill a young damaged Iraq War vet Pete Flores, who with his girlfriend Vikki Gaddis, hopes beyond hope for a fresh start.

With betrayal at breakneck speed and Burke's capacity to show humans at their best and their worst, RAIN GODS will keep you reading through the night.

JOIN THE REVOLUTION, COMRADE by Charles Foran

I read this collection of essays and reminiscences and book reviews because Charles Foran is going to be speaking at an event I've curated called Focus on China here in Toronto on February 2nd. The essays include the titular one that explores relationships with native Chinese friends during the time Foran spent teaching in Beijing that happened to place him in the eye of the student protests that culminated in the Tian An Men Square Massacre at the beginning of June 1989. The writing moves to Bali and to Vietnam and to Dublin where he was a student of Irish literature and working on his first novel manuscript.

I especially enjoyed the pieces about language and listening to the music and rhythm of accents as well as the more provocative pieces chronicling his time in south east Asia, an area for which he clearly has a passion.

Charles Foran is the authorized biographer of Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler and that book MORDECAI RICHLER: A LIFE will be published later in 2010 by Knopf.

Visit his website: www.charlesforan.com to learn more about his other books.

ANGEL'S TIP by Alafair Burke (2008)

In ANGEL'S TIP, three female Midwest college students decide to spend Spring Break in NYC where, on their final night on the town, they use their fake I.D. to get into a trendy nightspot in the meat-packing district. When it's time to head back to the hotel to snatch a few hours' sleep before flying back to Indiana, Chelsea Hart decides to stay on in the VIP room of the elite club, flirting with handsome strangers while her friends Stefanie and Jordan call it a night.

Cue NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher, a looker herself, who is on her morning run with her brother Jess who is flopping at her apartment while he's trying to make it as a musician. Ellie comes upon the mauled corpse of what turns out to be Chelsea Hart, her legs splayed, lingerie on display, and stabbed several times, including on her face.

In this mystery, you'll be carried along from clue to clue in step with Ellie and her partner J.J. Rogan and your heart will thump just a little quicker as you begin to unravel the knot of deception that leads to the truth about who killed Chelsea Hart and why. You'll be white-knuckling it all the way through to the satisfying end.

I especially enjoyed the pop-cultural references to books and tv shows of my early adolescence including Judy Blume's BLUBBER and then-scandalous WIFEY and the misheard lyrics to the theme songs for ALL IN THE FAMILY and THE JEFFERSONS.

Alafair Burke knows her genre and is already writing at the top of her game.

FIREWALL by Henning Mankell (2002)

Two apparently unconnected cases disarm Inspector Kurt Wallander. In one, the corpse of computer consultant Tynnes Falk is found near the ATM closest to his apartment where it seems that he has died of an unexpected heart attack. In the other, two teenaged girls, Sonja Hokberg and Eva Persson have been arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver, a crime to which they both confess without any remorse.

As Wallander peels away layers of both cases, he realizes that the implications extend far beyond the borders of Sweden. With compounding personal troubles at work, Wallander thinks he knows who to trust, but he's not sure. It is this doubt that allows him to save his own life and the life of another teenager who has been also caught up in this web of intrigue that reaches as far as the heart of darkest Angola and the World Bank.

STILL ALICE by Lisa Genova (2007)

Written by a woman who has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard, STILL ALICE is not your typical novel. Because of the medical details, it reads more like a case study at times. However, as the protagonist, a 50-year-old cognitive psychology prof, is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the narrative draws you in and Genova creates a character who is entirely credible.

For anyone with a family member who is suffering the ravages of this debilitating disease, STILL ALICE is a must read.

THE TELLING OF LIES by Timothy Findley (1989)

In this mystery, everyone seems to be a liar, including Vanessa Van Horne, our narrator and sleuth. Vanessa is holidaying for the last summer at the Aurora Sands Hotel (it is closing) on the eastern seaboard when Calder Maddox, an elderly and excessively wealthy businessman expires in his beach chair in broad daylight on the day that an iceberg has floated into view.

There is a flurry of activity as Maddox's wife is brought to the hotel and his longtime mistress is conveniently disappeared. What perplexes Vanessa and her MD cousin Lawrence is the discovery that Maddox's corpse is being kept on ice as important government agents descend on this sleepy retreat.

Not one to abandon her curious ways even when threatened, Vanessa, with the help of her friend Mercedes, uncovers ugly truths that lead her to solve the mystery.

This is not Findley's best novel (for me that would be either FAMOUS LAST WORDS or NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE), though it was given the 1989 Edgar Award for the best mystery book in Canada. He does know how to tell a story, and Vanessa albeit irksome is memorable.

MISSING JUSTICE by Alafair Burke (2004)

Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid has been recently promoted and her first assignment back after having been attacked in her own home is one about a judge who has gone missing.

Clarissa Easterbrook's Cole Haan loafer has been found in the muck at a new building project on the outskirts of Portland and her lab Griffie picked up by neighbors wandering the streets with his leash still attached. From the outset it seems that Judge Easterbrook has been abducted and that is upsetting enough to her husband, the CEO of the local hospital. When the police find her corpse, her husband becomes almost catatonic.

It's too easy to apprehend a suspect who had been sending Clarissa threatening letters and Kincaid wisely doubts the decision to prosecute him without crossing all of her Ts and dotting her Is. Adding insult to injury it's Kincaid's suave and noxious ex-husband who turns up as opposing counsel.

There are many red herrings along the way, but they didn't deter me from happily flipping the pages through to its satisfying end where even Kincaid's father's mysterious professional past is delectably resolved.

This is the first Samantha Kincaid novel I've read, but it certainly won't be the last.

THE HUMBLING by Philip Roth (2009)

I'll read anything by Roth, but this most recent novella had me a little disappointed in the predictability of the three act outcome.

Roth continues to be preoccupied with sex and aging and here his protagonist, a formerly famous actor who recently admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital, finds himself smitten with a lesbian 25 years his junior whom he first met in utero when he played against her mother in Synge's Playboy of the Western World 40 years ago.

Pegeen Mike lands on Simon's doorstep and offers him sexual salvation and companionship, but of course that can't last what with her parents and her scorned lesbian lover interfering.

Yet, I can't help but admire the directness and honesty and the believability of the words that Roth puts in the dirty mouths of his characters.

THE BRUTAL TELLING by Louise Penny (2009)

It's the end of summer in Three Pines and good things are happening for some of the locals: Ruth has adopted a duck named Rosa who follows her around like a lost lamb; the Bistro is brimming with business over the Labour Day weekend as visitors stretch out the last long weekend; and Clara Morrow has an upcoming show of her paintings at the Fortin Gallery in Montreal, a vernissage that promises to provide connections to some of the most influential people in the art world including a curator from the MoMA in NYC.

Even though the old Hadley House has been sold and gutted to become a posh inn and spa, it has been tainted again, by the corpse of a stranger and by the living breathing presence of a man who is a stranger to his son, but a "saint" to the wider world.

When "the Hermit's" bludgeoned body shows up on the floor of Olivier's Bistro, Inspector Gamache and his crew from the Surete are called in from Montreal to reveal not only the killer but also some ugly truths about greed.

In addition to purposeful plot twists and being welcomed into the homes and hearts of Three Pines locals like the Morrows, Myrna, Ruth, Olivier and Gabri, the inclusion of a subplot involving a first edition of Jane Eyre, the china of Catherine the Great and the work of Emily Carr kept me flipping pages through the night so I gulped the book in one sitting from start to finish.

The Brutal Telling is Globe and Mail crime fiction editor Margaret Canon's favorite pick for 2009 and I can see why. Pass the word about Louise Penny. She deserves to be read widely and with enthusiasm.

THE BOY IN THE MOON by Ian Brown (2009)

I probably read close to 100 books/year, many memoirs, mysteries and novels and no book has moved me more than this one this past year. I put Ian Brown's memoir on my Grade 11 English reading list because of the connection to L'Arche ( a community established by Jean Vanier for adults with intellectual disabilities) where all of my students are spending an evening volunteering throughout this school year.

What is astonishing about this book is the honesty, directness, compassion and love that infuses it. Brown does not set himself up for a pity party as a parent of a profoundly disabled son. Instead, he has the humility and grace to write truthfully about the exhausting and infuriating challenges of raising a child who not only rages and self-abuses but also has the capacity for joy.

Your attitudes will be altered by The Boy in the Moon and your heart might just be opened to a radical way of thinking about disability.

THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN by Garth Stein

This is a book I wish I'd written. I'm always a sucker for a story that's told by a dog (shouts out to Virginia Woolf, David Wrobelewski and Erika Ritter for particularly memorable canine tales) and in this case, Enzo is especially engaging.

On the last day of his life Enzo recalls the recent upset and troubles that have befallen his alpha male Denny, a young widower who has had to fight for custody of his only daughter because his rich in-laws refuse to accept that he could ever provide for Zoe in a sufficiently materialistic way.

Enzo and Denny are as close as man and man's best friend can be. They bond over Zoe, Eve and car racing. Yes, car racing-the art of the racing in the rain that is the title.

From the outset you know that Eve is going to die and it can't possibly be a surprise when it happens, but Enzo's description from his canine perspective underscores how transformative death can be.

Treat yourself and read this book that you will wish could just possibly be true.

HELLO GOODBYE: A NOVEL by Emily Chenoweth (2009)

This novel about a brain cancer patient's final summer is deft and not self-pitying. It's written from a third person perspective, so you have a little emotional distance from the three main characters, a self-absorbed university-aged daughter (Abby) and her parents (Elliott and Helen).

Clearly Chenoweth has walked this grief walk in her own life, because many of the details smack of a reality that is not contrived and essentially believable.

Sparing the reader the final goodbye, Chenoweth wisely closes the book with Helen (in the final stages of her inoperable brain cancer--a fate her healthy lifestyle couldn't spare her) looking over her shoulder as her husband and daughter jog up the path to meet her.

SPADEWORK by Timothy Findley (2001)

Although a novel, this could easily have been a morality play. You find infidelity, murder, betrayal and lust on the side streets of sleepy Stratford, the provincial Ontario town that discovered its raison d'etre when Tyrone Guthrie launched the theatre festival in the 1950s. And, in the tradition of 16th century morality plays, no one remains unpunished: avarice and lust eventually take a backseat to more pressing situations that involve real grief.

If you're lured by peering into the private lives of theatre folk, this is the book for you. Findley weaves a tapestry of small town preoccupations and peoples the warp with characters those familiar to his other work will identify: the lonely, the dispossessed, the sexually confused.

The tale unfolds and all of the digging begins after an accidental spade severs the line of communication into the home of the festival's nascent and dishy actor Griffin Kincaid.

9 DRAGONS by Michael Connelly (2009)

I picked up Connelly's most recent novel at IFOA where I heard him read on a night that Ian Rankin hosted. Both are masters of the crime fiction genre.

In 9 DRAGONS, Detective Harry Bosch is sent to investigate a homicide at Fortune Liquors, a small shop in a seedy section of south L.A. There he discovers John Li has been shot to death at close range, three times in the chest. Having met Li several years before, Bosch feels a connection and vows to his family that he will find his killer.

As he closes in on a suspect, a triad gang member who had been collecting protection payments from Li, Bosch receives an upsetting text video from his daughter's phone. Madeleine lives in Hong Kong with her mother and it appears that she has been abducted and Harry is being threatened from afar to drop his case in L.A.

Over the next 72 hours, Harry is on the chase of his life to find his daughter before she is trafficked out of Hong Kong and her organs are sold on the black market. Before they are reunited, Harry and his ex-wife's new love (and former triad member) Sun Yee find themselves in the seediest districts in Kowloon where there is real danger at every turn. There are 9 corpses that accumulate--the 9 dragons of the title.

Fans of Connelly will be amused by the appearance of Mickey Haller as Bosch's defense attorney when the Hong Kong police follow Bosch back to L.A. and try to pin the slaughter on him.

9 DRAGONS zooms along at a breakneck pace. I read its 374 pages in one gulp.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson

I have been meaning to read this crime novel since I first learned about it in the Sunday New York Times over a year ago. However, no amount of crime novels exposing man's inhumanity to man that I've read in the past could have prepared me for the horrific details connected to the masochistic serial killer at the heart of this story.

Thankfully Larsson tempered such graphic descriptions with a subplot involving a difficult romance, the tenuous health of a frail business icon and a through line about the mysterious disappearance/possible murder of a beloved woman who is part of a rich and famous family with questionable relationships.

Translated from the Swedish, I did find proper names with unfamiliar accents distracting, but not so much as to persuade me to stop reading this fiery-footed tale that gallops apace. And, the only situation that I found not credible was the remarkably open sexual rapport that journalist Mikael Blomkvist has with his married best friend Erika Berger.

Don't take only my word for this compelling book. Listen to Michael Ondaatje who blurbed "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an utterly fresh political and journalistic thriller that is also intimate and moral."

THE COMPLAINTS by Ian Rankin (2009)

Taking place over the course of 18 days in February in Edinburgh, this newest Rankin crime novel doesn't miss a note, even though I still pine for DI Rebus whom he stopped writing about two books ago in EXIT MUSIC.

Malcolm Fox is a more ordinary fellow, though like Rebus, he's not so lucky in love, having been divorced from his spouse after less than 2 years together. Malcolm has a sister who gets knocked about by her boyfriend and an aging father who is in a facility for which Malcolm foots the full bill without a grudge. Malcolm sees himself as the caretaker for both, though it's not until his sister's boyfriend shows up in a morgue that Fox acts on his genuine concern.

Because he is incapable of letting sleeping dogs lie, Fox finds himself on the wrong end of a promise and is suspended from the Complaints department with pay. He and another cop with a conscience, Jamie Breck, take the law into their own hands and get into even more trouble along the way to resolution.

I will read anything that Rankin pens and hope that this isn't the only time I'll be reading about Fox, though I do hope that he'll find more to do than alphabetize his exploding book collection in his spare time.

TIME WAS SOFT THERE by Jeremy Mercer

This was a dreamy little memoir of the English language bookshop with heart in Paris, originally founded by Sylvia Beach who famously loaned books to Hemingway and published Joyce when no-one else would look at his writing.

I especially loved meeting the current octogenarian owner George, a true Renaissance man, with the heart of ten thousand men.

Did you know that you could move in to Shakespeare and Company and work in the bookshop if you are a writer passing through?

TOO MUCH HAPPINESS by Alice Munro (2009)

You can't rush reading Alice Munro. I savoured each story and felt altered by every one of them. Violence shimmers under the surface, yet each flawed character draws attention to our own humanity.

Too Much Happiness is a collection not to be missed, nor is it for the weak of heart. Here is 78-year-old Alice Munro at the peak of her storytelling powers--until she dazzles with her next book, of course.

ALICE MUNRO SELECTED STORIES (1997)

I picked up this collection in Paris at Shakespeare and Company at the end of June and rationed the stories while I was reading many other novels.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, writes such heart-stopping and utterly beautiful stories. Assembled here are the ones that Munro chose, stories that she believes have a "sturdy sense" of self, "built out of [their] own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile."

Dip in and then delve. You will change the way you read fiction.

THE STRANGER HOUSE by Reginald Hill (2005)

I can't get enough of good crime fiction and Hill is at the top of his game in this novel. A young Australian mathematician is on her way to graduate work at Cambridge, but en route she decides to visit Illthwaite, the village from which her paternal grandmother was displaced thanks to a child migrant scheme forty years ago. Samantha Flood discovers quite quickly that the villagers she asks about her gran are definitely not telling her the full shilling about the past and she is determined to find out the truth, in spite of the consequences.

Hill never insults his readers, rather assumes that you are up to the chase, both physical and mental.

THE DAY THE FALLS STOOD STILL by Cathy Marie Buchanan (2009)

First time novelist Cathy Marie Buchanan writes with precision and aplomb in this tale which begins in 1915 in Niagara Falls, the dawn of a new era of hydroelectric power. Seventeen year old Bess Heath has lived a life of privilege as the youngest daughter of a hydro executive; however, after graduating from her boarding school and returning to her family home, she discovers that nothing is as she'd remembered. Her father has been fired, her mother is working as a seamstress instead of managing her household staff and Bess's beloved sister Isabel has taken to her bed, her engagement to Boyce Cruikshank broken.

A chance meeting with Tom Cole on a trolley platform changes Bess's life. And, although her blossoming relationship with him causes friction with her family, Bess is determined to make it work because Tom is not only handsome, but also talented and kind and thoughtful. Prejudice makes life difficult for the two lovers, but they persevere and remain devoted to each other throughout the years that Tom serves in WWI and returns a broken man.

Archival photos of the era as well as news clippings interspersed throughout the story add a degree of verisimilitude, though Buchanan's telling is deft enough without them. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey along the shoals and eddies of this story and you will too.

SWAN PEAK by James Lee Burke (2008)

Louisiana lawman Dave Robicheaux is taking a well-deserved and much needed break in Montana on his friend's ranch with his wife Molly and his bail-buddy Clete Purcel. They've left their Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans parish homes for respite in the mountains where they hope to spend their days fishing and relaxing.

However, the unusual and brutal murders of two college students on their friend's property pulls them into the whirl of a nefarious community run by a vicious and twisted oil tycoon.

Clete continues to be haunted by nightmares of a bloody episode in which the remains of a former mob boss had to be "combed out of the trees..." looking like "pulled pork somebody had dropped into a fire."

Dave and Clete and Molly have to keep their wits about them in order to get out of Montana alive.

JAQUOT AND THE ANGEL by Martin O'Brien

This is the second Jaquot novel I've read and it is as equally satisfying as the first also set in Provence.

A German family is extinguished by close-range gunfire and the case is one of the most baffling of Inspector Danile Jaquot's career. Many of the villagers believe that the crime could be personal since they remember the atrocities committed by the Germans during WWII, crimes that included the execution of innocent civilians.

When a local son is arrested and charged with the murders because of his passing dalliance with the dead granddaughter, a young stranger comes to town to temporarily run the family's flower shop. Marie-Ange's talent as a horticulturist and a business woman means the shop flourishes, but it is her talent as a psychic that is even more important in helping Jaquot to solve the crimes as the corpses continue to pile up.

THE SUFFOCATING NIGHT by Andrew Taylor

Cameron Rouse, a right-wing freelance journalist from London, shows up in Lydmouth to do a piece on the "communist" squatters in a disused military camp outside of town. However, Rouse's working visit to Lydmouth is short-lived indeed. He's one of the corpses that mystifies Detective Richard Thornhill who is on a bit of a wild goose chase of "persons of interest" that includes local Philip Wemyss-Brown, the esteemed editor of the local newspaper, and dear friend to Thornhill's former lover Jill Francis.

Taylor weaves a tangled web that is supremely satisfying as the real criminals are unable to escape its sticky grasp.