Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks

Ian Fleming’s star rose when John F. Kennedy casually mentioned that he was reading one of the James Bond books.  Bond burned his way through 14 books, all of which became movies, before Fleming’s death in 1964.  Those movies, which departed the published canon in 1982′s Moonraker, have come to define James Bond’s image, despite [...]

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Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson

“The number doesn’t matter. If I got down to 070.00, I’d want 065.00. If I weighed 010.00, I wouldn’t be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.” [...]

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Ink and Steel, by Elizabeth Bear

It’s no secret that Francis Crawford is my favorite tortured, self-destructive, poetry-spouting, multilingual courtier and spy. But Kit Marlowe, as fictionalized in this Elizabethan historical fantasy, has lately been running a close second. Stabbed through the eye in a barroom brawl, the infamous Marlowe is pleasantly surprised to wake up not in Hell, but in [...]

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The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

The comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable, but when Quentin Coldwater is recruited by Brakebills, a magical university hidden in upstate New York, he’s no wide-eyed eleven year old. Smart, anti-social, competitive, and melancholy, he’s designed his life to please Princeton’s admissions office. He took up performing magic tricks so that he could claim an [...]

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The Demon’s Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Wisecracking brothers with swords and guns, on the run from the demons that killed their father. This could have been a run-of-the-mill teenage urban fantasy with demon hunting and chase scenes, but first-time author Brennan also gives us an intriguing, sardonic narrator who hooked me into a story I didn’t expect. Sixteen-year-old Nick Ryves is [...]

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Farewell, Elmer Kelton

Some folks argue that the Western story as a separate genre is dead, or at least dying, and will before too long be just a subgenre of Historical Fiction. With the passing of Elmer Kelton last Saturday, that prediction is sadly one step closer to becoming true. Kelton was a writer of Western stories that [...]

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My Life in France, by Julia Child

Library users placing holds on a cookbook first published in 1961, spiking sales of butter and cream… Julia Child must be in the news again. With Meryl Streep playing Julia in theatres everywhere, cooks are inspired to recreate that iconic joie-de-vivre in the kitchen, and those of us who don’t cook are inspired to read [...]

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Ghost Town, by Richard W. Jennings

This book was very different than I expected. Given the description of a book featuring a camera that can take pictures of people who aren’t there, wouldn’t you expect a scary story? After all, it is called Ghost Town. But no, there’s not a spooky page to be found in this book. This isn’t really [...]

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Pretty Little Devils, by Nancy Holder

Every school has them, the popular clique of girls whom everyone wants to date or be best friends with. The Pretty Little Devils (PLDs) are such a group of girls, at Brookhaven High School in California. While they are pretty and intelligent, they are also manipulative, and can get away with anything, maybe even murder. [...]

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Sea Change, by Aimee Friedman

Miranda was planning a quiet summer vacation at home in New York City. She needed time to get over her cheating ex-boyfriend, and was looking forward to an internship at the Museum of Natural History. Then she receives word that her grandmother has passed away, and that her mother has inherited the family home on [...]

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Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

I’m breaking a rule I set for myself with this blog. I didn’t think I would ever blog a sequel. After all, if you liked a book, and a sequel comes out, you are probably already planning to read it. If you didn’t like a book, why would you want to read the sequel? But [...]

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Distant Waves: a Novel of the Titanic, by Suzanne Weyn

While you seldom come across a book that has something for everyone, Distant Waves: a Novel of the Titanic truly does. It has history, philosophy, and science, suspense, romance, and action, all mixed in with elements of the supernatural. It is the story of five sisters, born to a mother who makes her living as [...]

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Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong

Finally, we end the week with another crime novel set in a totalitarian state. Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong, takes place in China in the 1990s, just as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms to the Chinese economic system are opening the door to a more market-based economy. While many Chinese welcome these changes, and [...]

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The Coroner’s Lunch, by Colin Cotterill

As a young man, Siri Paiboun left his native Indochina to study medicine in Paris. After joining the Communist Party there in the 1930s because his sweetheart was a committed party member, Siri remained an active if not passionate party functionary for four decades. When the Pathet Lao finally triumphed in the decades-long civil war [...]

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Billy Boyle, by James Benn

If you like your crime fiction written in a fairly straightforward, no-nonsense style, with a lot of action and an appealingly imperfect main character, James Benn’s Billy Boyle series will be a good fit. Billy is a Boston policeman, just having been made a detective, when WWII begins. He is not the brightest star in [...]

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Murder in the Marais, by Cara Black

I had the good fortune while at the American Library Association Conference to spend some time talking to Cara Black, author of the finely written Aimée Leduc mystery series. It is always interesting to get an author’s perspective on her own books as well as on the rest of the field, and Cara suggested some [...]

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Siren of the Waters, by Michael Genelin

Some of the best contemporary crime fiction is being published by small presses. Soho Press is notable for its crime fiction with an international flavor. This week, Blogging for a Good Book looks at five Soho authors who set their stories in Slovakia, France, Laos, Shanghai, and England. All of these titles are in series, [...]

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The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

It’s the early 1960s and 22-year-old Skeeter returns home after graduating from Ole Miss.  She doesn’t have any prospects for a job, which makes her unhappy – and she doesn’t have any prospects for a husband, which makes her mother unhappy.  In between Junior League meetings and visiting with her married friends, Skeeter wonders what [...]

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