Virgin Lies

Categories Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

Virgin Lies is the second suspense novel by Roderick Anscombe to feature forensic psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lucas.  You don’t have to have read the first one, The Interview Room, to catch up, though—you’ll be caught up in the suspense from the very first scene, when Lucas fields a frantic phonecall from his wife, Abby, who wants him to use his professional skills to find a missing child—a child who may die while the adults who care for her stand helplessly by, just as their own child did.

Joyce Maynard, At It Again

Categories Mystery & Suspense , Nonfiction

Joyce Maynard is only five years older than I, but unlike me she's published a whole lot of good books, starting with the memoir she wrote when she was 18, Looking Back; A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.  Later she wrote a memoir of her affair with J. D. Salinger; the darkly funny Baby Love, about three teenaged mothers, a deranged escaped killer, and an equally deranged though less violent grandmother.  Before they divorced, she wrote children's books with her ex-husband, and a syndicated column about the joys of family life.  She probably portrayed family life as more joyful than it was in her case, and it's clear in Internal Combustion that she has still not completely moved on from that divorce. 

Later she wrote the engrossing To Die For, a novelization of the Pamela Smart case. Finally, she's crossed the line into serious True Crime, with Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City.

Mysteries on Martha's Vineyard: Cynthia Riggs and Philip Craig

Categories Mystery & Suspense

Summer reading naturally conjures up thoughts of ocean breezes and sand-laden books.  An ideal summer climate can be found in New England, and if you add the relative freedom of being on an island, what could be better?  The island of Martha's Vineyard is a mere 7 miles from the coast of Massachusetts, but that is distance enough to allow for an indigenous culture uniquely its own. 

Neither A Good Nor Happy Child

Categories Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

Justin Evans’ psychological thriller debut, A Good and Happy Child doesn’t open, it launches.   Once began, the story grimly informs the reader that the protagonist, George Davies is neither good nor happy. 

George Davies is a married New Yorker with a newborn son.  George and his wife aren't getting along because he cannot hold his infant son.   His wife orders him to seek help, so he begins to see a psychiatrist and record his past in notebooks.  Each chapter is representative of a notebook and they reveal that George was admitted to a mental institution in his adolescent years for violent behavior and possible demonic possession. 

Requiem for a Dealer

Categories Mystery & Suspense , Staff Picks , Fiction

I just read Jo Bannister’s sixth Brodie Farrell mystery, Requiem for a Dealer.  I’ve always liked her work—her Castlemere books are great police procedurals set in northern England—but I think I like these best. 

Brodie is a brisk, resourceful woman who runs a finding service in a little coastal English town.  She tracks down missing pets, locates china patterns in online auctions, whatever needs finding.

In the series debut, Echoes of Lies, she was given a photograph and asked to find the man in it.  She quickly and cleverly identified him as a local teacher, Daniel Hood.  What she didn’t know was that she was finding him for people who then tortured him for information they believed he had, and left him for dead.

He Saw the Other Side

Categories Science Fiction & Fantasy , Fiction

One might think that after my last blog, I might be done with ideas dragged out of the nursery and dressed in adult clothes.  Not so!  In fact, I continued in the same vein this past week with The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle. 

In The Bear Went Over the Mountain, a struggling Maine author loses his first manuscript to a fire, and the briefcase containing his second one to a bear.  The author goes into a deep depression.  The bear dresses up in clothes, reminds himself not to carry the briefcase in his mouth, and heads off to sell the manuscript in New York. 

Why I'm Like This: True Stories

Categories Romance , Parenting & Families , Nonfiction

Cynthia Kaplan went to summer camp and school dances, had a crush on Jamie Karlan, got dumped by boyfriends, struggled with her career, sought the approval of her parents, cared for her ill grandmother, got married, became a mother, and tried to live her life the best she knew how. 

If you see yourself in any of these scenarios, then you understand the happiness and heartache of being a woman. 

But if you think Why I'm Like This: True Stories is going to be an overly sentimental book, think again. Often compared to David Sedaris, Kaplan's personal essays are funny and sad yet refreshingly frank, as if she is examining her life under a microscope.