I’m always looking for new mystery authors to read, so after noticing positive reviews for this book in trade journals, I picked it up. It had everything I look for in a mystery: a unique setting (a chateau in Switzerland), a compelling sleuth, and a good puzzle. Agnes Luthi is a Swiss-American police inspector who…
Nickolas Butler has done it again. He’s written a pitch-perfect novel of several generations of men (and one woman) in northern Wisconsin. I didn't grow up in Wisconsin, or in a small town, but there is a universality to his characters and settings that makes his writing so accessible. I loved Butler’s first book, Shotgun Lovesongs,…
In a small medieval village on the edge of a Russian forest, the family of Pyotr Vladimirovich waits out the brutal winter. The children crowd around the massive oven, listening to their old nurse tell wonderful stories of Morozko, the Russian Jack Frost. (Little do they know that Morozko is real.) Shortly afterward, their mother…
This debut novel by Emily Littlejohn has all the elements of a great mystery: compelling characters; a vivid setting (the mountains of Colorado); strong writing; and of course, a puzzling murder. Gemma Monroe is a police officer in the small ski town of Cedar Valley, Colorado, who is called to investigate the murder of a…
Books can offer comfort at the darkest of times. That’s the message in The Bookshop on the Corner, and it was a happy coincidence that I happened to be reading it during the turmoil of our election last week. This book was the perfect antidote to political and media stress. It’s gentle, sweet, and reassuring…
Eleanor Flood is a crackpot. Well, she’s not, really, but that’s what I thought when I started reading this brilliant, funny story of a day in this character's life. In a direct, quirky, first-person narrative, Eleanor tells us that she’s not happy with her life. “Today will be different” is her mantra. Everything seems great…
In her first foray into adult fiction, best-selling young adult author Gayle Forman has written a book that every working mother will relate to. Maribeth Klein, adopted daughter, magazine editor and forty-four-year-old mother of twins, is working so hard trying to juggle all the pieces of her life that she doesn’t realize she’s having a…
This book asks a question that many of us contemplate: What if we had chosen a different path in life? How would that impact not only the structure of our lives, but who we really are on the inside? In Dark Matter, the main character, Jason Dessen, actually gets to meet his alternate self. A…
Sometimes you read a book and while you know it’s really good, you also have the sense that it is really important. Homegoing is one of those books. It’s not just compelling fiction; it’s also a tale of what it has meant to be black in America and in Ghana over the past three centuries.…
The Charles Manson killings were a defining moment of the late ‘60’s. I remember learning about them later, as a teenager, with a kind of horrified fascination. Author Emma Cline was also fascinated by Manson, and became fixated on the man and the commune he created. It was this obsession that led to her writing…
