Jill

Maggie and her husband Jones are always arguing about their son Ricky. He’s gotten quiet, dresses oddly, has a tattoo and a girlfriend they don’t much like. But, he has good grades and he’s never really been in trouble – he’s just hard to reach.

When Ricky’s girlfriend goes missing, Maggie is the first to defend him from the suspicion that falls on him, but Jones, a police detective, isn’t so sure.

Jones’ suspicion is rooted in a disappearance that happened when he himself was just in high school – and it didn’t end so well.

You can't always count on a sequel.  It's not always easy to fall right back into the lives of beloved characters or return to the atmosphere of a cherished setting. But, the many fans of Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark need have no such worries.

Sally and Troo are back for more misbegotten adventures, real danger blithely and summarily dismissed, and childhoods both rare and surprisingly familiar.

Kagen's genius is in the two-fold telling of her stories: the literal story, narrated by adolescent Sally O'Malley of Milwaukee, is a story of a 1950s summer in a working-class neighborhood rife with the dangers of city living – but filtered by a child's perspective – her belief in the good in people, and her kid's assumption of immortality. The second story is the one we read in our mind's eye: the neighbor whose will has no sooner been changed than her health takes a turn for the worse; the string of burglaries in the neighborhood and the disappearance of a playground regular.  We know that none of this bodes well, but in Sally O'Malley's eyes, it's all an adventure waiting to be lived or a mystery to keep her little sister, Troo, from sticking her naughty nose into.

If you've never read Whistling in the Dark, you'll still enjoy Good Graces, but once you get a glimpse into the O'Malley's world, I predict there will be no stopping you from running back in for the first one, too.  If you are one of the Legion Whistling In The Dark fans – I'll see you at Saturn for your copy of Good Graces – we open at 9am!

Kathleen Kent is the author of The Heretic's Daughter, a popular fictional account of a real historical figure, Martha Carrier, who was burned as a witch in the Salem Witch trials, and who was Kent's great, great grandmother ten times removed.  I got to hear Ms. Kent talk about her research into her family tree, and quite the tree it is.

In The Wolves of Andover, Kent explores through fiction the life of another ancestor – Thomas Carrier – husband of Martha Carrier in his later life and the man rumored to be King Charles' executioner under Oliver Cromwell.

Kent writes with a sure hand, and the world that was late 1600s New England comes to life all the more vividly for having been based on diaries and papers of its long-ago inhabitants.

I read this haunting novel because I'd heard so much buzz about its appeal in other countries.

The author, a Korean who has many literary prizes to her credit, is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University.  Her novel, about an elderly woman who becomes separated from her husband in the crowded Seoul train station and is never found, is a powerful, moving story of family and heartbreak that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

It is told in the voice of four family members – daughter, son, husband and mother, and their stories weave a picture of the life of a woman wildly under-appreciated by her husband and children, for whom she sacrificed everything

I found the sections narrated by the eldest daughter, a novelist, the most haunting as they are told in the second person – “you” – rather than "I" or "she". 

Abraham Verghese – author of the amazing novel Cutting For Stone – got it dead right when he said the four vivid voices of the narrators each have "the immediacy of a whispered confession." 

Mark Kurlansky takes quirky topics and writes bestselling books exploring them. You’ve probably seen Cod – an international bestseller – or Salt.

In The Last Fish Tale, Kurlansky gives us an in-depth look at Gloucester, Massachusetts – a rare old breed of coastal fishing town of the kind that is rapidly vanishing around the world.

Kurlansky starts out by describing Gloucester’s fabled annual pole-walk – a part of the week-long St. Peter’s Celebration in which rugged, manly fishermen try vainly to traverse the length of a greased pole in order to capture a flag at the end before falling 40 or more feet into the frigid ocean.

The entire book celebrates the culture of America’s fishermen and their vanishing way of life as entire fish populations are wiped out, governmental regulations threaten to take away their livelihood and sea-side tourism threatens to price them out of their own neighborhoods.

We get a good dose of the state of world fisheries and the history of various species of fish as they’ve become over-fished, been threatened by invasive species or, in some cases, enjoyed a resurgence in pockets around the world.

Jack Reacher, Lee Child's beloved ex-army intelligence officer, roams the country in book after book, getting into scrape after scrape and getting bad guy after bad guy, but we've never known precisely why.

The Affair is the prequel to Reacher's many tales, and tells the story of his last official adventure in the army – the one that set him on the course he's on today.

Max Allan Collins has written novels, non-fiction, plays, graphic novels, movie tie-ins…you name it.  He has written and directed films and documentaries, and his graphic novel, Road to Perdition, was the basis of an Academy Award Winning movie.

But, despite that long list of credentials, I love Max Allan Collins' P.I. character, Nathan Heller, best – even though lots of his adventures aren't even in print anymore. I love 'em because Nate is so hard-boiled, and such a stud, and, in Collins' hands, has been in the wrong place at the wrong time for decades now – his 'memoirs', which Collins has been writing since the early '80s, place Heller in the midst of Huey P. Long's assassination in Louisiana, the Lindberg kidnapping – even the Bay of Pigs. And, this new novel finds our man Nate a – quote – intimate – unquote – of the blonde bombshell herself – Marilyn Monroe – at the time of her death, which, to Heller's way of thinking, was most definitely a murder.