fiction

Matthew Dane was a police officer until his daughter was kidnapped and missing for years.  He then left the force and started a private detective service so he could continue the search for his daughter.  Once his daughter was found, he was able to help her adjust to life outside of captivity and then help other families in the same situation.  

Shannon Bliss went missing at the age of 16.  Now, almost 12 years later, Matthew finds a woman waiting for him outside his hotel room claiming to be Shannon Bliss.  She is seeking his assistance in reuniting with her family and bringing down the

Writer Taisy Cleary moves into the pool house at her father's house, invited there after two decades of silence. Wilson, her absent and hateful father, is recovering from heart surgery and wants her to write his memoir. Taisy's presence is at first greatly resented by Willow, her little known half-sister. Willow is sixteen and after being homeschooled her whole life, is forced to attend high school and is struggling to fit in. Up until now, Willow's world has been tightly controlled by her father.

Taisy secretly hopes her return to her hometown will bring her into contact with Ben, her first

Eight Hundred Grapes, the number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine, is a story about relationships – with spouses, fiancés, family, self, and home.

Georgia Ford is certain she’s made the right choices for herself. She has a stable job and a fiancé who really seems to understand her. They’re about to move to London to her dream house and neighborhood, where she can build a life for herself away from the tumult and uncertainty of her family and the family business - a vineyard in Northern California.

So why does it all seem to be falling apart days before her wedding? Can Georgia

Not knowing how her family has landed in witness protection is driving seventeen year old "Meg" crazy. But she knows the two rules of being in witness protection... be invisible and don't make friends.  Easier said than done, and after six placements in the last year she is bound and determined to make this placement stick as the constant moving and stress of learning new identities and back stories is tearing her family apart. Meg is determined to figure out what landed her family in this situation and she'll do whatever she can to fix it so they can just go home and everything can go back to

The Waverley family, Claire and Sydney, both have the gift of helpful magic. They live in the charming town of Bascom, North Carolina where it’s autumn and as temperatures fall, everyone and everything grows restless and problems flourish.

Claire runs Waverley’s Candies out of her kitchen, making handcrafted confections. Business is so good she can’t keep up with demand on her own. When someone offers to buy the business, Claire is stuck in a quandary.

Sydney owns a successful hair salon and knows what hairstyle will look best on anyone. But she’s reluctant to fire a new hire who isn’t

Freedom Oliver's past has caught up with her - or at least Nessa Delaney's past has finally found her. When Nessa's husband Mark is shot to death in their home, she is quickly convicted of the crime. Forced to choose between leaving her son and unborn daughter with her horrible in-laws or giving them up completely, she chooses the latter. After two very long years she is released and her brother-in-law is found guilty. Under the Witness Protection Program, Nessa has been Freedom Oliver for nearly twenty years. Living in Oregon, she works at a small biker bar, is the town drunk, and is always

In Dear Committee Members, Schumacher puts a delightful twist on the epistolary novel. The story is told completely through LORs (Letters of Recommendation) written by a washed-up professor still teaching in “the wake of the deliberate gutting of the liberal arts, English in particular, in favor of the technological sciences…which the faceless gremlins…have condemned to indigence and ruin.”

Totally one-sided, Shumacher still paints a vivid picture of both the personal and professional life of Jason Fitger. With an ex-wife, ex-lover and trail of irritated colleagues in his wake, Fitger reveals

The two narrators alternate chapters telling the story of the splinters of their individual families melding into a new one. Eighth-grader Stewart and Ninth-grader Ashley are on their way to becoming step-siblings, with Stewart and his widower dad moving in with Ashley and her divorced mom--though Ashley's recently out-of-the-closet dad is still living in their backyard laneway house. They are a complete contrast of personalities and styles. As Stewart describes:

Our house--I mean, the house where I lived until today--was old. It was built in the 1940s, and it was a bungalow, and the rooms

“Oh, calamity!”  This phrase is used often in response to the various annoyances, surprises and disasters that happen to the parents of the Pirriwee Public School kindergarten class.  Something horrible happens during the parent trivia night event at the school, and Moriarty keeps this information secret right up until the end.  Each chapter brings the reader another step closer to finding out who was killed and how, and there are plenty of suspects.  In fact, there are several characters you will probably wish will be killed in some gruesome way!   Big Little Lies really is a clever title, as

The America that we know is gone - destroyed by war and a biological disaster.  The country is split in two. The dangerous East is full of human survivors riddled by mutation. Lane has always lived in the West, behind a giant wall meant to keep her safe from the feral, mutated creatures of the East. She soon learns that her father is a fetch -- hired to travel into the Feral Zone and retrieve valuable art. When he doesn't return she is forced to go into the feral zone to save him and also finish his mission -- retrieve something of value for a high-ranking official. If she fails, her father

This novel reminds me of early LeCarre, which is a good thing, because that is when he did his best work. Philip Mangan, a British journalist working in China, is approached by a man who tells him, "the night heron is hunting." Mangan mentions this encounter to a “friend” who works in the British Embassy.  The “friend” then communicates this to his bosses in London who are definitely interested in pursuing contact. Mangan then becomes the contact for British Intelligence to the man who approached him. Everything goes nicely and then everything goes wrong. This is Brookes’ first novel and I

The dedication:

For Steve, who sees.
And for Anne, who believes.

At its core, this is a book about perception. About seeing who a person really is at his or her core and believing in them. Most of the time when we look at others, we see a blurry picture of a person based on surface appearances and casual observations, then bring them into focus with our own assumptions and prejudices, largely defining them based on who we are, not who they are. It's a rare and valuable thing to look and really see, to let a person fully define him or herself to us without our faulty interpretations.

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, read by Caroline Lee, is an extraordinary book deserving of its place on many 2014 must-read lists. Set in an Australian suburb, it’s a story about three women that meet at their children’s kindergarten orientation and become friends. Clues and innuendo lead the reader to believe a tragic event has occurred during a school parent get-together. All who attended the event are interrogated by the police in short interviews and the timeline alternates between past and present. Big Little Lies touches on divorce, single parenting, domestic violence, and even the

I immediately fell for Denton Little. Born at a time when people know the date they will die, Denton knows his funeral is today. No surprise. Tomorrow is his death date. No big deal. But waking up in the bed with his best friend's sister? Now that is a surprise.  And a big deal.

The next day, his death date, strange things start happening. Sure he's going to die, but what is this huge bluish-purple bruise on his leg? And the little red pulsing lights within it? Denton's decided since he's going to die tomorrow anyway, he might as well not worry his mom or dad. However, this only works for so

Tish is writing journal entries as an assignment for her English teacher, Mrs. Dunphrey. She has promised not to read any entries marked "Don't read this" and that is exactly what Tish writes before almost every entry. As Tish struggles with her abusive father and neglectful mother, she writes about those struggles in the journal. Dunphrey comments positively about how much she is writing, asks her to write some entries she can actually read, and also scolds her for not turning her journal in on time and for not completing other homework assignments.

The contrast between Mrs. Dunphrey's

John Darnielle’s second book is about the space between two separate worlds – the one we live in and the one we think we live in. It’s a place where aspirations are born, where imagination develops . . . also where great loneliness lives.

We follow Sean Philips, who has been in an accident, a bad one, and he’s tracing his way backwards to his younger self to make sense out of it. Sean also follows himself forward from the accident, describing how he designs a game he titles Trace Italian for which players mail him their move and he replies with the next turn. Trace Italian advances

Hardboiled has been transported to Ireland and the result is thoroughly enjoyable! 

Kerrigan writes with a spare, bare bones style that packs a punch. At a bar in Dublin, the path of ex-con Danny Callaghan crosses with small-time crook Walter Bennett. Bennett is the target of murder attempt gone wrong, and Callaghan is inadvertently involved. The criminal kingpin who ordered the hit decides to use him for his own purposes. Why Callaghan is being used isn’t immediately apparent but he has ended up in the middle of a gang war. Callaghan must now walk a tightrope between the criminals and the

It’s a shame that Me and Earl and the Dying Girl gets lumped in with John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Even though both are excellent novels involving a person dying of cancer, both are about vastly different things. Both have a vastly different tone, too - instead of Green’s warmth and earnestness, here life is more confused and bitter and darkly funny and deeply personal, which is more like how I remember high school. An unmotivated senior, Greg Gaines tries to stay under the radar and just survive the day unscathed. His goal is to drift through the year and deliberately keeps himself

Trickster. Father of Lies. Wildfire. Lucky. He goes by many names, but we probably best know him as Loki. Before he was an Avengers fan favorite, Loki was playing tricks on the Norse gods of Asgard, sometimes as a tenuous ally, other times as the villain, but if Joanne Harris’s The Gospel of Loki is to be believed, always a bit misunderstood.

The tricky part about novelizations of mythology is that readers know, more or less, how the story is going to end; the journey there must be an entertaining one, and The Gospel of Loki certainly is. Everyone loves a trickster, and Loki is in fine form

I have tried, and failed spectacularly, to write a concise recommendation of  We Have Always Lived in the Castle. So here is the short version: This book is an actual masterpiece written by a true literary genius. Go read it. Now.

Here's the long version. 

Eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood, her sister Constance, and their Uncle Julian have lived a deeply isolated life ever since the rest of their family died from arsenic poisoning six years ago. That night Merricat had been sent to bed early for misbehavior, Constance did not take sugar on her blackberries like the rest

If you’re expecting something akin to Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, you will be in for a disappointment. Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise is both hilarious and heart-wrenching. Narrator Deb has just gotten married to Chip, her positive, gregarious partner. They are on their honeymoon in the Caribbean when they become involved in a mermaid sighting, a questionable death, corporate greed, a kidnapping, and a myriad of other activities. The supporting cast of characters includes best friend Gina (“Everything’s performance art with her, she lives in a world of irony”), a hipster

Annie O’Sullivan is a realtor heading out to show a house one summer afternoon. Near the close of the open house, Annie is abducted by a potential client, a stranger who drugs and transports her to a remote mountain cabin on Vancouver Island where he repeatedly beats, rapes, and terrorizes her. As the days and nights of her captivity begin to blur together, Annie is forced to conform to the whims of a psychopath, "The Freak,” and to sacrifice parts of herself in an effort to survive. When she resurfaces a year later, it is as a shell of the person she used to be.

Annie’s story unravels in a

Amber Benson is mostly known as an actor, primarily for her role as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she's also an accomplished author with a number of books and other projects under her belt. Her latest novel, The Witches of Echo Park, is the first in an urban fantasy series about...well, witches. In Los Angeles. Echo Park, to be specific. Basically, it does what it says on the tin.

Lyse is a young woman running a plant nursery in Georgia. She returns home to LA when she learns her great-aunt Eleanora has terminal cancer. It's there that Lyse slowly learns about the coven of

Tiny Cooper is a character in David Levithan's book Will Grayson, Will Grayson. He is flamboyant and emotional, and he spends that novel writing and then performing a musical of his life. Hold Me Closer is that musical, written in theater script format.

David Levithan is one of my favorite authors (Every Day is AMAZING!) I thoroughly enjoyed Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I liked Tiny Cooper in that story - a lot. I enjoyed his flamboyancy and his emotional honesty - "Here I am, love me please!!!" But I struggled with this book, perhaps because I am not a musical person. I could picture some of

Cheryl Glickman is a 40-something manager of Open Palm, a women’s self-defense studio that has morphed into a supplier of self-defense as exercise videos. Cheryl’s home life is turned upside-down when she, seemingly overnight, takes in as a housemate a 20-year-old daughter of her Open Palm bosses, Clee. Cheryl and Clee do not get along. In fact, their bouts of passive-aggressive violence, subterfuge and insults are nothing short of operatic. The relationship between Cheryl and Clee is typical fair for characters in a Miranda July story – that is to say, it’s at turns surprising, violent, sweet

While it certainly contains the titular activities, this book isn't nearly as sensationalistic as its title might imply. More than anything, Sex & Violence is a fantastically-voiced, layered character study. The description "layered" applies to narrator-protagonist Evan, the other characters in the book, and their relationships; and it applies to the meanings of, manifestations of, and connections between sex and violence that Evan gradually comes to grasp in unstated, embodied ways. This is a depiction of real people and life, complex and complicated and lived.

Evan moves through life adrift

This volume completes Atwood's trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and continued in The Year of the Flood. In the not-too-distant future, most of humanity has been wiped out by a man-made global pandemic, known by God's Gardeners, a new environmental religious sect, as the waterless flood. But as the trilogy's main characters have discovered, there are more survivors than they originally imagined, and they're not all friendly and supportive. In this installment, the main characters of the previous two novels have converged together with other human survivors and the Crakers (the new human

The Sacrifice, Joyce Carol Oates' new novel, is based largely on the 1987 Tawana Brawley alleged rape case and the author's 1969 novel, Them, based on the 1967 race riots.  The novel takes place in the fictional Red Rock neighborhood of inner-city Pascayne, New Jersey, in October of 1987.  It centers around a black family:  Sybilla Frye, 15, allegedly gang raped and beaten by white police officers; her mother, Ednetta Frye; and her stepfather, Anis Schutt.  At the center of the story are the manipulative Mudrick twins, Rev. Marus Mudrick and his attorney brother, Byron; and Leopaldo Quarrquan

I have read many pastiches of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but I think I enjoyed this one the most.  Sherlock Holmes has retired to the country where he keeps bees and takes on the occasional job. One day, while out on the moor, he stumbles across Mary Russell, and they somehow develop a friendship.  Holmes teaches her the art of detection and she becomes an apprentice of sorts. As their relationship develops, Holmes involves her in one of his cases, a kidnapping, and then strange things start to happen to Miss Russell! Mrs. Hudson and Doctor Watson are here in supporting roles.  

Th

I have read many books about the Kennedy assassination, and found Stephen Hunter’s telling from a sniper’s point of view an interesting perspective I hadn’t seen before. Hunter, a retired journalist and creator of the Bob Lee Swagger series, constructs a thought provoking scenario explaining how Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, a patsy for the real assassin. Hunter’s main character, Bob Lee Swagger, a decorated former marine sniper, thinks Oswald does not have the mental and physical skills to pull off the assassination. Swagger cites Oswald’s marine corps record and his history of failure at