I recently started watching the television show White Collar. As with most shows that I stick with, it’s the characters and how they interact that keep me interested.
I really wasn’t expecting to like this book, but there I sat, reading page after page, anxious to find out what happens next. It has a bit of a Bridget Jones likeness. Louisa Clark is in her mid-twenties and still floundering through life, living with her quirky parents, comparing herself to her intellectually superior sister, and in a long term relationship that seems to be going nowhere. She also has an unconventional sense of style.
Sunshine Superman tells the story of Carl Boenish, an intrepid explorer pushing the limits of physical experience, and an inventive cinematographer of that boundary’s edge. He was a skydiver, whose footage from the 70s and 80s shows people seemingly capable of the ultimate assault on reality. They could fly.
After Tanya Dubois finds her husband's dead body at the bottom of the stairs she decides to run. Not because she's guilty, but because she is living under an assumed name and hiding from the past. She needs a new identity and the only way to get one is to call the man she's hated for 15 years. Roland Oliver has connections and money, two things Tanya needs. His reason for helping her? He has secrets of his own. "I want a clean identity, a name that's prettier than my own and if possible, I'd like to be a few years younger." Thus, Amelie Keen is born.
I was immediately charmed by Ferry’s first chapter, which begins “Sometimes I try to show my students the power of the story by telling them one.” He then continues to do so, complete with Princess Bride-esque interruptions by his students.
Flynn Berry's Under the Harrow is a murder mystery turned inside-out, where "Whodunnit?" is overshadowed by "How do you process tragedy and loss?" It's a dark, haunting ride, with a few twists you may not see coming. (I didn't.)
"I've always been a monster," begins the jacket flap of Drift & Dagger. Mal keeps that a secret, though. More openly, he's something of a cross between a pirate, thief, smuggler, archeologist, and bounty hunter. He is a world-traveling adventurer who specializes in acquiring and selling magical artifacts, often through underhanded means. He frequents ports and bazaars, black markets and bars, dense slums and dense jungles and everything in between.
What a fun novel! There's a lot of double dealing, a lot of humor at everyone’s expense and a lot of action!
Neal Graham is hired by his father to hide the mistress of a man who is the other half of a famous television couple, who purport to be happily married. When the mistress decides to end the relationship, the man refuses to take no for an answer and she brings charges of rape. She goes into hiding until the trial and Neal is charged with babysitting her. The television husband’s business partners start looking for her and it is not to bring her flowers!
A private jet takes off from Martha's Vineyard for the New York City area with a family of four aboard, plus another couple, a security guard, a crew of three, and a forty-something painter who was invited along on a kindly impulse. Eighteen minutes later the plane has crashed into Long Island Sound, killing everybody on board except for the painter, Scott Burroughs, who swims through the night with the only other survivor, a four-year-old boy, on his back. He is, of course, hailed as a hero.
