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The Black Country

by Alex Grecian

Fiction — Mystery / Crime Fiction
Putnam Adult; May 21, 2013
Paperback (ARC)
400 pages
(Source: Publisher)

From the book:

The British Midlands. It’s called the “Black Country” for a reason. Bad things happen there.

When members of a prominent family disappear from a coal-mining village–and a human eyeball is discovered in a bird’s nest–the local constable sends for help from Scotland Yard’s new Murder Squad. Fresh off the grisly 1889 murders of The Yard, Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith respond, but they have no idea what they’re about to get into. The villagers have intense, intertwined histories. Everybody bears a secret. Superstitions abound. And the village itself is slowly sinking into the mines beneath it.

Not even the arrival of forensics pioneer Dr. Bernard Kingsley seems to help. In fact, the more the three of them investigate, the more they realize they may never be allowed to leave…

The Black Country is the second book in Alex Grecian’s Murder Squad series, and it is just as good as the first book (The Yard, which I read and reviewed last year). I am becoming very attached to Inspector Day, Dr. Kingsley, and Henry (Dr. Kingsley’s assistant). The banter between Inspector Day and Sergeant Hammersmith is even better than I remember it. While I really enjoyed The Yard and jumped at the chance to read and review The Black Country when it was offered to me by the publisher, The Black Country has me resting assured that I will want to read every book in this series.

In The Black Country, Inspector Day, Sergeant Hammersmith, and Dr. Kingsley head to the village of Blackhampton in what is called the “Black Country.” The synopsis of the book above says the nickname comes from the bad things that happen there, but it carries other meanings, too. Blackhampton is a mining town, and so there is much that is black about the village. Three people of the village have disappeared–a mother, father, and little boy of the same family–and the local constable in Blackhampton has done all he can without calling in the big guys from Scotland Yard. What Day, Hammersmith, and Kingsley find in Blackhampton over the course of the two days they spend there is a community of people who are torn between not liking outsiders but wanting help finding the three missing villagers (particularly the little boy). They also find superstition, a strange illness that is making more than half the villagers sick, and a stranger who has been hanging out in the village who seems to have a shoddy past and secrets of his own. Oh, and The Black Country includes a character with the worst facial-injury-turned-deformity EVER.

I enjoyed everything about this book–Grecian’s succinct writing style; the further development of the main characters, including their backstories and their relationships with one another; the mystery itself; the time frame in which the story takes place; the historical bits about superstition, mining towns in the late 19th century, and the Civil War; and the twists in the story that kept me guessing. Just when I thought I had things figured out, Grecian would throw me a curve ball…and the big TA-DA moment in the book is pretty shocking. I just didn’t want to believe it. Good stuff.

If you enjoy reading good crime fiction, particularly crime fiction that takes place in England in the late 19th century, I recommend Alex Grecian’s Murder Squad series. The writing and the stories are good, the characters are well-developed, the main characters in particular are good people, and the historical elements are very interesting. The Black Country comes out today, and I’m already looking forward to the next one.

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**If you choose to purchase this title using the links below, I will receive a small percentage of the sale (to be used toward site maintenance and buying more books).

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Immortal Bird:
A Family Memoir

by Doron Weber

Nonfiction — Memoir
Simon & Schuster; February 5, 2013
Paperback
368 pages
(Source: Publisher / TLC Book Tours)

From the back cover:

A medical mystery and a remarkable passion for life lie at the heart of a gifted boy’s fight to survive. Born with a congenital heart defect that required surgery when he was a baby, Damon Weber lives a big life with spirit and independence that have always been a source of pride to his parents and an inspiration to his brother and sister as well as his friends. But when Damon’s triumphant coming of age is threatened by a new illness, his father embarks on a search for answers in a race against time and a seriously flawed system.

Damon Weber was born with a congenital heart defect–his heart lacked the second ventricle that pumps old blood back into the lungs to be oxygenated. By the time he was four, he’d had two open-heart surgeries, the second of which seemed to completely alleviate his problem. At age twelve he was still a little slower (physically) than other kids his age, and his growth had been stunted as a side effect of his abnormal heart, but overall he was a seemingly normal, healthy, active pre-teen.

Soon after he turned 13, Damon started to feel sick; he was tired, he was having problems breathing, and his face and abdomen were becoming bloated. After tests done at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, the Webers found out that Damon had Protein-losing enteropathy (PLE), a disease that shows up in about 10% of the children who have had the heart surgery Damon went through as a toddler. No one knows why PLE occurs or how to combat it, really. There is no cure. All Damon and his family could do was try the different therapies that have had some effectiveness in other patients. If none of the other therapies worked, Damon’s last resort was a heart transplant…which comes with plenty of its own risks.

Damon ended up needing the transplant, which he received, and he seemed to be doing very well. He spent a month in the hospital, was able to go home to continue his recovery, and he felt good (compared to how he felt before the transplant). Things were looking up.

Damon went home from the hospital on February 22, 2005. On March 30, 2005, Damon died of a post-transplant infection that could have been taken care of–avoided, even–with proper medical care. Immortal Bird is a family memoir written by Damon’s dad that memorializes what a great, talented, strong kid Damon was, as well as an indictment of this country’s flawed health care system.

This book is truly heartbreaking, but it’s also uplifting and inspiring. Damon may have lived for only sixteen years, but he did everything he possibly could in that time. He very rarely let his illness stop him from doing all of the things he wanted to do. He was a talented stage actor who made friends easily and had big dreams of someday having a career in diplomacy. He was given a small speaking part in the HBO series Deadwood (that aired just a few days before he died). He and his family spent their summers in Isle of Skye in Scotland. It would take up too much room here to list everything Damon was able to do in his short lifetime, despite not feeling well for his last four years. Reading about Damon–his positive attitude and his accomplishments–was my favorite part of Immortal Bird.

I have a couple of issues with Immortal Bird, though, and because of the subject matter, I almost feel like a jerk even bringing them up. Regardless, I feel like they need to be pointed out. Both of my issues have to do with Doron’s (the author’s) general attitude.

First, the Webers are a relatively wealthy, privileged family. Most of what Damon was able to do during his lifetime–and the medical care he received–can be attributed to this privilege. Doron is well-connected and has resources to draw on that the average American doesn’t have. And that’s great in Damon’s case–I’m certainly not knocking all of the fantastic things he was able to do in such a short time. I’m glad that his short life was so full and rewarding. However, nowhere in the book is this privilege acknowledged. Nowhere in the book does Doron Weber say, “I know how lucky we were to even be able to get the expert medical care Damon needed. I know I was well-connected above and beyond the average citizen.” Maybe it was supposed to go without saying, but a little acknowledgement of their privilege would have been nice in the context of the story. The expert medical care ended up being extremely flawed, even for a privileged family like the Webers, so what does that say for all of the people who don’t have that kind of privilege? Even a short paragraph pointing this out would have gone a long way.

Second, nowhere in the book does Doron Weber acknowledge the heart donor or the donor’s family, aside from making a very tasteless joke that Doron’s 16-year-old son has to point out was just wrong. Nowhere in the book does Doron show any kind of appreciation for what the donor and his/her family must have gone through in order for Damon to have a new heart. This was a huge oversight in my opinion. Much of what Doron Weber does (or doesn’t do) during his son’s illness just makes him look like a selfish, privileged jerk. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have done many of the same things in Doron’s position; I would have used my privilege in any way possible to make sure my son was being taken care of. But again, some kind of acknowledgement of the donor and his/her family would have gone a long way.

The best parts of Immortal Bird are the parts about Damon as a person. Although part of Doron’s attempt with this book was to point out how flawed our health care system can be in this country, the only people who that part of the book will benefit are the wealthy and privileged. If the average American is looking for advice about what to do in the same situation, they aren’t going to find it in Immortal Bird. Regardless, it’s a wonderful memorial to Damon and his time with his family, and it’s worth reading just for that. I highly recommend it to people who enjoy reading good memoirs.

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**If you choose to purchase this title using the links below, I will receive a small percentage of the sale (to be used toward site maintenance and buying more books).

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Frozen in Time

by Mitchell Zuckoff

Nonfiction — World War II
Harper; April 23, 2013
Hardcover
416 pages
(Source: Publisher / TLC Book Tours)

On November 5, 1942, a U.S. C-53 cargo plane on a routine flight crash-landed on the Greenland ice cap. All five men aboard initially survived the crash and sent out distress calls. Four days later, a B-17 involved in the search-and-rescue for the missing C-53 and its crew got caught in a nasty storm and also crashed. All nine men on that flight initially survived. While trying to save the surviving men of the B-17, an amphibious Coast Guard plane called a Grumman Duck vanished along with the three men on board. By the time the last three B-17 men stranded on the Greenland glacier were finally rescued by Bernt Balchan’s team, they had spent 148 days in subzero temperatures, hurricane-force winds, and terrifying Greenland blizzards. For 148 days they had survived on an active glacier, full of hidden crevasses and other life-threatening dangers. Unfortunately, the C-53 and its crew was never found, nor was the Grumman Duck and its crew.

In 2012, seventy years after these events, Mitchell Zuckoff joined the Coast Guard and North South Polar, Inc.–a volunteer group led by Lou Sapienza–in Greenland, on a mission to find the Grumman Duck and to bring the remains of its men back to the U.S. for proper burials and closure. Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest For Lost Heroes of World War II recounts the events of 1942-43 and the 2012 mission to find the Grumman Duck.

Frozen in Time is written as narrative nonfiction, so it reads like a suspense novel. Nothing in the book is fabricated; Zuckoff did extensive research, and “took no liberties with facts, dialogue, characters, details, or chronology” (as noted in his “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of the book). Zuckoff moves back and forth between the events of 1942-43 and the events of 2012, with the date he’s writing about as part of the heading of each chapter. Of course this adds to the suspense when he leaves the men on the ice in 1942 to talk about the preparations today’s group is making for landing on Greenland in 2012.

Zuckoff also includes a brief but detailed history of Greenland starting with Erik the Red’s “discovery” of Greenland in 982. He (Zuckoff) writes about Greenland’s terrain, population, weather, and why the U.S. government was using Greenland as a military base during WWII. I really didn’t know much about Greenland before reading Frozen in Time and I learned so much from the book. Greenland sounds like my version of Hell, and I can’t imagine being stranded there with little to no shelter for 148 days. I was raving about the book to Eric one night and told him that I probably would have given up on the third day if I hadn’t been rescued–I would have just gone to sleep in the snow and let the cold kill me. The nine men from the B-17 crash, along with their rescuers, were some of the bravest men I have ever read about.

Frozen in Time is very well written and Zuckoff made me feel like I was actually there, witnessing everything that happened in 1942-43. I felt the cold, the frustration, the hunger, and the innumerable other obstacles the men of the B-17 had to conquer in order to survive. If reading about WWII, learning about other countries, or reading about people who have survived in the face of harrowing adversity is something you’re into, I highly recommend Frozen in Time. And because of its narrative nonfiction format, it will appeal to readers of fiction and nonfiction alike.

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**If you choose to purchase this title using the links below, I will receive a small percentage of the sale (to be used toward site maintenance and buying more books).

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Hooo-wee, April was a busy month! I went to two library book sales: the book sale for the smaller of my two local libraries was at the beginning of the month, and the book sale for my “big” local library was at the end of the month (and my dad drove all the way here to go with me!). In between those two events, Eric had nine days off from work and we did THE BIG SPRING CLEAN. We cleaned everything: windows, walls, curtains, cabinets, you name it. We got so much work done. It was EXHAUSTING but the feeling of accomplishment afterwards was LOVELY. And now that the sunshine and warmer weather have made their way to Central PA, I finally have the windows open every day and my house feels so good to be in. STUFFINESS, BE GONE!

Because of the general hustle and bustle around here I read fewer books than I thought I would, but that’s okay. I still got a ton of reading done:

Finished in April: 14
YTD: 67

• The Liars’ Gospel, Naomi Alderman
• Firestarter, Stephen King
• The Missing File, D.A. Mishani
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
• Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King
• The Big Over Easy, Jasper Fforde
• The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker
• Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans
• Roadwork, Richard Bachman
• The Beautiful Room is Empty, Edmund White
• Amity & Sorrow, Peggy Riley
• Deadly Harvest, Michael Stanley
• May We Be Forgiven, A.M. Homes

Click here to see the list of everything I’ve read in 2013

Pages read in April: 5,290
YTD: 23,973

Number of pages I read in April, by day

Currently reading:

• Frozen in Time, Mitchell Zuckoff (TLC Book Tours)

Plans for May:

• The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe (#TuesBookTalk)
• Bayou, Vol. 1, Jeremy Love (Twitter Book Club, #BayouVol1)
• Fight For Your Long Day, Alex Kudera (The Next Best Book Club)
• The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (BOOK CLUB)
• Song of Susannah, Stephen King (The EPIC Dark Tower Read-a-Long)
• The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood (Project Read All Of Atwood)
• Cujo, Stephen King (READ ALL THE SK!)
• The Running Man, Richard Bachman (READ ALL THE SK!)
• The Black Country, Alex Grecian
• Famous Drownings in Literary History, Kevin Haworth (CCLaP Book Tour)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (reading with sj for Towel Day!)
• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (Classics Club readalong, hosted by The True Book Addict)
• The Fourth Bear, Jasper Fforde
• A Virtual Love, Andrew Blackman
• The Water Sign, C.S. Samulski
• Immortal Bird, Doron Weber (TLC Book Tours)
• The Roving Tree, Elsie Augustave

I don’t know if I’ll get through all of those, but that’s what I’m planning to read (along with whatever else I feel like reading, if there’s time). I’m pretty sure I can do it.

What was the best book you read in April? Is there a book that you’re especially looking forward to reading this month?

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Amity & Sorrow

by Peggy Riley

Fiction
Little, Brown and Company; April 16, 2013
Kindle edition
338 pages
(Source: Publisher / NetGalley )

From Goodreads:

A mother and her daughters drive for days without sleep until they crash their car in rural Oklahoma. The mother, Amaranth, is desperate to get away from someone she’s convinced will follow them wherever they go–her husband. The girls, Amity and Sorrow, can’t imagine what the world holds outside their father’s polygamous compound. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of Bradley, a farmer grieving the loss of his wife. At first unwelcoming to these strange, prayerful women, Bradley’s abiding tolerance gets the best of him, and they become a new kind of family. An unforgettable story of belief and redemption, Amity & Sorrow is about the influence of community and learning to stand on your own.

Via Dictionary.com:

Amaranth: an imaginary, undying flower
Amity: friendship; peaceful harmony
Sorrow: distress caused by loss, affliction, disappointment, etc.; grief, sadness, or regret

Amity and Sorrow are sisters who were born and raised on the compound of (their father) Zachariah’s polygamous, religious cult. Amity is twelve and Sorrow must be fifteen or sixteen (I don’t believe her actual age is ever given). They know nothing of the world outside the compound; they’ve never been taught to read or write; all they know is what they’ve been told by their father–who calls himself God–and the women in the compound. They have both been brainwashed into believing their father’s teachings, but Sorrow is especially entrenched in the compound’s way of life and religion, being the group’s Oracle and her father’s right hand.

When the story of Amity & Sorrow opens, the sisters’ world has already been destroyed. The compound has been raided by the police and a fire started by someone has given Amaranth (their mother) the cover she needs to flee the compound with her daughters. What started years ago as an idea of Utopia has turned into something that makes Amaranth question everything she believes in. One major incident (no spoilers!) has made Amaranth’s belief system and way of life come crashing down, and she knows that she must start over with her daughters in order to save them and give them the life–away from the compound–that they all deserve. Whether or not the three women can overcome what Zachariah’s cult has done to them–physically, emotionally, and psychologically–remains to be seen. When Amaranth wrecks their car on Bradley’s farmland, what seems at first like bad luck soon shows itself to be the very thing Amaranth and the girls might need in order to deprogram their minds and bodies.

Amity & Sorrow is written in the perspectives of Amaranth and Amity; the story moves back and forth between the present and the past, leaving the women’s stories to unfold slowly. Everything we know about Sorrow comes from the point of view of either Amaranth or Amity, which is the one thing about the book that I was slightly disappointed with. As her name foretells, Sorrow is having a very hard time being away from the compound and her father (who she also believes to be God), and I would have liked to know more about what was going through her mind. Amity is strongly bonded to her sister (sometimes literally) and as her name suggests early on, she tries to be the peacemaker between Amaranth and Sorrow, often unsuccessfully. Amity finds herself caught between the loyalties she feels to her mother and to Sorrow.

I didn’t enjoy reading Amity & Sorrow–enjoy is bad word choice in this case. It was really my morbid curiosity that made me want to read this book. I am not a fan of religious fanaticism and cults (understatement), and I was curious to read about the polygamous cult in Amity & Sorrow; I wanted to read about how it affected these two young girls. Needless to say, Amity & Sorrow solidified my feelings. What their father’s cult did to them (and to Amaranth, to a lesser extent) was just awful, and the ending made me both hopeful and very sad. I did, however, enjoy Peggy Riley’s writing and the way she put the story together. As many times as the story of Amaranth, Sorrow, and Amity made me cringe, at no point did I want to stop reading. I was entirely sucked in from the opening lines:

Two sisters sit, side by side, in the backseat of an old car. Amity and Sorrow.

Their hands are hot and close together. A strip of white fabric loops between them, tying them together, wrist to wrist.

Their mother, Amaranth, drives them. The car pushes forward, endlessly forward, but her eyes are always watching in the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind them for cars.

Unfortunately, I think that will be the story of Amaranth’s life: pushing endlessly forward in an attempt to move on, but forever looking back over her shoulder, always aware of–and to some degree afraid of–the past she’s leaving behind.

Peggy Riley’s writing is captivating, and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more of her work in the future. Amity & Sorrow is a relatively quick read (it’s hard to put down), but because of its subject matter it’s also very thought-provoking. This isn’t a book I’ll soon forget.

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(To learn more about Peggy Riley, please visit her website.)

**If you choose to purchase this title using the links below, I will receive a small percentage of the sale (to be used toward site maintenance and buying more books).

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Eric and I had our usual Wednesday breakfast date this morning at Perkins (YUM), and then we went to the library (like we usually do after breakfast on Wednesdays). I had one book to return and one to borrow, although I ended up borrowing two:

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is for #TuesBookTalk, and The Fourth Bear is the second book in Fforde’s Nursery Crime series (sj and I have been reading this series and the Thursday Next series together).

THEN, while we were at the library, Eric went downstairs and found out that all of the left over books from last weekend’s book sale are FREE now. FREE. There weren’t many left that I was interested in (a lot of mass market paperbacks, and I don’t really enjoy owning those), but there were five books that I passed over on Monday that were still there:

From top to bottom: The Little, Brown Reader, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, The Norton Reader, William Burroughs: A Portrait by Barry Miles, and The Flounder by Günter Grass.

The Little, Brown Reader and The Norton Reader contain writing from some fantastic authors, and I’m pretty interested in reading the “unconventional but riveting portrait” (from the back cover) of William Burroughs.

And THEN, I bought this book from the little cart next to the library’s circulation desk:

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

The library always has a small cart of books for sale next to their circulation desk (each book goes for a $1 donation), and I have actually been passing this book over for a few weeks now. I keep reading really good reviews about it, though, and it sounds like something both Ashley and I will enjoy.

So in addition to the beautiful weather we’re having today, it was also another great day for books.

]]> http://btweenthecovers.com/2013/05/01/breakfast-books-this-week-part-deux/feed/ 13 hlindskold Library books! Free books! Serpahina! http://btweenthecovers.com/2013/05/01/review-deadly-harvest-by-michael-stanley/ http://btweenthecovers.com/2013/05/01/review-deadly-harvest-by-michael-stanley/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 11:30:48 +0000 Heather http://btweenthecovers.com/?p=7450 ]]>

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Deadly Harvest:
A Detective Kubu Mystery

by Michael Stanley

Fiction — Crime Fiction / Mystery
Harper Paperbacks; April 30, 2013
Paperback
496 pages
(Source: Publisher / TLC Book Tours)

In Botswana, Africa, young girls are going missing after getting into cars with mysterious men. Detectives David “Kubu” Bengu and Samantha Khama have been charged with finding the girls…or finding out what has happened to them. Have they been abducted for sale as servants or sex slaves, or have they been murdered for muti–a traditional African medicine made by witch doctors, usually derived from plants and sometimes animals? Recent evidence suggests the latter, but it is almost impossible to bring powerful witch doctors to justice in a country where they are still believed in and feared. When an albino man goes missing, Kubu and Samantha find themselves in a race to catch the people behind these disappearances before they can strike again.

As the “Author’s Note” at the back of the book explains, although Deadly Harvest is a crime fiction novel, it is “set on a background of reality” pertaining to a small portion of very powerful witch doctors who use their influential positions in societies throughout sub-Saharan Africa to get away with using human body parts to make a more powerful muti than the traditional healing kind made from plants and (sometimes) animals. I found this interesting and educational because I had no idea that stuff like this still happens in different parts of the world. It’s pretty scary (and maddening) to think that these witch doctors usually get away with what they are doing because of the religious/superstitious fear they instill in people.

Deadly Harvest is (I think) the fourth book in the Detective Kubu series written by Michael Stanley (writing duo Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip), but it can easily be read as a standalone novel without any kind of confusion or background history. The mystery is straightforward but intriguing; the story flows nicely from point to point, but it isn’t immediately apparent whodunit. Stanley kept me guessing for at least two-thirds of the book–which is important to me when I’m reading a mystery–and even when I thought I had the bad guy pegged, I still wasn’t sure until close to the end why or how it all added up. For me, that makes the mystery in Deadly Harvest a good one.

I was a little leery of Detective Kubu at first (for a few reasons) but as the story progressed and I came to understand him better, he really grew on me and I ended up liking him quite a bit. I really like Samantha, the new detective that has been added to the series; Samantha is all about women’s equality in a society that still carries traditional views of women and the roles they are expected to play. She’s awesome. I think Kubu and Samantha balance each other out nicely and make a good team.

I really enjoyed reading Deadly Harvest, both for the good mystery it provided and for the new things that I learned in the process. I will definitely be reading more of the Detective Kubu series in the future. Recommended.

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(To learn more about Michael Stanley, please visit the Detective Kubu website.)

**If you choose to purchase this title using the links below, I will receive a small percentage of the sale (to be used toward site maintenance and buying more books).

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…my dad drove here from Central NY just to go to the book sale with me and to hang out with me for the day!

That’s right, my dad–who is the most special–drove to PA all the way from Central NY (about four and a half hours) just to take me out to breakfast and to go to the library book sale with me. Isn’t that great?! We are a family who is very serious about our books. Haha!

Dad drove here yesterday (Sunday–with the promise of my lasagna for dinner), then today after the kids left for school we went to breakfast at Cracker Barrel and to the book sale. My dad already owns thousands of books (no, really, he owns something like 3,000 books and that’s probably understated), so my mother kind of gave him a limit on how many he could buy this time. Ha! He still left with almost two full bags of books. I, however, CLEANED HOUSE. I came away with FOUR bags of books, and totally didn’t stick to my list like I promised myself I would. OOPS. Wait until you see all of the goodies I found this time, though:

This whole pile of books is by Don DeLillo. I’ve been meaning to read his books for quite some time, and now I have a ton of them. From top to bottom: The Body Artist, Point Omega, Players, Mao II, White Noise, Falling Man, and Underworld.

Look at all these books by Nadine Gordimer! One whole shelf at the sale was full of her books, so I just cleaned the shelf off. SCORE. From top to bottom: The Pickup, The House Gun, Jump and Other Stories, A Sport of Nature, Selected Stories, The Conservationist, July’s People, Burger’s Daughter, and None to Accompany Me. Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 and is another author that I’ve been meaning to read. I can’t wait to dive into these.

There weren’t too many classics at this book sale, either, but I managed to find seven that I haven’t read. I’m THE MOST excited about finding Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth. From top to bottom: Native Son by Richard Wright (I’ve read this, but didn’t own it), a W.E.B. DuBois Reader (edited) by Andrew G. Paschal, Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison, The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life to Come and Other Stories by E.M. Forster, and Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.

From top to bottom: The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Run by Ann Patchett, The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, and The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien.

From top to bottom: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow, The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez, The Mission Song by John le Carré, Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Angry Candy by Harlan Ellison, Slippage by Harlan Ellison, and That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo.

From top to bottom: The Water-Method Man by John Irving, The Fourth Hand by John Irving, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, Old School by Tobias Wolff, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut, Shardik by Richard Adams, Three Complete Novels: Billy Bathgate, World’s Fair, Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow, and Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan.

SO MANY GOOD BOOKS (or so I hope).

When we were done at the book sale, Dad and I came back to my house and chatted for another couple of hours, and then he took off for NY. We had a wonderful day together and I’m so happy that he’s awesome enough to drive here just to spend a day with me. He really is the best.

Now I just need to find room for all these books…

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The Missing File

by D.A. Mishani

Fiction — Crime Fiction / Mystery
Harper; March 19, 2013
Hardcover
304 pages
(Source: Publisher / TLC Book Tours)

From the back cover:

Police detective Avraham Avraham knows that when a crime is committed in his quiet suburban Tel Aviv, there is little need for a complex investigation. There are no serial killers, kidnappings, or rapes here. It’s usually the neighbor, the uncle, the father. The explanation, as he has learned, is always the simplest answer.

But his theory is challenged when a sixteen-year-old boy named Ofer Sharabi disappears without a trace while on his way to school one morning. Suddenly Avraham’s ordered world is knocked off its well-oiled axis and his life consumed by perplexity.

The more he finds out about the boy and his circumstances, the further out of reach the truth seems to become. Avraham’s best lead is Ofer’s older neighbor and schoolteacher, Zeev Avni. He has information that sheds new light on the case–and makes him a likely suspect. But will the neighbor’s strange story save the investigation before it’s too late?

The Missing File is a good, solid crime fiction novel. Told from two perspectives–that of Detective Avraham, and that of Zeev Avni–it not only provides a good mystery; it’s also a good portrayal of suburban life, proving that lots of things about suburban living are universal.

I’m not sure that I like Detective Avraham, though. I don’t necessarily dislike him as a character, but he didn’t exactly win my heart over, either. He is portrayed as kind of incompetent concerning the case of Ofer’s disappearance, but he’s also described by one of his superiors as a “promising young detective,” and she obviously respects him as such. There is no good explanation provided for the difficulty Avraham faces as the lead detective in this case, and that makes his character a little disappointing. We haven’t seen the last of Avraham, though–The Missing File is only the first in what is to become an entire series featuring this detective–and I have hope for Avraham’s character. He still has potential, and I think he can be redeemed in future books. (Or maybe he’s intended to be an anti-hero of sorts, and he might grow on me in future books.)

Zeev Avni, on the other hand, is a very interesting character who I’m hoping to see more of in future books. I couldn’t quite get a handle on him, and I’d love to see how he develops.

My one semi-major complaint about the book (and it’s not something that should stop anyone from reading The Missing File) is the title. There’s no missing file in the story. Now, titles can have literal meanings, and they can have figurative meanings. If I take the title literally, there is no missing file. If I take the title as figurative, there might be an argument for a “missing file,” but it’s a stretch. I am one of those readers who always takes the title into account and connects it to the story at some point while I’m reading the book, so this was a little frustrating for me. I think a different title should have been chosen.

Overall, The Missing File is a good read. I was pretty sure I had the perpetrators of the crime picked correctly early on, but Mishani kept me second-guessing myself. And although I was right about Ofer’s disappearance (in a way), the development of the criminals’ apprehension kept the story interesting. I’d recommend it to readers that enjoy a good crime fiction novel, and I’ll be looking forward to reading more books in the series.

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(To learn more about D.A. Mishani, please visit his website.)

**If you choose to purchase this title using the links below, I will receive a small percentage of the sale (to be used toward site maintenance and buying more books).

Amazon | Powell’s Books | IndieBound

Today was the first day of my local library’s biannual book sale. I have two local libraries, actually, but this book sale that runs today through Saturday is for my LOCAL local library in Hollidaysburg (the one about two miles from my house). It’s a tiny library (but they have plans to move to a new location and build a bigger library, starting at the end of the year if all goes well) so this book sale isn’t nearly as big as the one for the Altoona library, but I still managed to buy 14 good books for $14. Today through tomorrow at 5pm, hardcovers and trade paperbacks are $1 per book, and mass market paperbacks are 50 cents. After 5pm tomorrow, BAG DAY starts. I’m planning on going back either tomorrow night or sometime Saturday to see what’s left and maybe fill up a bag. I just realized a few minutes ago that I passed over a book I have on my wish list, so I’m hoping it’s still there when I go back (Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky).

Here are the books I bought today:

From top left to bottom right: Plainsong by Kent Haruf, Empire Falls by Richard Russo, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

All of these were on my “to-read-do-not-own” shelf on Goodreads aside from The Bean Trees and Homeland, so I was very happy to find them. I read The Bean Trees when I was a teenager, but I remember nothing about it and I didn’t own it. I had never heard of Homeland (I don’t think), but Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors, so buying that one was a no-brainer.

From left to right: The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Importance of Being Earnest and Four Other Plays by Oscar Wilde, and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi.

The book sale’s stock of classic books was pretty much non-existent, but I’ve been meaning to read The Social Contract for some time now. I don’t think I knew about The Drowned and the Saved before I found it today, but it sounds very good.

From left to right: Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

I read Eco’s The Name of the Rose last year and wasn’t all that impressed, but I’m willing to give him another chance. Some people whose reading tastes I share have assured me Foucault’s Pendulum is a very good book, and I was excited to pay only a dollar for a hardcover edition in good condition.

Wench is a book that I saw some Twitter buddies talking about a month or so ago, and they were raving about it; it was an insta-grab when I found it today. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Lots of bloggers have been reading and reviewing the books in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series recently, and all the good reviews have me intrigued. What a nice surprise to find the first book in the series at the book sale today. Score!

From left to right: The Regulators by Richard Bachman (Stephen King), and Gerald’s Game by Stephen King.

Last but certainly not least, I was quite happy to find these two hardcover editions and pay only a dollar for each of them. As most of you know, sj and I are working our way through all of Stephen King’s books in order of publication, so it will be nice to have these already on hand when we get to them. And I love the cover of The Regulators for some reason. There were quite a few mass market paperback editions of his books at the sale, but I’m not really a fan of the small size of those. If they are still there when I go back for bag day, I’ll probably grab them anyway.

Not a bad haul for a book sale that takes up about twenty tables (that are nowhere near full) in one small room; I was actually pretty impressed with the book selection. And as always, the money is going to a good cause. Regardless of what certain authors think, libraries are still an important part of our communities and I’m happy to give them some of my spending money.

Side note: This is what happens when I sit down to blog and Rascal decides that he wants attention. “NO BLOGGING ALLOWED UNTIL I GET ALL THE RUBS.”

(Post title quote: Henry Ward Beecher)