The Welsh Girl
Library Journal: This debut novel by an award-winning short story writer is set during World War II in northern Wales, where German POWs are held in a low-security prison. The intertwining stories involve a farm girl named Esther, who becomes pregnant after being raped by an English soldier; German POW Karsten, who is ashamed of […]
Holmes On the Range
Kirkus Reviews: Inspired by the Baker Street genius, a Montana cowboy solves some murders at the cattle ranch where he works. Redheaded cowpoke Gustav Amlingmeyer ("Old Red") has a hankering for the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. After reading Doyle's "The Red-Headed League," he feels that emulating the famous sleuth is his destiny. Gustav's younger brother […]
The Collaborator of Bethlehem
Library Journal: In this outstanding debut, Rees, formerly the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine and author of Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, presents modern-day Bethlehem, an ancient city of tremendous historical and religious significance, torn apart by constant attacks and reprisals between Israelis and Palestinians. Even the police chief […]
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Library Journal: In Gardner's latest thriller, Boston Police Sgt. D.D. Warren hooks up with Massachusetts State Police Det. Robert Dodge (from Alone) to investigate a long-abandoned underground cavern found on the grounds of the former Boston State Mental Hospital. The hospital had been shut down decades earlier, but the mummified bodies of six young girls […]
Paula Spencer
James Hynes – The Washington Post : Reading Paula Spencer is pure, undiluted pleasure, and it's not necessary to have read the first novel to thoroughly enjoy this one. Paula is still a very funny woman (and her sharp-tongued sister Carmel is even funnier), and Doyle himself is still the master of the extended set-piece. […]
The Dead Fathers Club
Kirkus Reviews: Literary influence is neatly reconfigured in the English author's second novel (after The Last Family in England, 2005), in which an 11-year-old schoolboy is commanded to seek revenge by the ghost of his murdered father. "Dad's ghost" appears to Philip Noble, not on the battlements at Elsinore, but at the family-operated Castle and […]
Knots
Publishers Weekly : Somalia-born Farah's ninth novel (after Links, first in a trilogy of which this is the second book) tells the spellbinding story of Cambara, a Somalian ?migr? to Canada. Cambara is mourning her only son's drowning death?in the Toronto pool of her abusive lawyer husband's mistress. In the aftermath, Cambara resolves to leave […]
Napoleon's Pyramids
Publishers Weekly: At the start of Dietrich's superb historical thriller, his swashbuckling hero, American Ethan Gage, who's living in Paris during the waning days of the French Revolution and was once apprenticed to Benjamin Franklin, wins a curious Egyptian medallion in a card game. Soon after, he's set upon by thieves, chased by the police, […]
What Is the What : the Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng : a Novel
Francine Prose – The New York Times: Reading What Is the What does indeed make it impossible to pretend that Valentino Achak Deng and the other Lost Boys and all the men and women and children who have suffered, and continue to suffer, fates like his do not exist. Dave Eggers has made the outlines […]
You Suck : a Love Story
Publishers Weekly: Moore's latest (after 2006's A Dirty Job) is a cheerfully perverse, gut-busting tale of young vampires in love. Nineteen-year-old Tommy is a bewildered hipster recently relocated to San Francisco from Incontinence, Ind. His sarcastic redhead (and bloodsucking) girlfriend, Jody, brings him into the fold of the undead ("I wanted us to be together," […]