Racing the Light

Racing the Light (#1,120) is a thriller by Robert Crais featuring Elvis Cole, his LA-based private eye, and his partner, Joe Pike.  Joe Pike is mostly silent, but often deadly.  And he knows dangerous people.  All of that is helpful when Elvis is approached by a little old lady bearing wads of cash to find her adult son who has gone missing.  Since she came with two bodyguards and an escort vehicle, Elvis is intrigued, although not sure he wants to take the case.  But what could it hurt to poke around a bit?  

What he uncovers is that Josh Shumacher is a podcaster bent on following a hot tip that is leading him into some very dangerous territory.  Powerful people do not want Josh interfering in their business and are willing to do anything to stop him.  

Doting and mysterious parents, powerful enemies, a dead stripper and a revived romance for Elvis - what could make for a better read?  Not much!  Enjoy!

Maame

Meet Madeleine Wright.  She's the central character in Jessica George's novel Maame (#1,119).  Maddie is twenty-five, works at a dead end job she hates, but can't afford to give up, and still lives in central London with her father.  She longs to be free to live her own life, but Maddie is responsible enough to know she can't step away.  Her dad has Parkinson's and she's his main caretaker.  Her older brother isn't around much, except to ask her for money, and their mother lives mainly in Ghana, taking care of family property there.  To add another layer to Maddie's issues, she's usually the only black person in her workplaces, so she can never be sure if the snubs directed at her are normal for lower echelon workers, or if it's related to race.  To say her family is dysfunctional is a mild understatement!  Her mother, when she arrives from Ghana, tries to take over everything - her father's care, Maddie's bank account and her love life.

The day she is fired from her job starts a chain of events that change Maddie's outlook on life as she moves out into an apartment with roommates, begins dating (after eight years!), finds a new job and with it begins to sense what her future could hold.

Maddie is so clearly the underdog of her own story that she immediately has you rooting for her.  You'll recognize yourself in many of the cringe-worthy situations she finds herself in, but that makes her oh so relatable.  Keep a tissue handy while you read Maame, but know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel.  A very satisfying read, and highly recommended.

Girl In Ice

Erica Ferencik's Girl In Ice (#1,118) is a gritty thriller set in an unusual place: Arctic Greenland.  Valerie Chesterfield is an expert in linguistics, specializing in dead Nordic languages.  Which makes her the perfect candidate to visit a remote Artic research station where the scientists have thawed out alive a girl they found frozen into a glacier.  She's speaking a language no one else can understand.  Can Val help?

There are several problems with the idea.  Her twin brother Andy supposedly committed suicide at this outpost, wandering outside in the freezing weather wearing only his underwear.  Can Val bear to be in the same spot where her brother died under tragic circumstances?  Their father doesn't believe Andy committed suicide, and deep down, neither does Val.  It's a career-capping opportunity, but Val can barely make it from her apartment to the university where she works.  Is she physically and mentally up to the challenges?

Wyatt, the scientist in charge, is a menacing presence, demanding instant results from her work with the girl.  Val knows Wyatt from before, and doesn't trust his motives or his promises.  What is really going on at this research station?  Cut off from the outside world, Val struggles to communicate with the girl to find out what really happened to her.  Where are her parents?  Could she possibly have survived in the ice for hundreds of years, and if so, how?

It's not always an easy read, but along with Val, the reader wants to find out where the girl came from.  But will anyone leave the research station alive?  Maybe not.

Anywhere You Run

Anywhere You Run (#1,117) is Wanda M. Morris' second book, and if anything, it's even better than her first:  All Her Little Secrets.  So glad you pulled that manuscript with your heroine's "jiggly bits" back out of drawer after you thought no one would want to read about her, Ms. Morris!

This is historical fiction set in 1960s Mississippi, not a safe place for black families to be living.  Violet and her sister Marigold are all that are left of their family, living in an uneasy truce in their childhood home.  That is until the night Violet is forced to grab her few belongings to elope with a man she sees only as a ticket out of town.  In the meantime, Marigold has a secret of her own.  She had aspirations to become a lawyer, but her work at a Civil Rights Center in Jackson hasn't turned out the way she planned.  When a man comes knocking on her door looking for Violet and begins following her as well, she takes what she thinks is going to be the easy way out - marriage to a man she doesn't love.  Neither sister has chosen a safe or easy path, but with a menacing man in pursuit of both of them, things take an ugly and dangerous turn.  

The point of view keeps changing from character to character as the story progresses, filling in some of the blanks as Marigold tries to adjust to life in Detroit while Violet hides out in a small Georgia town.  The tension keeps ratcheting up as Mercer Buggs comes ever closer to his targets.  Will either sister survive, much less find any kind of happiness?

A great read that's hard to put down.

Santa's Little Yelpers

Who doesn't love a Christmas mystery featuring curmudgeonly Andy Carpenter and his Golden Retriever Tara?  It took until February for Santa's Little Yelpers (#1,116) to arrive on the New Books shelf at my local library, but that didn't matter.  

What does matter is the fact that one of the Tara Foundation's faithful volunteers has just been arrested for a murder he says he didn't commit.  In fact, the victim could have cleared his conviction on a manslaughter charge from three years ago that got him disbarred from a prestigious New York City law firm.  Will Andy help him?  Well, there goes the Christmas in Disneyworld Andy had planned for wife Laurie and their adopted son Ricky...

Throw in land grabs in a remote Pennsylvania town, a strange religious cult and the murder of a mobster's son and you have the ingredients for a mystery that will keep you guessing right up until the end.  Love the humorous touches in these books!

Iona Iverson's Rules For Commuting

Ever ridden a bus or train to work?  Or taken an airplane?  Then you know the object of your commute is not to make eye contact or engage with each other, ever.  But for Iona Iverson, a woman of a "certain age" commuting with her French bull dog Lulu to her London job, that changes the day that Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right across the table from her.

How that incident changes the lives of the commuters on that train car is the subject of Clare Pooley's entertaining and engrossing novel Iona Iverson's Rules For Commuting (#1,115).  We learn more about Iona herself, the handsome nurse who comes to the rescue, the impossibly pretty girl who always has her nose in a book, and the teenager who has made a typically teen mistake and is living with the consequences.  There are others, of course, who contribute to the social glue.  They change from commuters to a community right in front of us, and we're cheering them on.

It's a thoroughly satisfying read; don't miss out!  You'll wish your commutes are half so entertaining.

Rules of Engagement

I saw Stacey Abrams' name on the spine of Rules of Engagement (#1,114) at my local library and looked forward to reading it after Blind Justice, her novel set in the Supreme Court.  Rules of Engagement is actually a much earlier novel published under her pen name Selena Montgomery, re-issued now that Ms. Abrams has had success under her own name.  

This is an espionage novel, which I was really looking forward to reading, but I must confess that I couldn't get past the first twenty pages.  I would classify this as a "steamy" novel.  From the cover blurbs, it certainly has its own set of fans, but I'm not one of them.  Too much emphasis on sex, and not enough on the espionage for me.  Be warned.

The Cat Who Saved Books

If you love books and reading, find a copy of The Cat Who Saved Books (#1,113) by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai.  The main character, Rintaro Natsuki, is a young high school student who spends almost all his waking hours reading in his grandfather's used bookstore.  When his grandfather quietly passes away one night, Rintaro is bereft.  Suddenly everything he's known in his life is gone: his grandfather and the bookstore that was their home.  He'll be forced to move with his unknown aunt to another city.

But that is before Tiger the Tabby enters his life and leads him through the back wall of the bookstore to help him save books from the people dwelling at the center of three different labyrinths.  The talking cat demands Rintaro's aid on his perilous mission.  Each foe claims to love books, but each is bent on destroying them in his own way.  If they succeed, books as we know them will vanish.  The tasks are progressively more difficult and dangerous, but who can refuse a talking cat?

On his reluctant quest, Rintaro is encouraged and joined by classmates whom he never realized were concerned about him.  Does he succeed in his mission?  You'll have to read The Cat Who Saved Books to find out.  Along the way, you'll read many truths about books and the people who read them which will undoubtedly resonate with you. Be prepared with a highlighter if you are lucky enough to own your own copy.  Not a long read, but a most enjoyable one.

Lightning Strike

William Kent Krueger's prequel to his popular Cork O'Connor Mystery series is Lightning Strike (#1,112).  It explains some of the hows and whys of Cork becoming the sheriff of small town Aurora deep in the Northwoods of Minnesota.  Not surprisingly, it's when he and one of his friends come across a body hanging from a tree in a remote clearing in the woods near Iron Lake.  He's only twelve and this kind of violent death is still new to him.

The victim is an Indian, Big John Manydeeds.  It's obviously a suicide, but as events prove maybe too obviously.  The resentment is strong against Indians in Aurora, and the fact that Sheriff Liam O'Connor, Cork's dad, is married to a woman of Indian heritage is enough to make both whites and Indians regard him with suspicion as he goes about investigating the untimely death.  Cork is troubled by the death and struggles to come to terms with it by pursuing his own trail of "crumbs" with his friends.  There are red herrings aplenty here, and real danger to both O'Connors as they uncover more of the truth.  While the mystery is solved in the end, Cork's life is changed forever.

As always, this is an absorbing read.  There are a number of characters here who will be familiar to anyone who has read other books in this series set in the vast Northwoods.  If you haven't discovered this series yet, or have only read Krueger's stand-alone classics, Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land, Lightning Strike would be an ideal place to start.