Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
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Shortly after being offered the assignment of reviewing Meg Gardiner's latest book, The Dirty Secrets Club, I was visiting an American friend in Tokyo and discovered the first Gardiner book, China Lake, on his bookshelf. The novel was a veritable roller coaster ride from page one. The protagonist, Evan Delaney, neatly splits the difference between Sue Grafton's feisty Kinsey Millhone and Robert Eversz's edgy Nina Zero. I finished it in short order, and was left eager to read The Dirty Secrets Club. Although her novels are set in her native California, Gardiner makes her home in England, and until now her books have been largely unavailable stateside. As Gardiner explained in our email interview, "The novels have been out in the rest of the English-speaking world since 2002, but weren't on sale in the USA. Then luck intervened, loudly" – Stephen King wrote a column praising Gardiner's books in Entertainment Weekly. The next week, "10 American publishers wanted to publish the Evan Delaney series, along with The Dirty Secrets Club," says Gardiner. "I was blown away." American readers will now have the chance to experience one of the finest contemporary writers in the genre.

The streets of San Francisco provide the backdrop for the fast-paced The Dirty Secrets Club. Membership is limited to the rich, famous and influential, to ensure that each person would have lots to lose if their secret were to be exposed. The problem is that one by one, the dirty secrets are coming to light, and the ensuing rash of high-profile suicides plagues the City by the Bay: first a highly regarded prosecutor launches her BMW off a freeway ramp; then a 49ers football star takes a flying dive off the Golden Gate Bridge. Enter Jo Beckett, forensic psychiatrist, and Amy Tang, hard-bitten SFPD policewoman, to try to make sense of it all. The interplay between Beckett and Tang is at once tentative and aggressive, neither one entirely trusting the motivations of the other. And Beckett has a secret of her own that she desperately wants to keep to herself.

Gardiner's characters are tough, but always sympathetic. "I figure that if I'm going to spend a year with these people while I write a novel, I'd better be able to stand their company. Even the awful characters had better have some redeeming features," she says. For my part, I will add a small amount to Gardiner's coffers by buying all of the Delaney books as soon as they are available – China Lake and Mission Canyon are already on sale, and the sequels will be released over the next three months.

Shortly after being offered the assignment of reviewing Meg Gardiner's latest book, The Dirty Secrets Club, I was visiting an American friend in Tokyo and discovered the first Gardiner book, China Lake, on his bookshelf. The novel was a veritable roller coaster ride from…

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Remember what happened when those Danish cartoonists drew caricatures of the Islamic prophet? Just imagine what could happen when an American novelist, New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor, does roughly the same in The Last Patriot.

Ex-Navy SEAL turned Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath (who Thor fans will recall from The First Commandment), is enjoying a little R&andR in gay Paree with his slightly damaged but healing girlfriend, Tracy Hastings (herself a Naval Explosive Ordinance Disposal tech) when things turn, well, not so gay. After a bungled car bomb blast and a narrow escape with an Islamic scholar in tow, the bodies begin to stack up like cordwood.

Why all the fuss? Seems that an addendum to the Koran, allegedly written by the prophet himself, makes an unexpected – and to a group of jihadists, entirely unwelcome – appearance. If allowed to become public, it could "stop militant Islam dead in its tracks." Tough times demand a tough hero, and they don't come any grittier than Thor's. Facing down a recalcitrant target who stands between him and the French pokey, Harvath employs Jack Bauer-like tactics to persuade his captive that confession is good for the soul. With not just a license to kill, but a license to wound, disrupt, maim and explode, Harvath is, virtually single-handedly, more than a match for any who would seek to overthrow our republic by means of force or violence. The only things he's missing are a cape and vulnerability to Kryptonite.

Fans of "24" and other high-adrenaline escapist fare will find Thor's latest cinematic page-turner a must-pack for this summer's vacation.

Remember what happened when those Danish cartoonists drew caricatures of the Islamic prophet? Just imagine what could happen when an American novelist, New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor, does roughly the same in The Last Patriot.

Ex-Navy SEAL turned Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath…

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My brother-in-law has noticed that most weather-related place names are more indicative than whimsical: if it is the middle of January and you are visiting a place called Snowshoe, you had better be prepared for deep drifts. A corollary for the male characters in Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry might be that if you meet a young woman who makes a great deal of casual conversation about cannibalism, it may be a very mixed blessing if she regards you as a “hunk.” “Hunk,” after all, derives from the Flemish word hunke, which means “a piece of food.” My observation, not Murray’s, though etymological curiosities related to her subject are among the few she doesn’t seem to have investigated.

For A Carnivore’s Inquiry is full of all sorts of unusual information from knowledgeable analyses of macabre paintings by Goya and Gericault to detailed accounts of the real events that served as sources for Poe and Melville, to imaginative reconstructions of historical events ranging from the demise of the Donner party to the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller. All of this discursive but fascinating exposition is linked in some way to the picaresque experiences of the main character, Katherine Shea, in whose wake men are found not only dead but also horribly mutilated.

A Carnivore’s Inquiry is told in the first person, and so it is easy for the reader to understand what attracts men to Katherine. She is eccentrically attractive, disarmingly direct, acutely perceptive and genuinely witty. Through her narrative, the other characters emerge as fully realized (I am tempted to say “full-bodied and full-blooded”) individuals especially her successful father, whom she regards as irredeemably strange, and her deranged mother, whom she regards as a soul mate.

Murray’s first novel, Slow Burn, was a sort of Tama Jamowitz story set in Manila, and her PEN-Faulkner award-winning collection of stories, The Caprices, treated characters on the margins of the Pacific theater of World War II. This neo-Gothic tale, which recalls the style of Nicholson Baker, is a considerably different sort of work but an extremely enjoyable ride nonetheless. Martin Kich is a professor of English at Wright State University.

My brother-in-law has noticed that most weather-related place names are more indicative than whimsical: if it is the middle of January and you are visiting a place called Snowshoe, you had better be prepared for deep drifts. A corollary for the male characters in Sabina…
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As I read each of the delightful books in Tasha Alexander's series featuring Lady Emily Ashton, I can't decide which character I would most like to be: the spirited and intellectual Margaret, the regal and self-assured Cecile, or the gracious and lovely Ivy. However, I always go back to the leading lady, Emily.

In A Fatal Waltz, the third book featuring my favorite 19th-century English sleuth (sorry, Holmes, old chap), we find Emily right where we want her—with intrigue swirling around her. I dove into this book fully anticipating Lady Emily to be at the top of her game as a forward-thinking woman testing the boundaries of elite society, to the cheers of some and the horror of others. But a new character leaves Emily reduced to little more than stammers—a beautiful, worldly, sophisticated countess who is close to the affairs surrounding this new mystery . . . and perhaps too close to Emily's fiancé, Colin Hargreaves.

Thrown together with the countess at a house party hosted by the powerful but unpleasant Lord Fortescue, formerly verbose Emily suddenly finds herself searching for a snappy comeback, or any words at all. Then the sudden murder of Lord Fortescue pushes the household and its guests into chaos, and pushes Emily to gather her wits as she launches another controversial investigation. But her dedication to solving this crime has less to do with shocking her peers and more to do with a life-or-death vow to a friend: Ivy's husband, Robert, stands accused. The clues uncovered take Emily from the desolate moors of the English countryside, to London's Berkeley Square, to artists' studios in wintry Vienna. Alexander's descriptions of these places are spot-on, and readers will be equally drawn in by this mental time travel as by her superb storytelling.

Kristi Grimes writes from Birmingham, Alabama.

 

As I read each of the delightful books in Tasha Alexander's series featuring Lady Emily Ashton, I can't decide which character I would most like to be: the spirited and intellectual Margaret, the regal and self-assured Cecile, or the gracious and lovely Ivy. However,…

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A chance encounter on the pier of Magic Beach, California, launches the newest adventure of Dean Koontz’s singular hero, Odd Thomas, who has starred in three previous bestsellers. Wise beyond his 20-something years, Odd evokes the homespun wisdom of Forrest Gump amid the mind-spinning adventures of a Jack Bauer.

The ultimate Everyman, the one-time fry cook is ostensibly just a jack-of-all-trades for an aging actor. Yet a prophetic vision triggers a manhunt for Odd by the Magic Beach police. While on the run, he puts his trust in the mysterious Annamaria and people like Reverend Moran, who betrays him by revealing him to the police. Odd also trusts his own instincts and one of his “oddest” companions: Francis Albert Sinatra, Ol’ Blue Eyes, haunts Odd, and goes ballistic with such descriptive finesse it’s a joy to read.

Canine relationships are a hallmark of Koontz’s writing, and they’re sublimely apparent in this tale. Odd’s companions include a ghost dog and new dog who intertwine in time and memory, much as Odd’s encounters with people and with danger. Throughout Odd Hours, there is the threat of a nuclear terror attack that would affect hundreds of thousands of people. But it’s with his descriptions of the personal terror that circles Odd as he confronts a world that blends life and death . . . and lingering death . . . where Koontz is at his zenith.

In the creation of the character Odd Thomas, with his prophetic dreams and psychic encounters and plain-spoken philosophizing, Koontz may have intended an avatar for himself, a voice to opine on everything from the two-way therapeutic interrelationship of man and dog to the global state of distress, but he’s transcended that to provide an avatar of hope and honor and courage for all of us – the linchpin of a rollicking good tale.

Sandy Huseby writes from Fargo, North Dakota, and lakeside in northern Minnesota.

Wise beyond his 20-something years, Odd evokes the homespun wisdom of Forrest Gump amid the mind-spinning adventures of a Jack Bauer.
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If there are any lingering doubts that Alan Furst is our premiere writer of historical spy fiction, his 10th novel, The Spies of Warsaw, will put them to rest. No one sets the tone of the dangerous shadows and the consequences of misjudgment quite like Furst – and he also keeps the reader guessing about who is trustworthy and who isn't, which makes for a highly entertaining read.

The novel opens in the fall of 1937, when the assembly of the next great war machine from Germany is resonating throughout Europe. There can be no doubt that war is coming. Enter our hero, a military attache from the French embassy, Col. Jean-Francois Mercier, suave and dapper, a decorated hero of World War I with the requisite amount of courage and testosterone.

As if an imminent war weren't enough to keep Mercier busy, he is in love with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, Anna, who is a lawyer for the League of Nations. Matters get sticky when one of his lower-level spies becomes convinced the Gestapo is on to him. This is when Furst really kicks his novel into gear, casting suspicion on every character Mercier has to deal with. He spares us no mischievous nuance in the persona of people such as the Russian defectors Viktor and Malka Rozen, Dr. Lapp, a senior German officer in Warsaw, or the vicious Maj. August Voss of SS counterintelligence.

If peril cast an aroma, its miasma would hover over each page of The Spies of Warsaw. Furst is a master at setting, and his depiction of Warsaw and the surrounding Polish countryside is rife with the grim spectacle of a nation teetering on war. Perhaps this is why the few moments that Col. Mercier can manage with his lover, Anna, seem both so tender and erotically charged. You may never take a train ride again without wondering who the mysterious character is in the seat next to you.

 

Michael Lee is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

If there are any lingering doubts that Alan Furst is our premiere writer of historical spy fiction, his 10th novel, The Spies of Warsaw, will put them to rest. No one sets the tone of the dangerous shadows and the consequences of misjudgment quite…

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Former CIA officer Robert Baer, whose experiences in the Middle East inspired the film Syriana, makes his fiction debut with Blow the House Down, an alternative history to 9/11 that weaves fact and fiction into an intriguingly plausible version of the tragic attacks. The story is replete with money-hungry businessmen, sinister terrorists, rogues, righteous agents and the requisite beautiful woman. In short, there are the good guys, the bad guys and the worse guys.

The hero of Baer’s book is Max Waller, a middle-aged CIA agent with an ex-wife, a teenage daughter and a singular obsession: finding the terrorists responsible for the real-life kidnapping and murder of fellow agent William Buckley. Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, was kidnapped in 1984 and subjected to torture and interrogation for 444 days before dying in captivity. Max, always regarded as a lone wolf, sticks his nose under the wrong tent and finds himself on the outside looking in. His own people are following him, the FBI is making a case against him and he is being set up to take a huge fall, one that will force him out of the agency and possibly into prison. But Max hasn’t spent two decades in obscure parts of the world working with shady people without learning a thing or two. With his finger curled around the thread of a mystery, he pulls, and slowly unravels a connection between the U.S., Iran, Osama bin Laden and the eventual 9/11 hijackers. Max flits from one godforsaken Middle East hotspot to the next, growing increasingly disturbed by what he finds something is going to happen and it will be big. Most troubling, the powers-that-be are not only ignoring his warnings, but also seem to be going out of their way to shut him up.

Baer mixes real events and characters among his fictional creations. While the tragedy of 9/11 has recently begun to crop up in literary fiction, this is one of its incipient starring roles in the popular fiction genre. Baer treats the subject with respect in this thoughtful page-turner. Ian Schwarz writes from New York City.

Former CIA officer Robert Baer, whose experiences in the Middle East inspired the film Syriana, makes his fiction debut with Blow the House Down, an alternative history to 9/11 that weaves fact and fiction into an intriguingly plausible version of the tragic attacks. The story…
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What if you were the teenage golden boy of a small town, and you saw something you shouldn’t have seen? What if the only way to stay safe is to keep silent, and disappear? What happens when you’re ready to come home again? In The Virgin of Small Plains, award-winning mystery writer Nancy Pickard tells the story of Mitch, Abby and Rex, best friends in idyllic Small Plains, Kansas. When Rex, his brother and their father the local sheriff find the naked body of a young woman in a cow pasture during a blizzard, the teenagers’ lives change in ways they never anticipated. Overnight, Mitch disappears, leaving both his girlfriend and his best buddy feeling abandoned. Over the next decade and a half, life goes on, though with Mitch’s continued absence, neither Abby nor Rex ever feels complete. The townspeople chip in to bury the unidentified girl. Inexplicably, strange miracles occur, and in death, the girl acquires a new identity and a power she lacked in life. Those who ask her help in curing the sick start calling her the Virgin.

After his mother’s death in another snowstorm, Mitch decides that 17 years away is long enough. Determined to get his revenge on the town and the men he feels abandoned him, Mitch settles in to a ranch house his family rarely uses and begins buying property in town. His unexpected encounters with Abby and Rex reopen the wounds all three carry from the night of the Virgin’s death. When Mitch meets another young woman seeking a miracle, his desire for revenge is transformed into a healing force. In an unfolding series of revelations, Abby, Mitch and Rex now sheriff himself discover the truth about the Virgin, and their own families. Pickard handles the shifts between 1987 and the present deftly. She gets inside the hearts and minds of wounded teenagers, and shows how they became strong, capable but still vulnerable adults. The Virgin of Small Plains is a powerful novel that will keep you reading way past bedtime. Leslie Budewitz writes from northwest Montana.

What if you were the teenage golden boy of a small town, and you saw something you shouldn't have seen? What if the only way to stay safe is to keep silent, and disappear? What happens when you're ready to come home again? In The…
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Try to think of someone in our culture who enjoys unquestioned access to both the highest chambers of power and the lowest regions of squalor; someone who is trusted by all because he poses no threat, and thus has in his keeping more information than anyone else possibly could. Who would it be? The cable guy? The pizza deliverer? In Jason Goodwin’s Istanbul of 1836, it is Yashim Togalu, a fellow who can walk as freely into the sultan’s harem as into a coffeehouse. Why such freedom? Because he is a eunuch. Having been castrated in his youth, he holds the keys to the Sublime Porte, the capital of the Ottoman Empire the most beautiful and dangerous city in the world, and the fabulous site of Goodwin’s new mystery, The Janissary Tree.

When a harem girl and a member of the royal guard are found murdered on the same day, the sultan and the head military officer immediately hand the case over to Investigator Yashim. Time is short: The sultan will review the New Guard in 10 days, and if the mysterious deaths (others follow hard upon the first two) are not cleared up by then, the precarious stability of the empire may once again crumble. Goodwin’s mid-career crossover from nonfiction to detective novels (this is the first in a projected series) is a triumph of the first order. As our finest historian of the Ottoman world, he knows well that to recreate a past civilization, both author and reader must inhabit it fully in the imagination. With Yashim, we go shopping in the bustling market by the Golden Horn, and then go home to cook up a savory pot of rice mouth-wateringly mixed with currants, pine nuts and Allah knows what else. We make friends with the Byronic ambassador from Poland and a redoubtable drag queen. Along the way, we begin to appreciate the dark and bloody consequences of the collapse of the Janissary Guard in 1826. We learn that much more than perfumed flesh is being made ready within the walls of the harem. We are dazzled by the beauty of a lady who gives Yashim back his manhood. It is difficult to imagine a more generous or more subtle realization of the word mystery than the experience of The Janissary Tree. Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

Try to think of someone in our culture who enjoys unquestioned access to both the highest chambers of power and the lowest regions of squalor; someone who is trusted by all because he poses no threat, and thus has in his keeping more information than…
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<B>It’s a mystery</B> Noted Greek writer Petros Markaris uses a thoroughly modern and thoroughly corrupt Athens as the backdrop for an international mystery in <B>Deadline in Athens</B>. The novel introduces the overworked and underpaid Athenian homicide inspector Costas Haritos, who wants to do nothing more than quickly close his cases and get his boss and the media off his back. But he can’t abide the unanswered questions in his head. Soon what looks like a simple crime of passion among poverty-stricken Albanian immigrants turns into an international investigation. Well-crafted with a set of memorable characters and satisfying plot twists, <B>Deadline in Athens</B> provides just enough hints to keep you guessing and more than enough suspense to keep you reading. <I>Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.</I>

<B>It's a mystery</B> Noted Greek writer Petros Markaris uses a thoroughly modern and thoroughly corrupt Athens as the backdrop for an international mystery in <B>Deadline in Athens</B>. The novel introduces the overworked and underpaid Athenian homicide inspector Costas Haritos, who wants to do nothing more…
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Given the volcanic sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s understandable that he’s chosen to retread many of that book’s conventions and plot devices for The Lost Symbol. Once again Brown’s protagonist, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, must unlock a series of fiendishly cryptic puzzles to keep world chaos at bay, all the while confronting, within the span of a single day, a self-mutilating but endlessly resourceful villain, a powerful secret society (the Freemasons) and a well-meaning but obstructionist law-enforcement agency (the CIA). And again Langdon is accompanied in his frantic flights from danger by a woman who’s both attractive and academically worthy of him. The action takes place in and around some of Washington, D.C.’s grandest architectural treasures, among them the Capitol, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress.

When he’s not assuming other identities, the villain Langdon faces calls himself Mal’akh. He is truly a terrifying foe, rich, muscular, merciless and tattooed from head to toe. Having insinuated himself into the highest rank of Masons, his mission is to discover and expose the organization’s deepest and most socially disruptive secrets. To prevent this, Langdon has to rescue a friend who Mal’akh has kidnapped and is torturing for information. Alas, the CIA is also onto Mal’akh and is determined to keep Langdon from messing things up.  All the action proceeds from these entanglements. At times, the book reads like an episode of the TV series "24."

Building psychologically complex characters is not Brown’s strong suit, nor need it be since he’s essentially writing genre fiction. But he does create a memorable one in the diminutive person of Inoue Sato, head of the CIA’s Office of Security. A survivor of the Nisei internment camps of World War II, she is pure chain-smoking, command-snapping venom. She steals every scene she’s in. Langdon also takes a Tom Clancy turn here, equipping the CIA commandos with all manner of high-tech weapons which should make Langdon’s escapes impossible but don’t. When Langdon isn’t running for his life, he’s tossing off tutorials on myth, history and religion. Seldom has unrelieved mayhem been so instructive.

There’s not much tension-relieving humor in The Lost Symbol, but there is one spot in which Brown seems to be poking fun at himself and his delay in finishing the manuscript for this book. Langdon calls his editor to get a phone number and nimbly parries the editor’s questions about when he’s going to meet his deadline. After Langdon hangs up, the editor “stared at the receiver and shook his head. Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

Well, it was worth the wait.

Given the volcanic sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s understandable that he’s chosen to retread many of that book’s conventions and plot devices for The Lost Symbol. Once again Brown’s protagonist, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, must unlock a series of fiendishly…

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Maggie Wilson remembered what happened that night she was left for dead. Her then-husband Nate came home drunk. She could see him in the doorframe still, raising his hand to strike her. She never doubted that memory. But then, five years later, someone else confessed to the attack.

This gripping first novel by Paul Jaskunas reads like a memoir as he captures the earnest voice of this beautiful young woman, turned into the village freak by the savage attack. Her testimony sent Nate to prison, and Maggie, now 28, must consider that she might have misremembered. Maybe it wasn’t her husband after all. Maybe that powerful memory was false.

Tautly written, Hidden opens with Maggie’s description of the scene when the police arrive and find her unconscious and bleeding on the floor of their farmhouse near the picturesque Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. The reader gradually learns much about Maggie: how she happened to marry so young, and how she came to violate her marriage vows with a co-worker; how she wants to lose herself. “Mine is a secretive country,” Maggie says. “It was settled by people who came here to hide.” Supporting characters come off well in this novel, and that’s what keeps it compelling. Manny, the 78-year-old neighbor Maggie drinks gin with is as memorable as her tedious, devoted mother, or Nate, who makes the mistake of taking his domineering father for a role model.

No simple story of good and evil, this novel keeps you guessing. Jaskunas, who is himself an epileptic, gives convincing descriptions of the seizures Maggie undergoes following her injuries. He tells how seizures feel from the inside. In fact, Hidden is a well-told story of what an experience like Maggie’s would feel like from the inside how it might feel to no longer trust your memory. Anne Morris is a reviewer from Austin, Texas.

Maggie Wilson remembered what happened that night she was left for dead. Her then-husband Nate came home drunk. She could see him in the doorframe still, raising his hand to strike her. She never doubted that memory. But then, five years later, someone else confessed…
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The older I get, the more aware I am that there are just too many books being published. There's no way to keep up and read everything, so I've made reading guidelines for myself. One I settled on a few years ago was simply not to read any featuring a non-professional as the protagonist-detective. Personally, I would rather not know if my dry cleaner is finding dead bodies on the premises regularly, and, if I had a literary agent, I would certainly prefer that he or she concentrate on selling my book rather than on solving crimes.

Now Rosemary Harris has punctured my neat, serviceable little rule with her new series, which begins with Pushing Up Daisies. Her heroine, Paula Holliday, who was downsized from her media job in New York City, has started a landscaping business in suburban Connecticut. What better profession to give an amateur sleuth—she has an excuse, after all, to be digging around in the dirt, which is a natural place to find a body. There are archeologists, true, but landscaping is a less exotic, more believable job. Paula becomes involved in a mystery when she uncovers the remains of a long-dead baby on the estate of a pair of deceased sisters. Eventually there is a contemporary crime that also catches Paula's growing interest in detective work; the solutions to the mysteries central to the plot are surprisingly complex. Paula does have professional and personal reasons to become involved, so the reader doesn't have to be distracted by wondering why she doesn't leave the police work to the police. (And the policeman here, in the person of the overweight Mike O'Malley, is a person of interest, both to the reader and certainly to Paula.)

Harris, who is a master gardener herself, takes care not to pile on too much horticulture; actually, I would have preferred more. But the strengths of Pushing Up Daisies involve place, character and often sprightly dialogue. And note the scene in which the villain is unmasked: It's highly original and involves a maze, crushed oyster shells and buttercream icing.

Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

The older I get, the more aware I am that there are just too many books being published. There's no way to keep up and read everything, so I've made reading guidelines for myself. One I settled on a few years ago was simply not…

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