January Magazine’s Best Books of 2008

Of the thousands of books January Magazine’s writers and editors reviewed and read in 2008, here are the 99 we liked best.

The Best Books of 2008

The sky is falling. And it has been for some time. The past 12 months have produced the sorts of calamities that can start panics. And it seems that, as delighted with the economy as everyone seemed to be 12 and certainly 24 months ago, they are now willing to believe it’s all coming apart. The reality is this: you must have downs. If you did not, how would you even recognize the ups? It’s all physics. There’s change ahead? Sure. But there’s always change. That’s just how we humans roll.

If there’s a juicy center to current financial woes its that the book industry is less likely to be as shaken as some others. And, sure: some layoffs have been announced and some houses have cut back. But industry insiders have said that the layoffs were due and the cutbacks warranted and some corners of the industry are already reporting reasons to smile. I predict this will continue. In times shaped by political turmoil and financial calamity, the book takes an even more important place than usual. You can no longer afford that Lexus you’d promised yourself? Console yourself with a new book. Took a hit in the job market? Help yourself out: buy a book. Legal advice too expensive? Do part of it yourself with a book. As a treat and as a lifeline, if you’re not already turning to books for answers and succor, my crystal ball is telling me that, chances are you will.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan forecast a new dawn for the book in the quieter America she sees heading her way:

I suspect reading is about to make a big comeback in America, that in fact we're going to be reading more books in the future, not fewer. It is a relatively inexpensive (libraries, Kindle, Amazon), peaceful and enriching activity. And we’re about to enter an age of greater quiet. More people will be home, not traveling as much to business meetings or rushing out to the new jobsite. A lot of adults are going to be more in search of guidance and inspiration. The past quarter century we’ve had other diversions, often expensive ones -- movies, DVDs, Xboxes. Books will fit the quieter future.

Even while some stores have reported lower sales, many library systems are enjoying record use. Translation: we may not have as much money as we did in recent years, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to read.

The year we’re just passing out of was an important one for the electronic book. Finally, after a couple of decades of hollering about it, the e-book got the bit in its teeth. This was partly due Amazon’s debut of their very accessible Kindle e-book reader and partly due Oprah’s (good old Oprah!) endorsement of same. It may even have been due in part to the stinky economy. After all, though the initial investment for a reader is relatively hefty, the cost of a book manufactured and shipped in the ether can be comparatively slim. And it should be, too. Let’s face it: in a world increasingly concerned with renewable resources, devices like the Kindle deliver books right into your hand without killing a single tree. Something to think about.

In terms of the books themselves, 2008 was a fabulous year. Times may be lean, but some of our very favorite books were thick and lush and rich in spirit if not in fact. And if there were less books published than usual, we certainly did not notice it. As always, the January Magazine stacks were also thick and lush and it was apparent that many worthy books were published in 2008.

As usual, our best of the year feature reflects the books our contributors and editors liked best in 2008. We review from almost all branches of the book industry and, as a result, our choices run the gamut.

The January Magazine Best Books of the Year list is not a popularity contest. Our choices reflect what our writers and editors liked best of the books they read and enjoyed throughout the year. They don’t need to qualify their choices or explain them to anyone. There is no board or panel. No quotas from certain publishers, no authors that must be included. These are, quite simply, the books that our well read eyes and hearts liked best, listed in alphabetical order within the loose category in which they fall.

You can find various segments of January Magazine’s Best Books of the Year 2008 feature here. Best Children’s Books, best Cookbooks, best Art & Culture, best Non-Fiction and best Fiction. Best Crime Fiction appears in two segments: Part I is titles from A-G and Part II is titles from H-Z.

Best Books of 2008: Fiction

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow) 960 pages
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is a weighty tome which completes, in part, his spelunking through the underpinnings of the current century. The avout live in a Concent regulated by time. It becomes necessary for one of them, Erasmus, to venture into the world where he discovers that some of the core beliefs are based on untruths and comes into contact with aliens who ask the same questions that he does. It concludes the philosophical explorations of the Baroque Cycle, but begins more questions than it has answers. Set in the far future on a world which is earth-like, this is Stepehnson’s most deeply envisioned landscape in terms of characters, land and language and manages to read differently each time. Weighty but worth the effort. -- Iain Emsley

Arkansas by John Brandon (McSweeney’s) 224 pages
Drug-running gangsters are at the heart of Arkansas, John Brandon’s debut novel from McSweeney’s Books; however, as the title reminds us, the shady business is carried out not in Harlem, Miami or Vegas but the rural Southeast. This allows Brandon to indulge in the kind of quirky writing that distinguishes Southern grit-lit and, true to its McSweeney’s roots, this neo-noir novel is cynical and hip. Kyle Ribb and Swin Ruiz are petty criminals who, for lack of anything better to do, start working for a black-marketeer named Frog in the land of trailer parks and deep-fried breakfasts. The two run packets from an Arkansas state park where they have phony cover jobs as assistant park rangers. Brandon keeps the pace brisk and tense. The violence, when it comes, surfaces quickly, snaps at us in the space of a paragraph, then recedes just as fast. -- David Abrams

Beside a Burning Sea by John Shors (New American Library) 448 pages
Over two weekends at the pool last June, I lost myself in the wondrous Beside a Burning Sea, by John Shors. Set during World War II, just after a medical ship is torpedoed, nine survivors make their way to a nearby island. Sure, the set-up sounds a bit like the TV series Lost -- but Shors takes this almost conventional conceit to rare heights, casting his novel with castaways who a perfectly opposed to one another. The nurse sisters, the Japanese POW, the heroic doctor, the mysterious loner, the innocent girl. Each has a deep inner life the island sets afire -- again, very Lost-like. The love story that blossoms against very bitter prejudice propels the tale, allowing the characters to define themselves according to their loyalty (or lack thereof) to the POW. The question isn’t whether these people will ever get rescued; truth is you don’t want them to because this is such rich territory for fiction. The ticking bomb is that Japanese forces are combing the area for places to settle troops. So are they coming here ... or aren’t they? If they do come, will they free the POW and capture the others? Dramatic stuff, but what makes this novel sing isn’t the threat that these people will survive the Japanese, but whether they’ll survive each other. With love scenes, gripping action and miraculously telling character details it all blends brilliantly to create a novel that’s easy to admire and impossible to dismiss. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey (Harper) 502 pages
I came to Bright Shiny Morning fully prepared to loathe it. How could it be otherwise? Frey had gotten his shot with a couple of well-published and well-promoted biographies. He’d gotten his shot and blown it in a grand and noisy style. Shouldn’t Frey, in the tradition of historical wannabes everywhere, just go off with his tail between his legs and leave us alone on our various paths to finding books that matter? But he did not. Instead, he took himself quietly off and emerged with a stout and ambitious book. Inevitably, fire was drawn. Like many others, and with an admittedly jaundiced eye, I started to read. And was astonished. Bright Shiny Morning is not perfect. There are weirdly wide flaws. But it is utterly, completely original. More: the book’s flakey, broken narrative and bumper-to-bumper pace captures the feeling that is Los Angeles while its sharp little vignettes grab some of the context. -- Linda L. Richards

Death: A Life by George Pendle (Three Rivers Press) 250 pages
“My earliest memory is of my mother. She was a heavyset lady, the size of a small mountain. Everyone knew her as Sin.” So begins Death: A Life, a clever, thoughtful and surprisingly funny quasi-autobiography of the grim reaper. “My father was Satan. He was Mother’s father, too, which led to some awkward introductions at parties.” These snippets from the very first chapter (“The Beginning of the End”) capture the spirit of Death: A Life quite perfectly. It is, of course, a novel -- it’s all made up -- even though it’s delivered just like a biography. Death is even given a bio on the back cover (though, alas, no author photo). Death is darkly funny, surprisingly moving, deeply charming. It’s an enjoyable -- albeit unlikely -- read. But don’t expect a sequel. As good as it is, once is probably enough. -- David Middleton

Duma Key by Stephen King (Scribner) 592 pages
In recent years, Stephen King has begun to be accorded the respect he deserves. For example, in 2003, he was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Even so, one can still draw concerned scowls when one mentions his name among certain factions of the literati. I’ve never really understood this. Many of the books King writes have frightening elements, but I’ve never been tempted to dismiss him as a horror writer. King is a fabulous stylist and a wonderful storyteller. He wields a mean metaphor and he always finds the right word. And if I have to get frightened in order to read him, so be it. Through the years I’ve often said that I would read King no matter what he chose to write about. One gets the feeling that, if Stephen King decided to write about light bulbs, the journey would be satisfying: he’s just that good. And he is once again that good in 2008’s Duma Key. There are shards of King’s own 1999 accident in Duma Key, where we meet Edgar Freemantle, the owner of a successful construction company who meets with a life-altering accident on a job site. When, while he is recovering, Edgar’s marriage collapses, he rents a house in the Florida Keys where he intends to learn to deal with his injuries and teach himself to paint. Longtime fans might be reminded of King’s earlier vacation-gone-bad book, The Shining, but Duma Key is a much better book. The author has more miles on him: he understands human nature better these days and he understands his talent. It’s tough to say this is King’s best book ever -- there are so many good ones, after all. But Duma Key is quite, quite wonderful. A masterwork from a journeyman at the very top of his game. Bravo! -- Linda L. Richards

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (Random House) 368 pages
Niccolo Vespucci, aka Mogor dell’Amore and sundry other aliases, arrives at the court of Akbar the Great, “the Great Great One,” descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and emperor of the Mughal empire that encompasses vast swathes of 15th-century India. Vespucci, a Florentine, has a story to tell that only the emperor can hear, as it concerns the fate of his relative, the Princess Angelica of legendary beauty, and the adventures that befell her when she abandoned the subcontinent for the western world of the Near East and Europe, all for the love of the indomitable warrior Argalia. If that sounds like something from The Arabian Nights, then that’s the intention -- Rushdie’s latest novel is a multifaceted fairy tale that embraces mythology and history, legend and fact, fictional characters and historical figures, magic, illusion and self-delusion. The novel fully deserves the accolade of tapestry, so finely woven and dazzling are its constituent parts. The prose, of course, is beautifully detailed, but Rushdie leavens the erudition with coarse dialogue that is at times hilariously profane and blasphemous. Above all, what leaps off the page is Rushdie’s sheer enjoyment of storytelling just for the hell of it. This is an exercise in imagination, an artful and irrepressibly playful cornucopia of tales, myths, digressions and narrative non sequiturs. Even the peripheries of the story teem with vibrant, larger-than-life characters straight from myth. It’s a sumptuous read, fabulous in both senses of the word. The deceptively simple art of storytelling may have fallen out of favor among self-consciously literary writers, but Rushdie is determined that we should not forget its pure joys entirely. -- Declan Burke

Exit Lines by Joan Barfoot (Knopf Canada) 336 pages
Dark and funny and dangerously nuanced, in Exit Lines Joan Barfoot manages another notch on an already impressive double bandolier of high impact Canadian novels. Four new guests at a retirement home form a pact of “pleasurable rebellion.” The concept is funny and, on the surface of things, the approach is lighthearted. However, Barfoot deals here with topics most of us would much rather skate past: mortality, morality and a diminished twilight as a footnote to a vibrantly lived life. As in her previous novel, the Giller-finalist Luck, Barfoot captures humanity in a way that both resonates and makes one wonder at a world slightly askew. Barfoot’s vision is always worth watching, and there’s no exception to that rule in Exit Lines.
-- Monica Stark

The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 196 pages
The successful short-short story, also called “flash fiction,” operates like an elite military commando team: get in, get out, take no prisoners. Writers have a particular challenge when trying to create believable plot and characters in stories which typically range from just a few sentences to a few pages. How do you reduce a universe of meaning to something the size of a breadbox? Etgar Keret makes it look so easy. In his previous collection, The Nimrod Flipout, and now with The Girl on the Fridge, the Israeli writer hits us with one flash-bang surprise after another. These perfect little gems range far and wide across the human experience. While some are strange and off-kilter, Keret never leaves us scratching our heads in bewilderment. The short-shorts take us to places we recognize, but then detour our assumptions in the space of a single word. -- David Abrams

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane (Morrow) 720 pages
While a case could be made that Lehane’s fat new novel belongs in the crime fiction and mystery section of bookstores (the main characters are cops and the story could not exist as it does without the crimes involved), it probably doesn’t. The author has done a great deal to burnish the reputation of the detective story; his five Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro private-eye novels (including 1999’s Prayers for Rain) have been celebrated widely. But he’s been moving farther away from the genre ever since Mystic River was published in 2001, and followed by Shutter Island in 2003. The Given Day is a large-canvas historical yarn about Boston and Boston cops, which may remind some readers of Robert B. Parker’s underappreciated 1994 novel, All Our Yesterdays. While Parker’s compass pointed him in the direction of early 20th-century violence and cynicism, Lehane steers a more twisted and intriguing course through a post-World War I America that’s preoccupied with racism, sports and fear of communist incursions, beset by disease and divided by class. In these pages, he tells parallel stories about Luther Laurence, a young black man -- smarter than most people think -- who falls in with the wrong crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and flees both murder charges and a pregnant wife, landing in Boston and the employ of the Coughlin family. The Coughlins aren’t long off the boat from Ireland, but they’ve established themselves within the local police ranks. In addition to Laurence, Lehane focuses here on Danny Coughlin, a rather idealistic but far from naïve young cop, the rising son of an influential police captain, who supplies a window through which we witness the misnamed “Spanish flu pandemic” of 1918 to 1919; the Woodrow Wilson-era campaign against radicals; and the notorious 1919 Boston Police Strike. Lehane even manages to mix into his story the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, though I understand he eventually edited out much of that subplot. There’s so much story in The Given Day, that the reader may have trouble keeping a handle on it all. But Lehane does an exceptional job of moving his plot along, whether with the romance between Danny Coughlin and a young Irish woman holding too many secrets; or the low-boil confrontation between Laurence and powerful, conniving cop Eddie McKenna; or the rivalry between Boston’s mayor and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would eventually ride his much-inflated role in ending the police strike directly to the White House. And the author’s portrayal of baseball star Babe Ruth, who winds through this yarn like a lazy river, popping up periodically for comic relief or to assist in illuminating the era’s culture, is marvelous. If Lehane ever gets around to writing a Given Day sequel (he is reportedly writing another Kenzie and Gennaro novel first), I hope he’ll find a place in it for the Babe. He’s a character who often seems as if he could only exist in fiction. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine (Alfred A. Knopf) 528 pages
In 2001, Rabih Alameddine’s novel I, the Divine was published. I still haven’t read it, but I love the idea: the novel is a series of first chapters about the life of a woman. Like the opening minutes of Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, she keeps revising the way she tells the story, yet each way reveals something more about her. The Hakawati, Alameddine’s new novel, is equally fascinating: it’s a long tale about a teller of tales, a hakawati. At its core, this is the story of three generations, a son, his father and his grandfather -- and the familial conflicts that define their lives. Osama al-Kharrat and other family members gather as Osama’s father is dying. Written in a sort of magical realistic style, Alameddine layers the history of this contemporary family with the history of Lebanon -- including generous helpings of regional folklore -- and the result is a stunning, unforgettable tour de force. Ultimately, Alameddine creates a delicious soup that almost overwhelms you. But in a good way. Self-deprecatingly, Alameddine calls this book a “story,” but he might just as well have called it a “tale.” As for me, I call it a big, sprawling epic that begs to be savored slowly and considered deeply. No matter what anyone calls it, it’ll leave you tingling. -- Tony Buchsbaum

In the Light of You by Nathan Singer (Bleak House Books) 238 pages
I used to think that the 1998 film American History X was hardcore, that it pushed the envelope and was a really brave story about what hatred can do to you. But then I read Nathan Singer’s masterpiece. Now American History X seems like a Disney flick. In the Light of You takes place during the mid-1990s, around the time of Los Angeles’ Rodney King riots, the Rampart police scandals, and O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. It features Mikal Fanon, a 17-year-old kid in a nameless Ohio city. He has no identity and a very scary home life, with distant and abusive parents. He craves an identity, the comfort of people like him. Now, most teenagers put on different identities like a snake sheds skin; but Mikal makes the very unfortunate decision to be friendly with the local skinhead, a charismatic young man named Richard Lovecraft. Lovecraft is the leader of an up-and-coming skinhead gang called the Fifth Reich, and author Singer doesn’t shy away from exploring that subculture. Now, I have to go back to American History X, because that’s what this story will most likely be compared to, once it gets the attention it deserves. In that movie, we’re shown what today’s skinheads look like, but we never live with them, never feel their filth or understand why young people enlist in their ranks. Singer uses first-person narration in In the Light of You, so we’re with Mikal every step of the way. The biggest myth is that the leaders of modern neo-Nazi organizations are stupid. Wrong and ignorant and very often evil, yes, but they’re not stupid. To build their numbers, they have to be smart and charismatic. They have to sell their dream of racial pride and segregation. Lovecraft repeats often that he doesn’t want black people killed, just separated from the whites. In one very interesting scene, he calls a black preacher an intelligent man, because he preaches about living away from white society. He is a good salesman, and Mikal buys in slowly but surely. Lovecraft finds out at one point that the kid is interested in the environment, so he concocts a story about how Adolf Hitler was very concerned with preserving nature and Earth’s health. In another scene, so intimate that it approaches the erotic, Lovecraft shaves Mikal’s head and gives him his uniform, promising that he’ll be tattooed to signify that he belongs to his new “family.” This is very much a coming-of-age story. Mikal is like every other sarcastic American teenager out there, angry and confused, but also humorous on occasion. You have to ask yourself, how could such a funny kid take part in so many ugly things, just because his leader says it’s the right thing to do? This should be required reading for teenagers, but only if they can talk with their parents about what happens in it. It’d be educational for both sides. -- Cameron Hughes

The Joker by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo (DC Comics) 128 pages
It’s a myth that murderous psychopaths are actually diabolical geniuses like Hannibal Lecter. They’re really more like Ted Bundy or the BTK killer, smart enough to blend and charming enough that you’d expect nothing. But in a comic-book world, it is perfectly acceptable that the Joker could talk his way out of the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane by convincing the doctors he was cured. It’s a neat idea and while I’m pretty sure it’s been done before, it’s never been done this well. The Joker is a hard villain to write. Use him too often, and he loses menace (much like Lecter, who isn’t nearly as scary, now that we know more about his origins); write a bad story about him, and you wonder why he’s held up as the ultimate Batman villain over the last 68 years. Brian Azzarello, creator of the brilliant neo-noir conspiracy comic 100 Bullets, likely knew these facts about the Joker as well, and set out to make him a scary character again. I knew it was going to be a different kind of story right from the start, because it begins not with the Joker, but with a low-level mobster sent to pick him up, who also serves as our narrator and guide through the Joker’s triumphant return to Gotham City. The Joker’s plan is very simple: he will gather allies and promise them big things if they help him become the king of criminals again. Our narrator, Jonny Frost, is seduced by this idea. He’s on the fast track to nowhere with his current crew, and Joker promises him big things. This could very easily be a sequel to the film The Dark Knight. Azzarello’s Joker is clearly the same character, complete with mouth scars and pancake make-up and old, ratty, but weirdly formal clothing. What we’re offered here isn’t “I have an insane plan” Joker; this is a grounded Joker with very clear goals. Writer Azzarello is smart with his pacing; you expect the Joker to snap and do something evil, but instead, his actions grow progressively worse and worse. In a stroke of genius, Azzarello has him snap at about the same time as Batman shows up. And at the same time Jonny realizes just how sick his new boss is, we’re sucker-punched by what the Joker does. I’d be a fool not to praise Bermejo’s illustrative work on The Joker as well. It’s dark and moody with enough flair that it achieves a sort of hyper-reality; his designs for characters such as Killer Croc and the Riddler are the traditional looks of the characters, while still real enough that you almost think they could be real. I now know why Johnny Depp is considered the perfect choice for the Riddler -- it’s such an obvious spin, that I can’t believe I ever doubted the idea of that casting for the villain. Who knew that the Joker could star in his own story, let alone be really great? I certainly didn’t. Bravo. -- Cameron Hughes

The Little Book by Selden Edwards (Dutton) 416 pages
I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up Selden Edwards’ The Little Book. All I knew were two things: that I liked the soiled-old-photograph-like cover (designed by Ben Gibson), and that the author had spent 33 years on his manuscript, beginning when he was still a young English teacher in 1974. Such labors of love either turn out to be masterpieces of development or messes of over-thinking. Fortunately, The Little Book is one of the former. It’s part of a subgenre of unlikely time-travel tales, like Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back (1990) or Allen Appel’s Time After Time (1985), in which the “how” of transportation through the years is pretty much ignored in favor of appreciating the consequences of the journey. In Edwards’ story, teenage baseball star-turned-California rock musician Stan “Wheeler” Burden, attacked by an unknown assailant in 1988 San Francisco, tumbles backward to 1897 Vienna. There, he must adapt as best he can, striking up the most unlikely association with Sigmund Freud, encountering Mayor Karl Lueger (who advocated racist policies and would be an inspiration to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism) and meeting not only his own father -- another victim of this time dislocation -- but his grandparents as well, who did happen to be in the Austrian capital all those years ago. In addition to discovering more about his father’s life and that of a former mentor, Burden helps fill out a vivid picture of Vienna before World War I, when it was still considered the intellectual capital of Europe. He must also contend with one moralistic dilemma after another, as he falls in love with a woman from his future and considers the opportunity of killing Hitler while he’s still a boy. Author Edwards obviously had fun in contriving the lengthy arc of circumstances that will lead to Burden’s attack in 1988, but he shows even more delight in re-creating a long-ago and ostensibly promising era. If it took him 33 years to write The Little Book, I fear we won’t see another work of fiction from this author. Thank goodness his first novel is so memorable. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster (Henry Holt) 192 pages
Paul Auster writes so quickly, seeming to release a novel a year, that you’d be tempted to think the man just can’t have any more ideas. But rather than a fiction factory primed to pump out surface ideas for our momentary enjoyment, Auster instead reaches deep into the human psyche every time, finding new ways to express the humanity we share and lacing his novels with ideas we wrestle with long after the last page is turned. Man in the Dark is a stunning meditation on loneliness. A man lies in the dark, assessing his life, and imagines the life of another man caught in what seems to be a time warp, dropped into a spot where he recognizes little except the shell of the life he used to have, What’s more, he’s on a mission he doesn’t fully understand -- but we understand that he’s been tasked with the murder of the man in the dark. This all-too-brief cat-chasing-its-own-tail novel is startling in its simplicity and remarkable in its depth of character and action. It’s further evidence that Paul Auster isn’t just one of our most effective novelists, but also one of our most insightful thinkers. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House) 288 pages
Olive Kitteridge is the kind of woman you would duck across the street to avoid meeting. She’s abrasive as sandpaper rubbed across a scab and unapologetically rude. In the hands of Elizabeth Strout, however, the retired Maine schoolteacher is one of the year’s best tour guides to the human heart. The novel is a series of linked short stories, any one of which can be plucked at random and enjoyed in their own right. Just as she did in her previous two novels, Amy and Isabelle and Abide With Me, Strout distills universal human behavior down to the miniature scale of one particular town and its residents. -- David Abrams

On Account of Conspicuous Women by Dawn Shamp (St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne) 320 pages
Dawn Shamp’s debut effort takes place in Roxboro, North Carolina mostly in the early 1920s. It focuses on the lives of four young conspicuous women who are moving from girl to womanhood at a time of great change. And so we see the first time American women may vote, we see racial strife and inequity as well as the introduction or increasing acceptance of inventions that will change the world -- telephones, motion pictures, automobiles -- all from the safe vantage of the eyes of these four young women who really have much more important things on their minds. On Account of Conspicuous Women is the exact opposite of an epic novel. It is quiet, unassuming, even gentle yet ever so worthwhile. In one way, it is more like a tool for time travel than almost any book I’ve ever read, offering up a simple -- and, yes, sweet -- peek into the lives of four conspicuous women in a very different time. -- Linda L. Richards

One More Year by Sara Krasikov (Spiegel & Grau) 229 pages
In a blurb for Sara Krasikov’s debut collection, novelist Yiyun Li said that Krasikov “treats every story as a novel,” which somehow sums up the collected work here ever so well. It is the rare writer who brings this kind of weight and importance to every short story character, yet I find myself, months after reading the book, casting my mind back again and again to Krasikov’s varied cast of the disenchanted and displaced. Like many of the major characters in One More Year, Krasikov was born in the former Soviet Republic. The current NYC resident is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received the O. Henry Award and is a Fulbright scholar. If this is the first you’ve heard of Krasikov, I hazard that it will not be the last. -- Monica Stark

The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell (Algonquin) 320 pages
As The Resurrectionist opens, a pharmacist named Sweeny has just had his young son, Danny, transferred to the Peck Clinic, a place where they specialize in comatose patients. It does not take us long to realize that, though the Peck Clinic has a good record for awakening patients in comas, there is a lot swirling just below the surface: just slightly out of our grasp. There is more to Sweeny, too, than meets the eye. The Resurrectionist begins on a sharp and steady noir/crime fiction beat, and becomes ever more surreal until, by journey’s end, it’s difficult to keep track of what’s real and what is not. O’Connell’s work has been compared to that of Kafka, William Gibson and Wambaugh. While he does not suffer under such comparison, it isn’t entirely fair. While, for me, there were moments when The Resurrectionist bent under its own weight, this was a journey I enjoyed from end to end. More: while I read, there was no voice to whom I felt O’Connell’s must be compared. This is great stuff: and unlike anything you’ve probably ever read before. Highly, highly recommended. -- Lincoln Cho

Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost (Del Rey) 272 pages
Frost writes beautifully. Lyrically. He writes as though he’s going to a place there is no coming back from. It seems to me to be the only place from which fantasy should be approached. On his Web site, Frost describes the fictional place we encounter in Shadowbridge as “a world of linked spiraling spans of bridges on which all impossibilities can happen. Ghosts parade, inscrutable gods cast riddles, and dangerous magic is unleashed.” And… “Monstrous creatures drain the lives of children and for a price, you can sample their fleeting quintessence -- provided the creatures don’t sample you instead.” And, truly, aside from the whole fleeting quintessence thing, that works for me, as well. Frost, who is also the author of the virtuous and awarded collection Attack of the Jazz Giants, has been a finalist for pretty much every award offered in his field of interest. In Shadowbridge, he proves himself to be a powerful writer here at the top of his game. If you love the sort of vibrant fantasy that relies as much on the skill of its creator as the complexity of his imagination, you will love Shadowbridge. -- Lincoln Cho

Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan (Viking) 320 pages
A teenage girl goes missing. Search parties are formed. Pale-faced parents speak to television cameras in quavering voices. Rewards are offered, flyers are taped to store windows, hopes rise and fall. By now, we’re sadly all too familiar with the unique cadence of events that follow an abduction. Most of us can pinpoint the exact moment when our optimistic faith turns to grim certainty the victim is not only missing, but murdered. In one of the best novels of his varied career, Stewart O’Nan charts the case of one family whose college-bound daughter vanishes into thin air while driving to work in a small Ohio town. With an almost forensic efficiency, O’Nan examines the effect of the mystery on the family, friends and the entire town. What happened to 18-year-old Kim Larsen is less important than how her parents and sister deal with the emotional aftershocks. -- David Abrams

The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt (Henry Holt) 320 pages
Hustvedt’s exquisite, elegiac novel layers past and present, creating a complex story of loneliness and loss. Narrated by Erik Davidsen, a psychiatrist, The Sorrows of An American is a novel of secrets and ghosts: father Lars Davidsen’s ghosts, which follow him back to Minnesota after World War II, Erik, divorced, lonely, plagued by a patient’s suicide, his sister, the widowed Inga, who learns her husband, famous writer Max Blaustein, led a secret life during their tumultuous marriage. Even Sonia, Inga’s 18-year-old daughter, carries painful burdens, including what she saw from her schoolroom window on September 11, 2001. September 11th is one of many psychological traumas folded into the novel. Lars is haunted by the killing of a Japanese soldier who assumed a position of prayer rather than aggression; Erik treats several patients suffering the aftereffects of parental abuse. Inga is triply traumatized by Max’s death, September 11th, and the intrusive, threatening Linda Fehlburger, a reporter claiming to know secrets about Max. Continual subtle references remind us that those fighting Iraq war are enduring the same suffering. Hustvedt’s ability to incorporate so much material so seamlessly makes reading Sorrows like drinking a wonderful old burgundy: rich, complex, lush, smooth (I will refrain from comparisons to oak, honey, or long finishes). Memory, love, loneliness, death, dreams, ghosts, fame -- all are here in a beautiful story that deserves more attention. -- Diane Leach

The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan (Random House Canada) 640 pages
Padma Viswasathan’s debut novel pads in on little cat feet and rips you along. You don’t realize you’re on an epic journey in the midst of a generational saga until you’re well along and it’s far, far too late to turn back. Not that you’d want to. Not that you even could. Inspired by the author’s own family history, we join Sivakami in a village in India in 1892, the year of her marriage to the healer, Hanumarathnam. She is ten. What astonishes here is Viswasathan’s virtuosity. In The Toss of A Lemon, we join India at a time of great social and political upheaval. Nevertheless, we experience this only at a distance. The way, in fact, Sivakami might experience it. Our concerns are more immediate, more domestic, though never more mundane. The marriage of a daughter, a granddaughter. The obedience of a son-in-law. The disturbingly progressive thoughts of a son. These concern Sivakami exclusively and, with her as our proxy, they are all that concern us, as well. -- Linda L. Richards

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf) 331 pages
Lahiri’s Bengali heritage informs this magnificent novel of linked stories, communicating worlds through the smallest of details. Saris fight slacks, a mother’s accumulated gold, intended for a future daughter-in-law, is lost to that most American of addictions, alcoholism. Food is a lush battleground of dals, rice, chocoris, bitter melon and Darjeeling tea. The drinking of tea or coffee represents more than taste; one is tradition; the other, cultural abandonment. Alcohol is tantamount to the worst kinds of assimilation, representative in all cases of disaster. But Lahiri’s God always reside in the details, transcending the particulars of immigrant experience to the universal. Ruma, of is adrift. She has married an American and is forgetting her Bengali. Her son speaks only English, eating with utensils rather than fingers. When her widowed father pays a visit, father and daughter, absent Ruma’s deceased mother, can communicate only in generalities. Sudha moves to London, where she meets Roger. The couple fall in love and get engaged. When Sudha returns home to inform her parents her news is overshadowed by Rahul, languishing at home. He vanishes soon afterward, his mother’s jewelry in his pockets. Sudha marries Roger and bears a son; the couple acquires a home. Rahul appears for a visit moving from auspicious to disastrous, as only visits from addicts can. Lahiri nails the hope, despair, and confusion of all families coping with the alcoholism’s immense destruction. The second half of Earth, “Hema and Kaushik,” is comprised of three linked stories, Hema narrating the first, speaking to Kaushik, the second by Kaushik, responding to Hema, “Going Ashore” bringing them together. The children of Bengali immigrants, Hema and Kaushik have known each other since childhood. Each has experienced the wrenching divisions of Bengali and American cultures. When Kaushik’s family returns to American from India, Hema’s parents welcome them for an extended stay, only to be shocked by their old friends, who wear American clothing and keep an open bottle of scotch nearby at all times. The ending is inexorable, dreadful, and made me weep. -- Diane Leach

Under Control by Mark McNay (Doubleday Canada) 310 pages
If you’re looking for a read that’s light and sunny to pull you through the winter doldrums, just keep skating on through: you’re not gonna find it here. Mark McNay’s second novel (after 2007’s Fresh) is muscular, hard and oh so bleak. Think Trainspotting meets Requiem for a Dream, then plop it onto the grimy streets of Norwich, England and you’ve got the basic idea. Especially if you can spin in some mental illness, drugs (of course, if you got the comparables) and dialog so sharp, watch out for papercuts. Under Control will not be everyone’s cup of English Breakfast, those that like this sort of thing, will like it a lot. -- David Middleton

Best Books of 2008: Crime Fiction, Part II

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block (Morrow) 304 pages
Over the years, I’ve made no secret of the fact that Lawrence Block is my favorite writer. I’m deeply in love with his Matt Scudder novels, so smart and sad and rich with character and grit. I discovered Eight Million Ways to Die when I was 19 and it made me love the genre and take it very seriously. Block was my gateway drug to George Pelecanos, Richard Price and so many other great novelists. Creative bastard that he is, Block has also reinvented the hit man novel. Although I love Barry Eisler’s John Rain series about an assassin searching for his soul, afraid that he might not even have one, Block’s John Keller is even more realistic -- and far scarier because of it. I keep going back to actor John Cusack’s line in Grosse Point Blank, when he says to a victim: “It’s not personal! Why does everyone always ask that?” That’s Keller in a nutshell. He’s a regular guy. He watches baseball and collects stamps. He’s the quiet neighbor everyone likes because he never bothers them. Killing just happens to be his job. And unlike most fictional hit men, Keller will kill a simple housewife just as easily as he would a mobster. He’s good at it too. Pure pro, all the way. He’ll get a call from his agent, Dot, catch a plane to wherever the hit is supposed to happen, stay in a cheap motel fighting boredom, and then after he’s finished, he will go back home to his simple life until the next call comes. In Hit and Run, though, he’s gotten it into his head to retire. Not because he’s growing a conscience about killing all those people, but because he’s getting old and he thinks this one last hit will set him up financially for the rest of his days. Of course his last hit goes wrong. While watching television in his room, he sees a special report about the governor of Ohio, a rising star, being assassinated in the same city where he’s gone to make his hit. Then bad turns to worse, when a picture of the suspected assassin is shown on the news -- and it’s a picture of Keller. Out of money, having spent most of its on expensive stamps, Keller sets off on the run with very few resources. But you don’t want to attack a savage beast without knowing what you’re going up against, do you? It’s not long before Keller stops running defensive drills and goes on the offense, trying to figure out who set him up for the crime, and why. Block’s third-person narration immerses you in his story, but with a curious detachment, the same sort of detachment Keller must feel while assassinating his targets. It’s a subtle technique, but once you get it, the story becomes horrific. You suddenly find yourself cheering on a really bad guy who should probably be put down like a mad dog or else imprisoned for life. This is why I idolize Block’s writing. What Keller does feel is often loneliness, where what he craves most is to be able to talk with someone and be completely honest. Who doesn’t want that? -- Cameron Hughes

The King of Swords by Nick Stone (Harper) 576 pages
This prequel to Nick Stone’s astonishing and award-winning first novel, Mr. Clarinet (2006), finds Miami cops Max Mingus and Joe Liston investigating the escape of some monkeys from a primate park. But that’s small potatoes compared with the larger, deeper and more disturbing focus of this book, which comes into relief as these cops are embroiled in a brutal series of murders. All the cards seem to lead them back to a man in the darkness, the epitome of evil, his name heard only in whispers -- Solomon Boukman. The only solution is for Mingus and Liston to navigate the Miami underworld looking for a fortune teller as well as a slimy pimp, who together may hold the key. But confronted with corrupt cops and black magic, Mingus and Liston realize that Boukman is far worse than the rumors that circle his existence. A book not to be missed. -- Ali Karim

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics edited by Paul Gravett (Running Press/Robinson) 480 pages
Hmm. Crime comics. I love ’em. But there’s never really been a decent, affordable collection. Oh, there have been reference books about them, full of teasing references and tantalizing glimpses of a panel or two, but a true selection, that will give you a real taste? Nope. Until now. The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett, is by far the richest reading experience I’ve had all year -- grim, vital, thrilling and alive. Within its almost 500 pages, there’s a veritable who’s who of some of the most regarded and respected comic-book writers and artists ever assembled, from all over the world, from past to present, all in glorious, no-holds-barred black and white. And there’s not a dog in the bunch. There are excerpts from comic strips, comic books and even a healthy smattering of bandes dessinées from Europe, where comics are taken a lot more seriously than they are in spandex-obsessed North America. Alan Moore’s “Old Gangsters Never Die” is a surreal bit of business, but an appropriate kick-off to an amazing lineup of well-known classics and bold new discoveries. Will Eisner’s The Spirit gets his heart broken; El Borbah, the Mexican professional wrestler and private eye, breaks into a sperm bank; and Max Allan Collins’ very pregnant Ms. Tree’s water breaks. There’s a “true crime” story here from the legendary team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond are represented by an arc from their Secret Agent X-9 newspaper strip, and France’s Jacques Tardi (who, alas, doesn’t contribute one of his masterful Nestor Burma adaptations) illustrates a sobering tale of post-Vietnam New York. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer shows up twice in this collection, once in a 1942 story that actually predates I, the Jury, where he’s known as Mike Lancer, and once under his own name in a string of little-seen 1954 strips. There’s a story from the extremely rare 1962 87th Precinct comic book (a tie-in to a TV show already cancelled), and Argentinean refugees Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz’s still-astonishingly bleak Alack Sinner appears in a noirish vignette. And even so, Gravett barely scratches the surface. More, please. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Nothing to Lose by Lee Child (Delacorte Press) 416 pages
Former military cop Jack Reacher is drifting through Colorado, when he stumbles upon two small towns, Despair and Hope, both of which will ultimately live up to their names. He soon finds himself run out of Despair by the local constabulary for vagrancy. As any veteran reader of Lee Child’s phenomenally popular series could predict, Reacher decides to return to the town, sensing that something is not quite right there. After befriending a shapely cop from Hope named Vaughan, he starts an investigation, only to turn up a dead body found on the side of a road separating the two towns. After that corpse vanishes, Reacher realizes there are larger and darker forces at work around him. All of this leads to a bare-knuckles barroom brawl pitting the 6-foot-5 Reacher against Despair’s sheriff and deputies, a sequence that it is as vivid as it is violent. And amid all of this, Reacher discovers that Despair is very much a company town, dominated by one powerful employer, a giant metal-recycling plant from which trucks roll in and out at all hours. He’s also intrigued by a mysterious plane that flies over Despair at night, questions surrounding a covert army base, and Thurman, an evangelical mayor. Thurman is actually kept offstage until the middle of this book, just when Reacher and Vaughan are getting intimate. But action fans need not fear, as plenty of bad guys get their jaws broken in these pages. What’s most interesting about Nothing to Lose may be Reacher’s musings on the madness that lurks at the heart of the road separating his two fictional Colorado towns. Although this book follows Child’s debut novel, Killing Floor (1997), in terms of plotting, the peep we get into Reacher’s understanding of the Iraq war and his distaste of fanatical religion make for compelling reading. This is what I love about the Jack Reacher novels -- the thought-provoking information that peppers the narrative and makes one question apparent reality. -- Ali Karim

Pavel & I by Daniel Vyleta (Bloomsbury) 352 pages
In a year that it seemed impossible to keep up with Cold War novels, Pavel & I stood head and shoulders above the pack. Unfortunately, it’s also quite likely that the book entirely escaped your notice. Although Daniel Vyleta’s debut work possesses strong literary merit, with a twisty plot featuring espionage, marauding gangs of displaced youths and a dead dwarf who keeps cropping up in the most unlikely places, the book would have done much better had it been marketed as a thriller, which it most clearly is. (It certainly kept this reader perched on the edge of her seat.) Set in Berlin immediately following World War II, the period detail here is wonderful, as is Vyleta’s ability to bring it all to life. I shivered under a blanket for most of my reading of the book, which is set entirely in the meanest Berlin winter in memory. -- Linda L. Richards

Paying for It by Tony Black (Preface Publishing/
Random House) 272 pages
A keen journalistic eye is evident in Black’s debut novel, set in the dark heart of Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh. The story features Gus Dury, who like Black is a journalist; but unlike Black, Dury’s career is imploding in the wake of an incident involving a government minister and the hot topic of immigration. Dury, who now lives in a flat above a pub, gets involved in finding out what happened to Billy, the son of his landlord and only friend. The trail leads deep into the malicious business of people-trafficking, where can be found Russian and East European gangsters, cops on the take and innocents trapped in the linkages between those worlds. At first I was a little skeptical about this story, due to its all-too-familiar genre trappings, such as Dury’s failed marriage, his love for the bottle and criminal gangs from the east. However, within a few pages, I was captivated by Black’s command of the English language, his sense of pace and the narrative marbled with humor pulled right off the gallows. Black’s debut is a superb effort -- and a good pick for readers lamenting the passing of Ian Rankin’s sardonic Detective Inspector John Rebus. Dury’s Edinburgh is as interesting, if not more interesting than Rebus’. -- Ali Karim

A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr (Quercus Publishing) 368 pages
Until two years ago, when British writer Philip Kerr brought Bernie Gunther back in The One from the Other, most readers -- myself included -- thought that his World War II-era Berlin cop turned private eye had been left behind in a trilogy of wonderfully atmospheric mysteries: March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990) and German Requiem (1991). But The One from the Other showed Gunther still endowed with cynicism and ingenuity, and that novel was so fondly received, that Kerr has put his man back on the payroll. In A Quiet Flame, we find Gunther posing as a Nazi war criminal (read the previous book to find out why) and escaping to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1950. Everywhere he goes in South America’s most European city, he seems to come across some former Hitler henchman, now living behind an assumed name and innocent occupation, benefiting from President Juan Perón’s interest in permanently retired Nazis -- and their ill-gotten gains. Gunther might have liked to disappear among the metropolis’ late-night eateries and broad boulevards, too. But instead he’s called on by the local chief of police, who knows something of his sordid background, to help investigate the gruesome slaying of a young girl -- a case that bears similarities to another, unsolved case that Gunther worked on during his days with the Berlin police. The assumption is that an ex-Nazi is behind this homicide, and who could be better prepared to suss out malevolent Nazis than Bernie Gunther? There are lots of flashbacks here, placing a more hopeful Gunther in Berlin in 1932, where he delves into the “lust murder” of Anita Schwarz, a disabled part-time prostitute and the daughter of a prominent “ brown shirt.” Far from distracting, these back-stories give us both more knowledge about Bernie Gunther and a captivating portrait of Berlin during its often wild, Weimar Republic days. In this sometimes chilling yarn, Kerr does an exceedingly good job of bringing to life such characters as Perón and his wife, Eva, as well as Adolf Eichmann and Otto Skorzeny. And he mixes them with fictional figures no less able to win attention, notably Anna Yagubsky, a beautiful young Jewish woman (“Her figure was all right if you liked them built like expensive thoroughbreds. I happened to like them built that way just fine.”), who wants the older Gunther’s help in finding her lost relatives, and in return assists him in the Schwarz probe, no matter the dangers involved -- and the bed sheets they must tangle along the way. Questions about Argentina’s collaboration with the Nazis and its anti-Semitism only add further spice to A Quiet Flame. There are just enough loose ends in the last chapter to suggest that Kerr has a sixth Bernie Gunther book in the works. Thank goodness. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Robbie’s Wife by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime) 256 pages
Jack Stone, a 60-year-old screenwriter quits Los Angeles after his second failed marriage, matched by a career on the slide. He packs his laptop and his life savings into a duffel bag and heads to Dorset, a sleepy little agricultural backwater in England’s southwest, to compose the killer screenplay he believes will get him back on professional track. His precarious financial situation is the ticking clock that is marbled throughout this narrative. Finding himself a lodger in the Barlow household’s spare room, he struggles to get a handle on his screenplay. But then he meets Maggie, “a tall woman with long auburn hair” and the eponymous Robbie Barlow’s wife. Robbie is a rugged sheep farmer, but with a university education, who befriends Stone, taking him in after his car has been vandalized. Robbie is in his early 40s and handsome, contrasting with the aging Stone, who at three score years considers himself on the losing side of his career as well as his life. Stone soon finds himself falling in love with Maggie, who is more than 20 years his junior, and as he does so, he discovers his lust expressing itself in his writing. As his fevered mind senses the attraction of this comely farmer’s spouse, his screenplay starts to take shape -- a dark shape. Due to this novel’s trajectory, the first three-quarters build up the tension until it becomes unbearable, both from a sexual and character-development perspective. Once all of that build-up is released, and the crime committed, Robbie’s Wife seems to go into a downward spiral, as Stone discovers the high price he must pay for his actions, both morally and criminally. As a cautionary tale, Robbie’s Wife works with a real erotic charge, but it’s the novel’s atmosphere, location and players that elevate it from the pulp tradition it so wants to emulate, and make it a very absorbing and insightful read. You’ll be thinking about this book for a lot longer than it takes to read. -- Ali Karim

Rough Weather by Robert B. Parker (Putnam) 304 pages
Ho-hum. Another year, another Spenser novel. But once more, Parker delivers the goods, and makes it look effortless. Although actually, the first few chapters didn’t bode particularly well. Yet another of Parker’s pastiche/rip-offs of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal”? He’s been there, done that (most notably in 1998’s Jesse Stone novel, Trouble in Paradise), each time with diminishing returns. On this occasion, private eye Spenser is hired by über-rich Heidi Bradshaw to serve as her bodyguard/escort at her daughter’s swank wedding on a private island. And he’s told he can bring his girlfriend, Susan Silverman! Oh, joy! By now, those of you who gave up on this Boston wise-ass years ago will be rolling your eyes, and I’ll admit that the arrival of Spenser’s nemesis as one of the wedding guests, the deadly and apparently superhuman hit man Rugar (never one of my favorite characters), had me wondering myself. Was Parker once again lighting out for the territory of misguided, self-indulgent self-mythology (cf.: A Catskill Eagle, Small Vices)? And yet, somehow, the love affair Parker has with his own character is put aside long enough for him to crank out yet another winner. Once the ball starts rolling, it becomes obvious why Parker’s still a champ after all these years. Simply put, the dude can write. The dialogue snaps, the pace never slackens (the confrontation between Spenser and a gang of kidnappers on the storm-tossed island could double as a how-to on writing action scenes), the characters reveal surprising depths and the stakes are mortal indeed. And once again, Parker’s preoccupation with the bounds of friendship and family, of honor and courage, are challenged. No, there are no great revelations here, but it’s always refreshing to see Spenser root around in the murk of his own moral code. Make no mistake: Spenser is a man of conscience, someone who understands that every action has consequences. But in a genre that too often resorts to glib cynicism of the cheapest and most prurient kind, it’s sorta nice to see someone pandering to the notion of doing the right thing. Call it the audacity of heroism. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Salvation Boulevard by Larry Beinhart (Nation Books) 368 pages
You hardly ever see this in these days of brain-dead, self-perpetuating culture wars: an honest-to-god intelligent mystery written for people whose thirst for ideas extends further than some snake-oil salesman’s spiel or the 24-hour “news” networks. The divisive issues of faith and belief -- and the increasingly cynical exploitation of that chasm by believers and non-believers alike -- is tackled with verve, style and surprising fair-mindedness in Beinhart’s Salvation Boulevard. Born-again gumshoe Carl Van Wagener is a devoted member of a huge fundamentalist church; a clean-living man who’s run a gauntlet of addictions and broken marriages to finally find salvation and redemption through Christ and the love of a good woman. But he’s also a well-respected and much-in-demand professional with a questioning nature. Which means he’s no slack-jawed drooler or squeaky-clean Bible humper -- the way believers are too often depicted in crime fiction -- but an intelligent and caring man whose beliefs are as human as he is. And those bedrock beliefs are challenged when he’s summoned by one of his best clients, Manny Goldfarb, a high-flying Jewish defense attorney and sucker for lost causes and big headlines, to work on the case of Ahmad Nazami, a young Muslim student charged with the murder of Nathaniel MacLeod, a controversial atheist professor. This book should be an unholy mash-up of pretentious polemics and cynical stereotypes, or a mean-spirited snoozefest taking potshots at easy targets. But it’s neither. Rather, it’s that rare crime novel that wears both its heart and its brain on its sleeve and manages to ask hard questions without sacrificing one single thrill. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski (St. Martin’s
Minotaur) 288 pages
In Severance Package, the Pole with Soul offers up his latest loose sequel to The Wheelman (2005). PR hack Jamie DeBroux is summoned to work one morning for a “management meeting.” For Jamie, it’s his first day back after the birth of his baby. He kisses his wife good-bye, heads for work, and is promptly informed that the company is a front for a super-secret government organization. The operation is being shut down, and they’ve all been ordered to commit suicide, even Jamie, who thought he was just writing copy for some vague investment firm. The elevators are rigged with nerve gas, and bombs will destroy that floor of the building once it’s all done. Jamie is soon fighting for his life as sweet, corn-fed Molly Lewis proceeds to slaughter everyone. What follows is a combination of The Terminator and Die Hard, except this is written by Duane Swierczynski, whose debut novel, Secret Dead Men, centered on a schizophrenic zombie. So this is really Terminator and Die Hard on acid. As a bonus, the novel shows some influence from Swierczynski’s comic-book work. This book makes the list on its weird factor alone. -- Jim Winter

Sins of the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno (Scribner) 400 pages
You know, once I realized that this was a creative take on Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories by way of Islam, Robert Ferrigno’s satirical thriller really opened up for me. Sins of the Assassin has all the trappings of a Bond yarn. The protagonist, Rakkim Epps, is little more than a highly trained thug for his government, only this time it’s an Islamic government rather than a British one. The novel has two colorful villains, the Colonel and his femme fatale lover, Baby. He’s a warlord in the Bible Belt (the old Southern confederacy), which vies with the Islamic Republic for dominance in what had been the United States, but was conquered dozens of years ago using a brilliantly executed attack involving suitcase nukes. Even more colorful is the rich, radical Islamist known as the Old One, who lives on a large, well-populated yacht that can be hidden with ease, become no one thinks it really exists. This book even has a major doomsday weapon hidden in the mountains that everyone wants. Sound familiar yet? It’s the questions that author Ferrigno asks in Sins that make it an interesting read. Can a theocracy survive without eventually devouring itself as people with different belief levels clash for power? Is it acceptable to be a killer in the name of patriotism? Do we need religion in a world where science is advancing at such a quick rate that many previously unanswerable questions about existence and life are finally being answered? And can somebody still be a good person without the assurance that only such behavior will lead him to Paradise? Sins is pulpish in the best ways, without feeling retro and insulting the reader’s intelligence. It’s the second book of a trilogy (following 2006’s Prayers for the Assassin), but would also work as a standalone novel. Ferrigno’s series plumbs the anxieties kicked up by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which many people who’d been politically liberal on 9/10 were scared out of their minds and became right-wing conservatives on 9/12. While Sins of the Assassin shows clear Bond influences, the action is more Jason Bourne caliber. Political intrigue is deep and layered here, and the action is often quick and vicious; it left me breathless, and the book’s climax left me speechless. Rakkim Epps is Daniel Craig’s James Bond -- quiet and tortured, with a soul that he won’t let us see for fear that the revelation would leave him unable to carry out what he views as his patriotic duties. This is a great and unique thriller. You’ll love it. -- Cameron Hughes

Siren of the Waters by Michael Genelin (Soho Crime) 336 pages
Olen Steinhauer has written many fine books about the police in a country very much like Romania. Now comes Genelin, whose protagonist, Jana Matinova, has climbed to the rank of commander in the police force of Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Her rise to her present position has cost her a lot, though, and she’s currently in charge of an investigation into a deadly human-trafficking ring. She’s a tremendously interesting character, totally believable (and with the same aura of sad determination as the hero of Child 44), facing a truly frightening villain named Koba. -- Dick Adler

The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin (Picador) 320 pages
The sequel to Goodwin’s Edgar Award-winning The Janissary Tree (2006), The Snake Stone is the second of his Istanbul novels to feature Yashim Togalu. Formerly a eunuch at the sultan’s court, Yashim has earned a reputation as a lala, or guardian, a man of discretion to whom people can turn in their time of need. When a French archaeologist throws himself on Yashim’s hospitality, and is then discovered horribly murdered, suspicion falls on Yashim himself -- but things are rarely what they seem in 19th-century Turkey. The plot is as pleasingly labyrinthine as its host city, employing history, archaeology and politics to flesh out a vibrant and meticulously detailed vision of the former Constantinople. Situated at the geographical crossing point between East and West, that city is a cultural melting pot that accommodates a bewildering variety of nationalities alongside its staple populations of Turks and Greeks. Goodwin, a historian, employs a rich and lyrical style perfectly suited to the stately pace, and The Snake Stone (originally released last year, but new in paperback for 2008) is very much a compelling page-turner, a literary thriller. The most gratifying aspect of it all is that the plot is not simply grafted onto a historical setting; the city is as much a character as anyone else in the novel, and the uncovering of its layers is integral to the investigation of the murder at hand. Beautifully written and exquisitely crafted, this is an exotic jewel with a keen respect for the tradition of the genre’s classic private-eye narratives. -- Declan Burke

Special Assignments by Boris Akunin (Random House) 335 pages
Fans of the brilliant Russian author Boris Akunin (a pseudonym) expect the unexpected: each of his books about Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a late-19th-century government detective -- “the governor-general of Moscow’s deputy for special assignments and a citizen of the sixth class, a knight of many Russian and foreign orders” -- is different in tone, style and subject-matter from the others; all are composed with the help of an elaborate (though not obtrusive or even apparent) scheme of subgenre classification and psychological personality types that keeps the writer stimulated and the reader surprised. (For instance, to quote Fandorin’s advice to a subordinate: “From what they knew about [one witness] ... he was a ‘tortoise’: an unsociable, suspicious type turned in on himself ... [W]ith a tortoise you had to avoid being too familiar; you must narrow the distance between you, or he’d immediately withdraw into his shell.”) The single book Special Assignments, containing two Fandorin tales, provides examples of Akunin’s eclecticism. “The Jack of Spades” notes the mischievous doings of a daring confidence-trickster whose swindles are thwarted by a just-as-cunning scheme perpetrated by the resourceful Fandorin; it is a witty duel between a comic knave and a prince of disguise. “The Decorator” displays the dark deeds of a Russian Jack the Ripper, who turns his evil eye upon Fandorin and his beloved associates; it is a grim and suspenseful battle with a serial killer. Both stories are translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield, who seems as adept at setting mood and style as the masterful Mr. Akunin. -- Tom Nolan

The Survivor by Tom Cain (Bantam Press) 400 pages
This second novel from the pseudonymous Tom Cain (The Accident Man) starts out with a flashback, focusing on shadowy intelligence figure Samuel Carver’s third mission. That 1993 assignment was to sabotage a plane carrying the elderly Waylon McCabe, a grotesque character who, apart from having a warped vision of Christianity, busies himself as an industrialist amassing a fortune from war and oil. Although his airplane crashes in the far reaches of Canada, McCabe survives, and then proceeds to plot his revenge not only on Carver, but on humanity in general. The Survivor then flips back to the conclusion of The Accident Man, where Carver is in therapy recovering from both the physical and mental injuries he’d sustained in the story. After that, we’re asked to follow parallel plots, one set in Carver’s hospital ward, the other built around an American and Russian conspiracy that could destroy our planet. The Russians are seeking to recover their agent, Alix Petrova -- who has become Carver’s lover -- and use her on a mission. Alix, meanwhile, is uncertain whether Carver will recover from his injuries, but she remains deeply in love with him. And as this story progresses, there’s a little problem with regard to a cache of suitcase-contained nukes that went missing after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. McCabe and his cabal realize all too well that these devices could be awfully useful in their plan to call forth the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tense, terse and fraught with anxiety, The Survivor draws upon the pulp-thriller heritage to navigate a story that makes you zip through the pages as if your life depended upon reaching the conclusion before your heart gives out. If you enjoy your thrillers fast and furious, with a nod to the Golden Age, when Britain’s spies saved the world, then the adventures of Samuel Carver will satisfy. -- Ali Karim

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster) 416 pages
New Iberia Sheriff’s detective Dave Robicheaux and private investigator Clete Purcell find themselves neck deep in homicide and targeted by a potential mobster in James Lee Burke’s gorgeous paradigm of good and evil, Swan Peak. This story is set in western Montana’s Lolo Pass, and Burke brings the same paintbrush and palette to the forests, creeks and mountains of Big Sky Country that he usually reserves for his Louisiana-based novels. It is an effusion of color and carnage. There are multiple story lines converging like tributaries meeting to feed the deep waters of a surging river. Purcell stumbles upon the ranch of wealthy brothers Ridley and Leslie Wellstone and raises the distinct possibility that Leslie Wellstone is really notorious mobster Sally Dio, who supposedly died in a plane crash. Leslie Wellstone is married to Jamie Sue Stapleton, a former country-music singer of physical beauty and exceptional voice whose ex-lover, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, a gifted musician himself, comes looking for her toting baggage of his own. While doing a stint in a Texas prison for grand theft, Greenwood sticks a shiv in a sadistic guard named Troyce Nix. Nix follows Greenwood to Montana to exact revenge, only to fall in love with another lost soul by the name of Candace Sweeney. If that weren’t enough, Purcell falls for an FBI agent investigating the Wellstones and maybe Purcell himself. The criminal aspects of these characters is more than enough for one book, but on top of all that, Burke sets a serial killer loose in Montana. The murderer’s victims are a University of Montana coed and her boyfriend. Purcell is convinced the Wellstones and their stable of hired thugs are involved, and Robicheaux is deputized by local sheriff Joe Bim Higgins to help solve the case. It isn’t long, though, before Robicheaux and Purcell are deemed more detrimental than helpful, and Robicheaux is un-deputized. And in a particularly gruesome confrontation involving Purcell (though there are many altercations throughout), the beleaguered and often juiced-out P.I. nearly loses his life. There is arguably not a better living American writer today than Burke, and all the robust qualities of his work -- the exploration of good and evil, of historical connections to present circumstances, of the consequences of happenstance and deliberate action, of love -- fill the pages of Swan Peak. -- Anthony Rainone

Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay (Bantam) 404 pages
Promise Falls, New York, the setting for Linwood Barclay’s terrific standalone thriller Too Close to Home, is a town of some 40,000 citizens: “too large to be called quaint,” notes Jim Cutter, the book’s narrator, a would be-artist turned landscape-gardener, “but it’s a pretty city, lots of historic architecture, a river running down from the falls it’s named for” -- and a population that turns self-righteous at the first hint of scandal. When Cutter’s teenaged son becomes the prime suspect in the murders of the Cutters’ next-door neighbors, Jim finds that in most townspeople’s eyes -- including those of his gardening clients -- his boy is guilty until proven innocent:

“Well, I certainly don’t blame him for pleading not guilty,” Leonard Putnam said. “That’s how the game is played. ... I suppose, were I to somehow lose control of my impulses and commit an act of violence, I’d no doubt proclaim my innocence, too.”

“I didn’t say he was pleading not guilty. I said he was innocent.”

Putnam half-chuckled again. “Look at me, actually having a debate with you about this. It’s quite extraordinary, really. We won’t be needing you anymore, it’s as simple as that. I’ll send you a check to cover the entire month, however. I’m a reasonable person.”

Barclay, a former Toronto, Canada, humor-columnist and author of last year’s internationally bestselling novel No Time for Goodbye, has a fine ear and eye for the hypocritical and ludicrous nuances of life in our modern cities and suburbs. He also knows how to tell a suspenseful tale of a family in jeopardy -- and of the saving graces of love, humor and grit. -- Tom Nolan

Toros & Torsos by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books) 408 pages
This second installment in the Hector Lassiter series is really more about Ernest Hemingway, with a detour into 1947 Hollywood for an accidental brush with the Black Dahlia. It begins in 1935, where Lassiter and “Hem” are locking down in the Florida Keys for a killer storm about to blow through. “Lasso,” as Hemingway calls Craig McDonald’s pulp-fiction writer with literary aspirations, manages to snag himself a young thing named Rachel. Soon, a bizarre series of killings begins up and down the Keys. Women are cut up and stuffed with machine parts, or else set in odd postures like surrealist paintings. When Hem and Lassiter return from a rescue run to another island, Rachel appears to have fallen victim to the same murderer. Lassiter is haunted by the killings as he accompanies Hemingway to revolutionary Spain in 1937 and then helps out Orson Welles on a movie in 1947, his presence in Los Angeles at that time perhaps leading to the Black Dahlia slaying of starlet Elizabeth Short. Across a quarter-century span, Lassiter is shadowed by Rachel’s ghost, wondering if she really died. Hector Lassiter himself is a compelling character, and an unusual one for a series player. He is a fictional member of the Lost Generation, so it’s not strange to find in his orbit luminaries such as Hemingway and Welles. McDonald paints a broad canvas that stretches from pre-World War I to the late 1960s. Not your typical crime novel, but then McDonald is not your typical writer. -- Jim Winter

Trigger City by Sean Chercover (Morrow) 304 pages
“Facts are not truth. Listen carefully. This is important.” These are the first words to come from private eye Ray Dudgeon since he finished his first adventure, in Sean Chercover’s debut novel, Big City, Bad Blood (2007). In Trigger City, Ray’s still smarting as a result of his clash with The Outfit, losing his girlfriend and being tortured. Business isn’t going well, either. So when the late Joan Richmond’s father offers all the money Ray needs for exclusive use of his services, Ray can’t say no. There’s no question about who killed Joan Richmond; a former coworker rang her doorbell, shot her in the face, then went home and committed suicide to The Best of Abba. But things get hairy when Ray’s usual allies, Chicago police Lieutenant Mike Angelo and reporter Terry Green, are scared away from this case. Things become even more bizarre when Ray finds himself caught between two government organizations straight out of a Duane Swierczynski novel. Chercover achieved amazing results with a stock premise in Big City. He does even better with Trigger City, writing more tightly and never letting up on the pace. A pale copy of his first novel would have been an achievement in and of itself. Chercover goes far beyond that with his sophomore work, telling a good story better than most writes could do. -- Jim Winter

Yellow Medicine by Anthony Neil Smith (Bleak House
Books) 260 pages
Anthony Neil Smith, the mastermind behind Plots With Guns, brings us a novel-length story that would be right at home among the 4,000-word nuggets PWG presents each quarter. Billy Lafitte is a disgraced New Orleans cop rebuilding his life in rural Minnesota. Only Billy hasn’t kicked his old habits. They come back to bite him when he tries to help out a friend with benefits by running interference between her boyfriend and some meth dealers. Everything Billy touches from the word go blows up in his face, and almost every friend he has in the world dies. To make matters worse, a Homeland Security agent named Rome loves the idea of making Lafitte into a terrorist, so he can present poor Billy’s head on a platter to his bosses. Turns out, Rome is every bit as bad, or even worse than Lafitte. Of course, Rome has no conscience. Lafitte can at least fake one. This is a dirty, nasty little book that sounds like rockabilly set to the clatter of bullets. -- Jim Winter

Best Books of 2008: Crime Fiction, Part I

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr (Akashic Books) 320 pages
One of the great pleasures of reading is discovering a stunning writer totally unknown to you. It’s very much like the romantic experience: your first thought is “Where has this person been all my life?” Akashic, that wonderful class act run by rock musician Johnny Temple, sent me in January a copy of a novel by Nina Revoyr called The Age of Dreaming. Not only is it a tremendously intriguing book about a fascinating period -- the 1910s and 20s, the golden age of silent movies -- but it’s also a superb work of publishing art: French covers (the fold-over sort that provide instant, unloseable bookmarks), an evocative cover photo, all the trimmings. Revoyr’s Jun Nakayama was a Japanese actor who became a movie star in Hollywood. He might remind you of Sessue Hayakawa, who appeared as the terrifying prison camp commander in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. Into this mix, Revoyr ladles recognizable chunks from a genuine Hollywood mystery -- the murder of a famous director which, although it was never officially solved, was thought to be the work of the mad mother of a very young and emotionally fragile Southern actress. Jun starts his story in 1964, 42 years after the murder and his abrupt retirement from the film world. Thanks to wise investments, he now lives in comfort in Los Angeles, thinking only occasionally about the past. But when a journalist and budding screenwriter calls to ask for an interview, Jun is set off on a truly amazing voyage of self-discovery. Driving his vintage Packard through neighborhoods now unimaginably changed to him, he contacts old associates from the period. A strong undercurrent of racial prejudice runs through this book: a scene in which Jun takes some Japanese associates to a golf driving range in Westwood, only to discover that a new rule bars “Orientals and Negroes” from playing there, could break your heart. -- Dick Adler

Blackout by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (Henry Holt) 243 pages
Chief Inspector Espinosa, the bibliophilic Brazilian police detective featured in Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s unusual series of police-procedural novels, is an odd duck -- as he himself reflects, in this passage from Blackout (translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser): “No other police chief went to interview witnesses after stopping off at the best bookstore in the neighborhood and selecting three books -- Faulkner, Coetzee, and Patricia Highsmith -- did the interview and got enraptured by the beauty of the interviewee, and then went out into the street, looked at the sky, and thought ‘Matisse blue.’ ... [W]hat a strange person he was ... a person turned in on himself, his own questions, his own world, that was a better way of putting it: he lived in his own world.” That world includes a beautiful girlfriend (whom he helped rescue from harm’s way in a previous book), an apartment with a “bookshelf” made just of volumes stacked upon volumes (“a compact mass of books three meters tall and two meters wide”) -- and of course those police cases which demand his professional attention and which somehow or other draw on his idiosyncratic knowledge, behavior and reading-tastes. The case in Blackout involves a homeless man killed in a cul-de-sac on a residential hillside. What was the poor man doing up there? And why would anyone harm him? The investigation centers on an interior decorator who may know more than he says; and the decorator’s psychiatrist-wife, who not only gets patients to explore their own secrets but who has some of her own. Espinosa behaves at times like the thoughtful Parisian inspector in the books of a certain French author he reads, and at other times like some hard-boiled American op stirring things up in Poisonville. In the existential end, though, the inspector is his own man: a self-absorbed and self-conscious original. -- Tom Nolan

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard (Morrow) 368 pages
Having previously recruited Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim (Mr. Timothy) and poet-novelist Edgar Allan Poe (The Pale Blue Eye) as detectives in two previous mysteries, Washington, D.C., author Louis Bayard finally turns to a real-life sleuth, accused criminal-turned-crime-fighter Eugène François Vidocq, to tackle one of history’s most curious cases -- the disappearance in 1795 of dauphin Louis-Charles, the son of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI. Although he’d technically become King Louis XVII at the time of his father’s death in 1793, during the French Revolution, Louis-Charles never ascended to the throne, but was instead imprisoned by republicans, who abused and eventually left him to die behind bars at age 10. But did he perish? Rumors spread that he had in fact escaped his cell, and several dozen “lost dauphin” pretenders came forward in subsequent years, after the monarchy was restored, hoping to be acclaimed the royal heir. Bayard’s own take on this episode is by turns thrilling, funny and moving. The action begins in Paris in 1818, when Vidocq, a renowned master of disguise and the founder of Paris’ plainclothes police force, approaches 26-year-old medical student Hector Carpentier. It seems that a man named Chrétien Leblanc was murdered while on his way to visit Hector, and Vidocq wants to know whether the aspiring young doctor was involved in that crime. Trouble is, Hector never met the deceased. Driven by Vidocq’s suspicions as well as his own curiosity, Hector goes on to discover a connection between Leblanc and his own doctor-father, who had once treated a very special and secret patient: the doomed young dauphin at Paris’ dreaded Temple Prison -- the “black tower” of this novel’s title. Apparently, someone is convinced that the almost-king did not actually die 13 years before, and he or she is willing to kill now in order to prevent his surprise resurrection. Could a youthful innocent lacking in memory, over whom Hector and Vidocq stumble in the course of their investigation, be the missing dauphin? And to what lengths are they willing to go to save his life now? Bayard is a skilled plotter and character-crafter, delivering here a playfully capricious Vidocq, who steals every scene he steps into, and in Hector Carpentier, a protagonist who sees his family’s story altered as he defies political chicanery and vengeful conspirators to determine the fate of Louis-Charles. Or does he? -- J. Kingston Pierce

Blue Heaven by C.J. Box (St. Martin’s Minotaur) 352 pages
Blue Heaven, by the redoubtable C.J. Box, who does such a tremendous job with his series about Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, is a superb standalone thriller, set in an Idaho town where Los Angeles Police Department retirees go to live -- and die, some of them violently. What Box does so well, without wasting a word, is to create an insular and frighteningly plausible community in North Idaho where Mark Fuhrman, the L.A. cop who sank the O.J. Simpson prosecutor’s case, has a radio talk show and many of the citizens share his conservative bias. It’s the kind of town where a Hispanic officer from Arcadia notices that he’s the only non-Anglo on board the flight to Spokane, Washington. (It’s his refusal to let go of a cold case, a robbery at Santa Anita, that sets off the ensuing bloodbath.) But it’s also home to some good people, notably a courageous banker who has held a dark secret too long and an old rancher (a perfect film role for Sam Elliott) who protects two children -- witnesses to the murder of a retired LAPD officer -- who are now in flight from the killers. In a word, heaven. -- Dick Adler

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) 422 pages
Mickey Haller, the L.A. criminal-defense attorney who narrates Michael Connelly’s exciting The Brass Verdict, is a no-frills professional: his ex-wife is his office-manager, his ex-wife’s boyfriend is his investigator, and his office is the backseat of his chauffeured car. Haller hasn’t taken a case to trial for a year, when this hard-charging book begins; but fate, and a presiding judge, give him a bounty of business when he’s assigned the client-list of a murdered colleague. One of those clients is a movie studio-chief accused of killing his wife and her apparent lover. As Haller works against deadline to craft a feasible defense -- a task made even harder by having to ascertain the truth or fantasy behind all these Hollywood types’ real or imagined back-stories -- another of Mr. Connelly’s series characters, LAPD detective Harry Bosch, is investigating the death of that murdered colleague of Haller’s, a death which impinges on Mickey’s life in unexpected and dangerous ways. It’s fascinating to see Detective Bosch through another character’s eyes, and intriguing to watch Mickey try to get the best of Harry, even as Haller finds his way through a legal and moral labyrinth that may lead to the end of his own career. Some reviewers have compared Michael Connelly to Raymond Chandler, if only because their works are both set in Los Angeles; but it should be apparent to all that Connelly is a modern maestro with his own style and set of preoccupations. Let others be compared to him. -- Tom Nolan

The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe (McLelland & Stewart) 391 pages
Published in North America early in 2008, The Calling created a stir for playing coy with the identity of its author. We were told only that Inger Ash Wolfe was the pen name of a well-known author of literary fiction. As a result, a lot of reviewers seemed to have a problem going beyond guessing games and, when they didn’t come up with answers, kicking the book to the curb. On reading this novel, though, I found that response little short of weird. In clarity of tone and sureness of voice, The Calling is astonishing. And yes: it is a serial-killer novel. And yes again: the book sometimes reaches towards violence that some readers will find distressing. Even so, The Calling is exquisite. More mystery novels are expected from this mysterious author. I can hardly wait. -- Linda L. Richards

Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais (Simon & Schuster) 288 pages
Hired three years ago to help defend suspected killer Lionel Byrd, private eye Elvis Cole found evidence that proved Byrd’s innocence. Now, jump forward to present time, when newly discovered and indisputable proof surfaces that Byrd was not only guilty of murder, but he was a serial killer who went on to claim more victims. It is a P.I.’s worst nightmare. Someone once said that Los Angeles is a great place to live, but a better place to write about. Robert Crais’ L.A. crackles and sparks, and the wounded and emotionally distressed are easily visible under the sun’s glare. Cole is a great gumshoe, because he has the heart of a lion and the soul of a poet. If there’s an alternative truth about Byrd yet to be uncovered, Cole will be the one to find it. Chasing Darkness does not succeed if Cole can’t penetrate the blue wall of Parker Center and the investigating detectives who refuse to give him information. P.I.s don’t have the accessibility of cops, and Byrd can be of no help, because he’s already committed suicide by the time this book opens. With assistance from insider friends such as LAPD detective Carol Starkey and Scientific Investigation Division technician John Chen, Cole is able to piece together what the police have. The evidence is rock-solid, but the difference lies in the interpretation, the subtleties that have to be teased out during the course of any criminal probe. The police agreed with suspicious speed on Byrd as their killer, and Cole isn’t buying it. He begins the most daunting aspect of his investigation -- going to speak to the family of Debra Repko, a woman who died after Cole helped free Byrd. Cole experiences the Repko family’s pain first-hand, in their faces and numbed mannerisms. Several things are guaranteed in any Elvis Cole book -- he’s going to bend the law if necessary to save a life, there are going to be action-packed sequences of some violence and his partner, Joe Pike, will be nearby to watch Cole’s back. It isn’t long before those ugly bed-partners, politics and big money, come into play here, and Cole believes he’s unearthed a diabolical connection between the murdered women and the LAPD itself. Chasing Darkness is not only about finding the identity of a serial killer, and redeeming a P.I.’s career, but it’s also about finding the light in one’s life. For Elvis Cole fans, there’s plenty of light in L.A. -- Anthony Rainone

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing) 448 pages
Remarkably accomplished in both storytelling and plot, Tom Rob Smith’s debut novel had me clutching it with both hands and barreling through it in a single sitting. What’s so bewitching about this tale? Begin with the fact that it takes place in Russia during the 1950s and Stalin’s cruel Soviet regime, which enslaved the Russian people in poverty and paranoia. Against that backdrop we’re given the hunt for a child-murdering serial killer, but also fed the propaganda that such crimes do not exist in Stalin’s Communist nirvana. Then we have to consider Smith’s characters -- Leo Demidov, a respected secret policeman, and his wife, Raisa, who find themselves on the wrong end of state politics when the case of a murdered child turns to obsession. They discover that the death on a railway track was not an accident, as the authorities insist. Nor was it an isolated case, for a trail of child homicides snakes along Russia’s railway system. On top of everything, we are presented in these pages with the cruelty of a state oppressing its population with gulag threats. Loosely based on the real-life case of Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, “the Red Ripper,” Child 44 finds Leo and Raisa exiled from their privileged home in Moscow to the freezing hinterlands, and trying to make do as best they’re able -- which is not always the prettiest picture. The brutality of this book is shocking, but is placed into the context of Stalinist-era atrocities. Even through that darkness, one can still feel the warmth and heartbreak of people struggling against tyranny. Child 44 is part Martin Cruz Smith, part Thomas Harris and part Robert Harris with just a smattering of George Orwell thrown in. -- Ali Karim

Dancing for the Hangman by Martin Edwards (Flambard
Press UK) 256 pages
Most students of criminal history know the fundamentals of the Hawley Harvey Crippen murder case. In 1910, that reportedly mild-mannered, Michigan-born homeopathic practitioner is said to have slain and then buried the partial remains of his domineering and unfaithful spouse, music hall singer Cora Crippen (aka “Belle Elmore”), beneath the brickwork floor of their London basement. Afterward, Crippen and his much younger employee and lover, Ethel Le Neve -- the two disguised as father and son -- fled Great Britain aboard the SS Montrose, bound for Canada, where they dreamed of beginning a new life together. However, their plans were foiled in dramatic fashion by Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Walter Dew. After being tipped to their escape via wireless telegram (a technological turning point well recounted by Erik Larson in Thunderstruck), Dew set off in pursuit on a faster ship, and was waiting for the Montrose when it finally entered Canada’s St. Lawrence River. He quickly took Crippen into custody and returned him to England, where the culprit was found guilty of homicide and hanged. That’s the framework of this tale, but around it Martin Edwards packs considerable substance -- emotional, entertaining and intriguing -- as he seeks to make sense of what led Crippen to poison Cora and then try to conceal her dismembered corpse. Retelling the story from Crippen’s point of view, Edwards casts his protagonist as a man too naïve and stoic for his own good, falling for a woman who manipulated him without compunction, abused him verbally and then cheated on him with younger admirers. Crippen trusted in people when he should not have, stayed in a marriage he ought to have abandoned long before violence resulted (if only the prejudice against divorce had not been so intense in his era) and may have put more faith in his legal defenders than they deserved. Edwards sees Crippen as a romantic, hungry for happiness, even if it only lasted briefly. Other fictionists have tackled the Crippen case, but none so successfully as Edwards does in Dancing for the Hangman. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Darwin’s Nightmare by Mike Knowles (ECW Press) 288 pages
At one point in Knowles’ hard-charging debut, career criminal Wilson confesses he isn’t “one of the good guys.” Well, duh. Before this blitzkrieg of a crime novel has run its course, young Wilson will have inflicted a world of hurt on his enemies -- and taken more than a few licks himself. Wilson is a rumor: a professional go-between and thug for hire working on the sly for a very select roster of clients in the criminal netherworld of Hamilton, the hard, gritty steel town without pity that lurks on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario. But when a fairly routine gig -- a “snatch-and-grab” at the local airport -- goes bad, Wilson’s name is suddenly on everyone’s lips, and he’s in everyone’s sights. The action is hard and raw and savage, and the characters are about as deliciously nasty as you’d expect. But what sets this book apart is Knowles’ considerable storytelling muscle, as he deliberately strings out the narrative (and cranks up the tension) with well-placed flashbacks to his protagonist’s dysfunctional past. And yet this is as clean and clenched a first novel as I’ve seen recently, suffering few of the common debut-work excesses. Devotees of Andrew Vachss’ Burke and Richard Stark’s Parker and fans of hard-boiled fiction in general should take heed: there’s a new bad boy in town. Wilson himself may not be one of the good guys, but his creator, a Canadian schoolteacher, is definitely worth keeping an eye on. -- Kevin Burton Smith

The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow (Knopf) 320 pages
What can I say about Don Winslow’s The Dawn Patrol to get you to buy it? That it’s one of the best private-eye novels in years? That behind the great writing and wonderfully unique voice hides a very serious truth about the United States, and California in particular? I’ve read the book twice now, and I enjoyed it even more the second time because I knew what to look for, but I could also fully immerse myself into Winslow’s world. The yarn is told in third-person narrative, much like some dude might tell you in a bar. And this dude, he’s a great storyteller; he’s excited about the tale he’s sharing and he just can’t keep himself from getting so worked up that his grammar gets a little sloppy. This dude in the bar, the one telling the story, wants you to know what makes his protagonist, surfer-detective Boone Daniels, and Daniels’ friends on the Dawn Patrol tick. In his telling, he wants to bring you along with him to San Diego, where his story takes place -- to smell the salty air near the beach, to understand that the coastal communities in America’s finest city boast individual personalities. He wants you to understand that the paradise of San Diego pays a very heavy price to be as enticing as it is, and that the price you pay makes you a little blind to the city’s dark and tattered soul. Man, this dude wants you there and nowhere else. I love The Dawn Patrol, I love that Winslow tells a P.I. novel like no one else, and that even when he uses a genre cliché, like having a powerful criminal try to pay off his hero, it still feels real, not like a cheap device to advance the plot. It’s wonderfully refreshing to read a P.I. novel that feels like it belongs in the present, rather than trying to emulate the styles and time periods of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. By the time I was finished with The Dawn Patrol, I knew Winslow’s characters so well, I kept expecting to see them at the beach -- Boone catching the big waves, High Tide chowing down on fish tacos (San Diegans take their fish tacos very seriously), Dave the Love God checking out the babes and Sunny Day walking into the water with her board, all eyes on her, men wanting her and women alternately wanting to be her while hating her for her confidence and beauty. The Dawn Patrol is my favorite novel of the year. I guess that’s saying a lot. -- Cameron Hughes

Death Was the Other Woman by Linda L. Richards (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne) 272 pages
This comforting homage to private-eye fiction of the 1930s is a huge departure from Richards’ Madeline Carter contemporary thrillers (Calculated Loss). Not only are the time period and setting different, but so are the style and pacing. Other Woman features Katherine “Kitty” Pangborn, the youthful and educated secretary to boozy but brave private eye Dexter J. Theroux in Depression-era Los Angeles. Left behind by her industrialist father, who committed suicide after the collapse of the U.S. stock market, Kitty tries to pick up the pieces of her world and make new sense of them. Although she’s fairly destitute, she is also resourceful and strong in spirit, and those traits are ideal complements to Theroux’s world-weariness. (Richards modeled Kitty generally on Effie Perrine, the underappreciated assistant to another seen-it-all gumshoe, Sam Spade.) Theroux is a World War II vet who looks at the city around him through the ridges of a whiskey tumbler; he needs somebody to watch out for him, even if that somebody is better known for her gams than her gats. Hints are made here about why the P.I. drinks so heavily, but I am sure that more will be revealed in further adventures. (This is the first installment of a series, to be followed next month by Death Was in the Picture.) Picking up where Chandler, Hammett, and their tough-edged ilk left off, but giving the conventions a sassy kick that the old guys never could have imagined, Richards offers a fresh outlook on the era that delivered the “Golden Age” of crime fiction. Death Was the Other Woman can be heartbreaking at times, but it’s also fast-paced and perceptive about the nuances of human deception. Journalist-turned-novelist Richards tells a brilliant story about a bygone era and a character, Kitty, who might have shown Spade and Philip Marlowe a thing or two about crime solving. -- Ali Karim

The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne) 312 pages
Icelanders have lots of room and time to reflect on the past -- or so it seems in the engrossing and moving police-procedural novels of Arnaldur Indridason, who chronicles the cases and concerns of the gloomy Reykjavik Inspector Erlendur Sveinnson. In The Draining Lake, it’s taken more than a quarter-century for an old corpse to rise to the surface of present-day scrutiny. Erlendur, whose personal preoccupation is missing persons and whose private life is a natural disaster, is the ideal man to investigate. His probing leads back into Cold War history, to a time when Iceland was a strategically vital country and the destination-spot for all sorts of sanctioned and unsanctioned guests. Who was the man whose body was thrown back then into Lake Kleifarvatn, weighted down by an old Russian radio transmitter? What set of circumstances led to this violent act? Was it a political gesture? A personal vendetta? A spy’s endgame? “There needn’t always be an explanation,” reasons Erlendur, who can’t quite see the cause-and-effect in his own personal history. “In Iceland there’s rarely a real motive behind a murder. It’s an accident or a snap decision, not premeditated and in most cases committed for no obvious reason.” On the other hand, a colleague insists: “All murders are willful. Some are just more stupid than others.” When the inspector finds the truth, in this work translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder, its aspects and implications stir echoes in his own mind and heart -- maybe enough for another quarter-century’s worth of gloomy reflections. -- Tom Nolan

Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan (Harcourt) 400 pages
Andrew Klavan takes my breath away. Never mind that since his last novel, Damnation Street, the author has become a “baptized Christian,” a state of being I don’t entirely approve. But Klavan writes like an angel. He can tell me any story he likes, I’ll follow with my tongue hanging out. And I don’t even care about the picture that makes. Klavan is just that good. As befitting all this hyperbole, Klavan’s latest novel, Empire of Lies, is breathtaking and in some ways, the perfect set piece with Larry Beinhart’s Salvation Boulevard, published slightly earlier in the year. Both books are novels of thought as much as mystery. Both plumb depths quite often left unplumbed: politics, religion, the unpleasantness of the modern age. And though both books do it quite differently, they manage it all with awe-inspiring style and grace. Hard-core mystery and thriller enthusiasts might be left a little cold by either book, because both of these authors kick conventions to the door. There is only story, style and substance for page after breathless page. -- Linda L. Richards

Empty Ever After by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak
House Books) 259 pages
We all possess secrets of some kind, from the innocent to the complex. After Brooklyn-based private investigator Moses Prager discovers that his ex-brother-in-law Patrick Maloney’s grave is violated, he finds himself traveling back in time to solve one of his most perplexing cases. When Prager’s ex-wife, Katy, receives a voice-mail from her dead brother, and then Prager sees Patrick at a local airport, things seem to be veering toward the paranormal. But this is a crime novel, not horror fiction, and Prager is too savvy not to know when someone is playing him. Forced to revisit people from Patrick’s past in order to get to the bottom of things, Prager understands it’s his past too. In these pages, Prager comes across as a philosopher-P.I., a man who sees the past as a wave washing over present time. Reed Farrel Coleman is a writer at the top of his game. The winner of several prestigious mystery-fiction awards, he never cheats his readers. There are well-delineated reasons his characters do what they do, and his stories leave you thinking. Coleman writes lush back-story, and wry observations are coupled with broad comedic touches that lighten the tone. Gem-like characters pebble the landscape, including Auschwitz survivor Mr. Roth and Moe’s pregnant Puerto Rican P.I. partner, Carmella Melendez. Prager is an ex-cop, and Empty Ever After features cops in abundance, such as upstate Sheriff Vandervoort, a man loyal to the Maloney influence, and gritty NYPD Detective Feeney, who first suspects Prager when the bodies start piling up. In a nod to the way things really work, Prager makes sure to keep the cops up to speed on whatever he learns. At the novel’s end, Prager depends on heavily armed police to help him face the bad guys down. Empty Ever After is a novel of metaphysics. For every action there is a reaction that can span the string of time. In Prager’s mind, you do what you must, no matter the cost. Emptiness can take many forms and there are many ways to fill it. But far from feeling empty at the end of this book, the reader feels greatly enhanced. -- Anthony Rainone

Envy the Night by Michael Koryta (St. Martin’s Press) 304 pages
Koryta’s books about Cleveland gumshoe Lincoln Perry were wonderful slices of Midwestern noir (Tonight I Said Goodbye was an Edgar Award finalist). But Envy the Night is that rarest of literary creatures: a standalone thriller that you want to see turned into a series. Could it happen? Could Frank Temple III, the 24-year-old son of a hired killer, and Nora Stafford, at 30 the unwilling proprietor of her comatose father’s auto body shop, survive all the dangers they face in the bucolic Wisconsin lakefront town known as Willow Flowage, just down the road from Tomahawk? We live in hope. -- Dick Adler

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere by John McFetridge
(Harcourt) 304 pages
Set in Toronto, John McFetridge’s sophomore offering (after Dirty Sweet) features an ensemble cast from both sides of the law, most of them spokes radiating out from Sharon, a single mother operating a low-level dope-growing operation. Gangs of Italians, South Asians and Angels, all grafting for a heavier slice of Toronto’s new prosperity; a Native American cop and his recently widowed partner investigating an apparent suicide while sitting on the powder keg of an internal affairs probe about to blow the Toronto force apart; Ray, a new face on the scene with an offer Sharon can’t refuse; Richard, the old flame now a power broker in the world of Canadian crime. A multi-character narrative, this story unfolds with a brevity, fluidity and power that is reminiscent of Elmore Leonard’s writing, in that it’s almost an abbreviation of style. One of its chief delights, however, is that McFetridge appears to be working on a more epic scale -- Toronto is here a microcosm of the contemporary world, where criminality is leading the charge towards globalization and leaving the local law-enforcement officers dazed with the speed and force of the onslaught. It’s also a tremendously fun read, the whole imbued with a deadpan wit, particularly in the sections where the supposedly dumb-ass criminals use the jargon of business executives to discuss their trade. Swaggeringly self-assured, it reads like the work of a master in mid-career; that it’s only McFetridge’s second novel only adds to the satisfaction. -- Declan Burke

The Fourth Watcher by Timothy Hallinan (Morrow) 320 pages
I thought that John Burdett’s terrific books (Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts) about Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the only practicing Buddhist on the Bangkok police force, contained all I needed to know about the darker, sadder side of that popular tourist stop. But then I began to read Timothy Hallinan’s novels about American travel writer Poke Rafferty, starting with A Nail Through the Heart (2007), a moving thriller full of violence, depravity and love. Hallinan’s latest, The Fourth Watcher, is even better: the kind of book that makes you wonder, What more can he possibly do? This time, he mixes into the tale Poke’s long-missing father, Frank, and a half-sister he never knew he had; a Secret Service agent who could be the worst nightmare anyone ever had; a few honest and many more crooked Thai cops; and Colonel Chu, the head of a Chinese triad, who grabs Rafferty’s beautiful love interest, Rose, and their street-smart 9-year-old adopted daughter. Chu says he’ll kill them both unless he gets back what Frank Rafferty stole from him: a whole lot of rubies and the papers to launch a new life for himself in America. Poke believes him, and so will you. -- Dick Adler

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
(Knopf) 480 pages
I consider this to be the best crime novel of 2008. No question about it. The late Stieg Larsson’s debut work is a giant, multi-layered, multi-character tale by a writer of considerable power. Full of social conscience and compassion, with considerable insight into the nature of moral corruption, the book just knocked me out. What’s most interesting about Dragon Tattoo are its vast array of characters and its unfamiliar Swedish setting, which captivates readers as this yarn unravels to an unexpected and chilling conclusion. Larsson’s two main characters are disgraced journalist and publisher Mikael Blomkvist and his partner, the enigmatic and deeply troubled Lisbeth Salander. This pair is soon to join the pantheon of the greatest crime-fiction players of all time. The story in which they perform is a curious blend of subgenres. We have a splash of courtroom drama at the opening, when Blomkvist loses a libel case brought by corrupt Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, which has serious repercussions for the magazine that Blomkvist publishes. Then we have the private-eye strand, which comes in the shape of a 40-year-old case involving the disappearance of teenager Harriet Vanger from an isolated island. Using as well some of the conventions of “cozies,” Dragon Tattoo slowly evolves into a tortured tale of family secrets, manifest evil and deep compassion that takes its two lead players from a desolate Swedish island during a frigid winter, to London and then on to Australia. It isn’t long before both Blomkvist and Salander find themselves to be hunters as well as prey, and it will take all of their combined skills to untangle themselves from the iniquities surrounding the events that have shaped the Vanger clan. Larsson even throws in an element of techno-thriller, what with Salander’s skills and contacts in the computer-hacking community. And, finally, what would a crime novel be without serial killing and torture? These are hoary conventions of the trade, but Larsson manages to ring freshness from them even as he mesmerizes the reader with his insights into human motivations. -- Ali Karim

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler
(Touchstone) 336 pages
This is the book that surprised me the most this year. It shouldn’t have been good. It sounded silly, being set in a collapsed country where the most important thing is a string of strip clubs. You’d never expect it to be as smart as it is, or so vicious in its satire or so sad at times. Victor Gischler’s protagonist, Mortimer Tate, was an insurance salesman with a failing marriage, and when things started to go really bad, he took a ton of supplies and moved into his cabin in the woods, hoping to ride out whatever was happening. Nine years later, he’s lonely but content. Then his little home is raided and he’s forced to kill the bandits. The incident convinces him to come down off his mountain to see what’s been going on in the world during his absence. A lot, as it turns out. Now, when you think of civilization, what images come to mind? Probably Starbucks and Best Buy stores, the result of corporations becoming obscenely powerful. So it made total sense to me that a string of strip clubs should have become social magnets. Those joints have three basic things everyone wants: food, shelter and sex. Upon entering the first club he finds, Tate becomes a celebrity, because he’s carrying so many valuable supplies, such as food and guns. To stay sane and have a reason to keep on going, our hero decides that his goal is to find his wife and see if she’s OK. It’s a simple plan, but in this world, nothing is easy. The action in Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse is fast and furious, and Mortimer Tate is almost always in danger because he possesses a large quantity of money that can be used at the clubs. In short order, he engages in a shootout on a moving train (powered by steroid-jacked musclemen), is kidnapped by what appears to be a tribe of women (really, escaped inmates from a mental institution, who intend to use him as a society-rebuilding stud) and finds himself in the clutch of cannibals (who in a hilarious revelation, turn out to be white suburbanite soccer moms and dads). A lot happens in this fairly slim novel, but it all feels quite natural. Gischler has created a living, breathing, but dramatically off-kilter world, where the worst things you can imagine happen. The scariest part is how plausible this fiction seems. No single thing destroyed the world; instead, it was a deadly mix of natural disasters and large-scale wars. Go-Go Girls’ premise is made credible in part by America’s response to Hurricane Katrina. In the summer of 2005, a terrible disaster wrecked New Orleans, one of the most beautiful and cultured cities in the United States, and we all but left it to die. Sure, there were dramatic rescue efforts made; but in the end, people stopped caring about the city -- saving New Orleans just wasn’t sexy anymore. This is why Go-Go Girls doesn’t stretch one’s imagination beyond reason: we’ve already proved we are capable of destroying ourselves. But I said earlier that Gischler’s tale is sad. He gives us a world in which a young man dresses and acts like a cowboy, because he wants some identity beyond that of refugee; a world where a teenage girl admires the sort of dress somebody might wear to a prom, and is amazed to realize that there was a time when people dressed to look good, not just to stay warm. There are a lot of moments like those in Go-Go Girls. I daresay Gischer’s book is even better than Cormac McCarthy’s slightly overrated The Road, because its satire is a lot smarter and its humor brings out just how horrific the world’s situation has become. -- Cameron Hughes

Best Books of 2008: Non-Fiction

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum (Crown) 352 pages
So many 20th-century misdeeds have been labeled “the crime of the century,” that it’s hard to keep track. Wasn’t the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping supposed to be the crime of the century? Or was it Leopold and Loeb’s murder from 1924? Perhaps it was the Great Brink’s Robbery of 1950, or the shocking Jonestown Massacre of 1978? And what about the slaying of libidinous architect Stanford White in 1906? For his latest book, New York Times reporter-turned-Vanity Fair writer Howard Blum casts the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing as the foremost crime of the 1900s. It certainly had drama, as the leaf copy of American Lightning makes clear: “On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured.” That devastation came in the midst of heightened animosities between labor organizers and industrialists in the United States. Much in contrast with pro-union San Francisco, the City of Angels had sought to curb (or kill) labor’s influence. One of the loudest voices in that campaign came from Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, so it was not unexpected that his business should be among the dozens targeted for damage by aggravated unionists who believed employers could only be brought to the bargaining table under threats of violence. Apparently, though, the timing mechanism on the suitcase bomb deposited in an alley behind the Times headquarters was faulty, and its dynamite went off later than planned, when people were working inside the structure. In the aftermath, the man considered at the time to be “America’s greatest detective,” William J. Burns, was called to investigate. Blum carefully tracks the efforts by Burns and his subordinates to identify and apprehend the men responsible for that explosion, brothers John J. and James B. McNamara. However, he extends his focus further, telling the parallel stories of eminent attorney Clarence Darrow, who was persuaded by labor leaders to defend the McNamaras, and moviemaking pioneer D.W. Griffith, who helped Burns to resolve the case and was inspired by it to create his epic 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. Blum does a remarkable job here of blending the tales of his principals together, and peppering in such other peripheral players as movie star Mary Pickford, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and union leader Samuel Gompers. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Full-Court Quest by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith (University of Oklahoma Press) 479 pages
Full-Court Quest is a delightful surprise. The story of a woman’s basketball team that started in an Indian boarding school and rose to take their place as Montana’s first basketball champions, playing at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Full-Court Quest has everything. A story you’re not likely to have heard before, authors Peavy and Smith did heavy detective work uncovering layer upon layer to reveal an important piece of women’s history; of native American history and even of the type of spirit for which the West became known. Peavy and Smith tell their chosen tale well, sprinkling us lightly across a narrative that, nonetheless, never loses any of its real life grit. And this was just the duo of authors to bring us this unforgettable story. Peavy and Smith have been collaborating on works of women’s history for three decades. They are the authors of ten books together, including Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement, Pioneer Women and Frontier House. A wonderful story splendidly told. It deserves the widest following imaginable. -- Sienna Powers

He Is…I Say by David Wild (DaCapo) 203 pages
Rolling Stone contributing editor David Wild offers up an intimate look at Neil Diamond, “our own King of Kings, our Jewish American Elvis” in He Is…I Say, a skillful biography that manages to be both affectionate and informative. In his introduction, Wild sets the tone: “Neil Diamond, as I can personally attest, was big in Jersey well before Bruce Springsteen became The Boss. In our home in particular, his music was always near the very top of our pops.” Part personal memoir, part revealing peek at an enduring icon, and part fan letter from a life-long Diamond aficionado, one thing is clear throughout: David Wild is a stylist second to none and it’s a pleasure to take this journey with him. “In the wonderfully emotional and occasionally manic-depressive world of Neil Diamond, agony and ecstasy have long gone hand in hand, making no shortage of beautiful music together.” -- Aaron Blanton

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller (Penguin) 224 pages
This year one of the best books about the Iraq War was set entirely in Wyoming. Alexandra Fuller obliquely connects the dots between the United States’ motives in the Mideast with the questionable practices of big-oil companies in The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, an account of a Wyoming roughneck’s short, happy life. Just as she did in her own memoirs of growing up in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, Fuller tells young Colton’s story in a parade of impressionistic scenes that are as much about the landscape as they are the wide-eyed oil rigger who walks through it. Colton, the unlikely hero at the center of the book, is no John Wayne, no Gary Cooper. He loves hunting and fishing, idolizes his father (also an oil rigger), swigs Mountain Dew by the gallon, marries young, drives a Ford pickup, and works hard to provide for his family. His is an ordinary life headed for an extraordinary fate. More than anything, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is a story about the crushing realities facing blue-collar Westerners, the once-proud pioneers who now find themselves the disposable commodities of industry and corporate greed. -- David Abrams

Lost: A Memoir by Cathy Ostlere (Key Porter Books) 256 pages
I had a bad feeling most of the time I spent reading Cathy Ostlere’s skillfully wrought memoir of a family’s grief, Lost. The award-winning writer has a wonderful way with language and, despite the personal nature of the material she covers here, she approaches it with a journalist’s eye and heart. Even so, almost from the very first moment, you get the feeling that this is a story that can’t have a happy ending. From the beginning, there’s something in Ostlere’s tone; something in the slow, stately march of the words she chooses to relate this deeply personal tale. Lost breaks the heart, again and again. Sometimes, it breaks the heart too much. -- Linda L. Richards

Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Life of Louis Riel’s Grandmother by Maggie Siggins (McLelland & Stewart) 307 pages
I love the genesis of Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Life of Louis Riel’s Grandmother. Author Siggins reports that, more than a decade ago, while she was doing research on Riel: A Life of Revolution, Siggins’ superlative biography of Canadian hero of history, Louis Riel. “As my research progressed,” writes Siggins, “I came to regard her as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The achievements of Laura Secord, Susanna Moodie, and Frances Ann Hopkins pale in comparison.” While in certain historical circles, those would be fighting words, they also convey the spirit of the biography of Marie-Anne that Siggins would come to write. If Siggins was ever an impartial historical observer, her impartiality got lost in the research someplace. Siggins tells her educated idea of Marie-Anne’s life with spirit, passion and conviction. The result is a significant work of non-fiction that breathes with the life of a well-told thriller. The book is just everything is ever could or even should be. -- Monica Stark

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea (Perigee Trade) 240 pages
Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED is the book for word lovers. Thanks to Ammon Shea, though I do not know the word for word lovers, I know what my trouble is: onomonomatia: vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word. If you or somebody you know suffers from onomonomatia, consider Reading the OED as a remedy, for Shea read the entirety Oxford English Dictionary, and lived to tell the tale. Reading the OED is a blast. Divided into 26 wordacious chapters -- that’s A-Z -- the book is both an examination of words and a meta-examination of reading dictionaries. It’s hysterically funny: David Sedaris, laugh-out-loud-on-the bus funny. I myself finished the book at home, where Shea’s definition of Xenium reduced me to hysteria. For the record: “Xenium: (n.) A gift given to a guest. ‘It is a very delicate balance to strike, this business of giving a gift to someone you do not want to offend and yet whom you also do not want to stick around too long. Unless you are one of those unbalanced individuals who actually enjoys having company, I would recommend giving a xenium (italics the author’s) such as a pair of used socks, something that says ‘Here is a gift -- please go away.’” Perhaps you feel this way yourself. This, along with several words for vomit (Keck is a good one) makes Reading the OED the perfect gift. Where else will you learn that gound is: (n.) the gunk that collects in the corners of the eyes? I bought three copies of Reading the OED as Christmas gifts. And I hardly expect to be accused of giving a Toe Cover: (n.) A present that is both useless and inexpensive. -- Diane Leach

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books) 384 pages
It’s tempting to think that people of the 21st century are too worldly, too skeptical to be taken in by the sort of hoaxes that were perpetrated on our forebears 100 or 200 years ago. But then you remember stories about voters being convinced (against all the evidence) that President-elect Barack Obama is Muslim or that the Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t really walk on Earth’s moon, but simply kicked up dust on a Hollywood stage set. And suddenly the capacity for men and women to be buffaloed doesn’t look so related to an earlier day. Still, the rich deception pulled off by editor Richard Adams Locke and his New York Sun “penny paper” in 1835 depended on their era’s being less knowledgeable about science and more easily wowed by pseudo-scientific discoveries. To drum up attention, the Sun published a series of articles supposedly proving the existence of life on the moon. And not just any life, but such exotica as walking beavers, unicorns, peculiar bearlike creatures, and 4-foot-tall “man-bats” (perhaps the predecessors of those bizarre “bat boys” the Weekly World News always used to feature on its cover). For several weeks, the “Great Moon Hoax” -- supposedly employing information supplied by an associate of noted astronomer Sir John Herschel -- captured international attention and brought acclaim (and income) to the young, struggling Sun. Renowned showman P.T. Barnum later claimed that the paper peddled $25,000 worth of moon-hoax paraphernalia to gullible readers. Marshaling ample (and then some) trivia and stories related to this fraud, New York in the 1830s, and people who were affected in some way by Locke’s bunkum (including Edgar Allan Poe, who claimed that the Sun had plagiarized his fiction), author Goodman delivers a remarkable story of a more innocent America and the sort of journalism that turned its residents into newspaper followers. -- J. Kingston Pierce

True Crime: An American Anthology edited by Harold Schechter (Library of America) 788 pages
The serial-killer porn and Mafiosi tell-alls that swamp today’s non-fiction crime shelves rarely light my fire, but I’m a sucker for more ambitious fare such as True Crime, edited by Harold Schechter. And for once the generic title is appropriate. The tell, though, is in the subtitle. Because in this ambitious collection, Schechter presents a very convincing argument that crime is about as American as apple pie, with a boffo selection of red, white and blue mayhem from a star-studded list of contributors, both contemporary and historical -- everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin to Dominick Dunne and Ann Rule. The book also contains narratives of murder and violence that stretch from homicidal pilgrims at Plymouth to the Menendez brothers of Southern California. There’s an excerpt from Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, Mark Twain takes a few swipes at the myths of the “Wild West” and James Ellroy, in his unsettling “My Mother’s Killer,” lets slip his well-worn Mad Dog of Crime persona just enough to reveal a surprising glimpse of Sick Puppy. Cotton Mather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Damon Runyon, Jim Thompson and Ambrose Bierce also chip in, and the newspaper and magazine articles, journal excerpts and public documents they and others are responsible for make this almost 800-page tome an unforgettable reading experience. It’s one hell of a reference source and a bruising and bloody social history of the United States. Hell, there’s even a collection of lyrics here from several murder ballads, so you can hum along. Nervously, perhaps, while you wonder if you remembered to lock the side door. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Best Books of 2008: Art & Culture

Amazing Baby by Desmond Morris (Firefly) 192 pages
After this, the joke that children don’t come with an owner’s manual might have to be put on hold. Celebrated zoologist Desmond Morris’ Amazing Baby fills that long empty hole: and so much more. This is the complete baby, a coffee table book so beautiful and perfect, in future no baby shower will ever be complete without a copy. Amazing Baby covers all the topics, handles all the questions, raises all the issues. From practical advice (nursing, weaning, waste control) to systems evaluations (the skeleton, the feet, the senses), it seems as though nothing has been overlooked. In his foreword, Morris tells us that “babies are more than just babies. They also happen to be our only certain form of immortality, in the sense that they carry on our genetic line, ensuring that our genes do not die out when we ourselves come to the end of our own lives.” With gorgeous photos, exquisite reproduction and fascinating text, the importance of babies both to our lives and to our well-being seems never to have been forgotten. -- Monica Stark


The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions by Quincy Jones (Insight Editions)
The life and times of media giant Quincy Jones isn’t new territory. For anyone interested in the man, there have been a couple of film documentaries and his autobiography, published just a few years ago. The thing is, what makes Quincy such a god in show business is also the what makes him so fascinating to read about and hear about, again and again. There’s always something new to see and hear, some new story, some fresh insight. The Complete Quincy Jones is different from other books -- even his own -- because it’s fully illustrated with photos and reproductions of items from his life. Other books have done this, and they’re always interesting. But here, something about the text and the selection of items transcends. Quickly moving through Quincy’s life, the stories sort of hop, skip, and jump through time, hitting the high notes: his childhood, his work in the music business, his barrier-breaking work scoring films and television series, and the mentoring and branching out to other media that have filled his later life. Quincy’s life is one that we imagine we can understand by listening to his music. After all, someone who’s been at it this long and this relentlessly must leave breadcrumbs of his life in his work -- but as I said, this book’s breadcrumbs, if you will, are tangible. Meaningful articles, a family photo album, a report card, handwritten notes, personal calendar pages, concert handbills, sheet music, and scores of archival photographs. All of this material brings the stories to life in a new way that’s nothing less than hypnotic. And peppered throughout are tributes from many of the people Quincy has worked with: four of the biggest guns -- Maya Angelou, Clint Eastwood, Bono and Sidney Poitier -- are all mentioned on the front cover, and they only scratch the surface. But beyond all the marquee names, the one that matters here is Quincy’s. He’s the real attraction. While biographical material about him abounds elsewhere, this beautiful book stands alone as a testament to the man’s work and life. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible by Wolfgang Stuppy and Rob Kesseler (Firefly) 264 pages
One look is all that’s required to understand that this sterling journey is very like one that we’ve been on before. The work is arresting, distinctive, familiar, yet it covers entirely new ground. Rob Kesseler is a professor at Saint Martins College of Art and Design. And he’s also the co-author of two previous books, also published by Firefly in North America: Pollen and Seeds. Like those previous works, Fruit is little short of astonishing. If the book never gets further than your coffee table, it’s still likely to blow the stuffing out of anything else laid near it. Physically, it’s a very large book. But though size is what makes it possible to really appreciate what we’re seeing here, it isn’t everything. And what we’re seeing is, of course, fruit. But it is depicted here in such magnificent ways that almost any one of the scores of images included would do well to be hung on a gallery wall. This isn’t art, though. At least, not in the usual sense. In this context, they are illustrations for a fantastic book, one that offers up a journey quite unlike any you’ve been on before: “As this book will reveal,” we are told in the very first chapter, “fruits are part of an elaborate plot. Their true nature is revealed by what is buried in their core: their seeds. Seeds are the most complex and precious organs plants ever produce, as it is the seeds that carry the next generation.” Like a seed, this is the barest sliver of the knowledge available. Reading all of Fruit is like a fantastic mini education. Don’t feel like reading? Just look at the pictures. They’ll take you away. -- David Middleton

Notes on a Life by Eleanor Coppola (Nan A. Talese) 306 pages
An artist’s view of life. A filmmaker’s view of a life spent in film. A mother’s comment, joy and lament. Notes on a Life could easily have been just another celebrity bio but it is so, so much more. In fact, it’s never that at all. Many lives are rich and hold deep wells of experience and emotion to mine, and often it’s enough. However Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life adds another layer. This is Eleanor Coppola -- yes, that Coppola -- and thus her internal mining is studded with encounters with people and faces we already know. Marlon said this. Frank said that. Wasn’t Sofia darling when she did that? All of these things add to the book. Take it to another even richer place. -- Monica Stark

The Surface of Meaning by Robert Bringhurst (Simon Fraser University) 240 pages
I feel as though I waited for The Surface of Meaning for a long time. Of course, like many designers, I knew that Bringhurst was working on another book. It was expected to be an important one, even in the course of a long and important professional history. The Surface of Meaning does not disappoint. In the acknowledgements, Bringhurst tells us that putting the book together was “in some respects more like curating an exhibition of sculpture or painting than like anything in the normal round of editing and publishing.” Considering the nature of this particular work, this isn’t surprising since, as the subtitle indicates, the book is about Books and Book Design in Canada. Bringhurst delivers the goods. The Surface of Meaning is the history, the encyclopedia and -- yes -- celebration of the book. And though the focus is on Canada, designers and typographers everywhere will want this one for their library. I’m quite certain The Surface of Meaning is one of the most important books about books published thus far in this millennium. -- David Middleton

The Water Garden by Leslie Geddes-Brown (Merrell) 192 pages
Leslie Geddes-Brown’s The Water Garden explores the use of water in the landscape in every way conceivable. In large, art coffee table book style, The Water Garden looks closely at the idea of water in the garden through a series of really great photographs as well as Geddes-Brown’s expert text. An accomplished journalist who has contributed to some of the leading magazines and newspapers in the world on the topic of houses and gardens, Geddes-Brown is the author of several books including The Walled Garden, The Floral Home and Waterside Living. The water garden in history, the Oriental water garden, the Islamic water garden, the formal water garden, the romantic water garden and many other aspects are explored through text and photos in some detail. It’s a stunning book, one meant alternately to inspire and to soothe. I would love to create a garden like any of those included in the book. However, I lack the space and -- to be perfectly honest -- I likely lack the wherewithal, as well. The Water Garden, though, is a wonderful journey for the armchair gardener as well as those who might be in a position to act on their inspiration. -- Aaron Blanton

Best Books of 2008: Cookbooks

The Complete Robuchon: French Home Cooking for the Way We Live Now by Joël Robuchon (Knopf) 832 pages
In a world full of glossy, high color cookbooks with shiny pages and mindless prose, The Complete Robuchon stands out. Here Joël Robuchon, a three star Michelin chef and arguably one of the most renowned chef/restaurateurs in the world -- passes on what he knows. And he knows a lot. This is not a book for everyone -- the fat content alone would preclude that. However, if you like your cookbooks -- and your food, for that matter -- old school and you love your Larousse Gastronomique (And, incidentally, Robuchon is on the committee for the newest edition) chances are you will appreciate what’s on offer here. If your tastes run to cooking tomes more glossy -- and if you expect photos of the meals you would concoct -- give this one a miss. -- Aaron Blanton

Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food by Gordon Ramsay (Key Porter) 256 pages
It’s possible that Gordon Ramsay is an acquired taste. At least, when I mention him, quite often the response I get is a roll of the eyes or a “oh: is he that very noisy guy?” And he is. At least, his television persona is tres noisy. But the fact is -- and this is even apparent when he’s yelling -- Gordon Ramsay is a wonderful chef. If you’ve not had the opportunity to witness this fact for yourself and especially if you enjoy cooking at home, you will see his simple brilliance in Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food. This is a cookbook for everyone, but especially those who don’t think they have enough time to prepare beautiful food for themselves and their families. Wonderfully designed, perfectly illustrated and literally stuffed with recipes even the greenest kitchen novice can follow, Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food is a book almost anyone can enjoy. Here Ramsay celebrates and shares what most accomplished chefs understand at an instinctive level: the very best food is very simple, very easy and very fast. -- Linda L. Richards

Great Chefs Cook Vegan by Linda Long (Gibbs Smith) 272 pages
Like many of the very best things in life, Great Chefs Cook Vegan grew out of an accident which led to an experiment which led to this fabulous book. Tired of being served plates of “unseasoned and overcooked vegetables,” vegetarian and veteran food writer and photographer Linda Long called ahead to two of New York’s top restaurants to warn there would be a vegan dining there on the evening of their reservation. “Will that be a problem?” she asked when she called ahead and was told by both Jean-Georges and davidburke & donatella that it would not be. The chefs at both restaurants, given fair warning, concocted beautiful meals that far exceeded Long’s expectations. “Not even a mention of a plate of vegetables!” she writes enthusiastically. Instead, four star meals that easily met her dining requirements and fulfilled her desires. This started Long on a journey of reserving and tasting and when she was impressed by the creative offerings of chef after chef, the next natural thought seemed to be to collect their creations in a book. “It was all getting too good to keep as a secret,” writes Long. “I should write a book!” To the potential delight of vegans everywhere, that’s just what she did, collecting offerings from 25 of the very top chefs in the United States including Charlie Trotter, Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, Cat Cora and Gabriel Kreuther. Together they offer up a very complete cookbook of fabulous eats from appetizers straight through to dessert. Unsurprisingly, not a single dish will make you think of overcooked plates of vegetables. Fantastic! -- Sienna Powers

Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life by Jamie Oliver (Hyperion) 407 pages
It seems Jamie Oliver has come a very long way since his Naked Chef days. At least, that’s the feeling you get when you read through Jamie at Home. It is, in a way, a kinder, gentler Jamie. More: this new Jamie is all about the simpler things in life. As long as they taste good. “All I’ve done,” Oliver writes in his introduction, “is fallen in love with my garden, and with my veg patch in particular!” He goes on to write about hugging trees and being at the point in a man’s life where he becomes “one with Mother Nature.” And what do we get out of this? Well, you guessed it: a year’s worth of cooking seasonally, of thinking about where your food comes from and how it is grown and made and how it comes to market. And, of course, how best to prepare your (preferably organically and locally grown) food for optimum taste and absolute simplicity. At its heart, though, whatever we say about organics, this is a Jamie Oliver book and so the food -- and the food styling and the design in general -- are all up to a certain very high standard. But whatever else he brings, Oliver offers a very real and contagious love of food and a high level of skill in sharing his thoughts. From where I’m standing right now -- at the time in my own life when I’m enjoying cooking locally grown, organic ingredients in season -- this is Oliver’s best book thus far. High praise, indeed, as all of those I’ve seen have been just super. -- Linda L. Richards

Leith’s Simple Cookery by Viv Pidgeon and Jenny Stringer (Bloomsbury) 532 pages
Every era seems to inspire at least one timeless classic that helps home chefs build in their own kitchens the food that is popular in the wider world. Leith’s Simple Cookery brings to mind earlier classics: The Joy of Cooking and Larousse Gatronomique for starters. Simple, elegant books that are all about food, boiled as tightly down to its own essentials as the time in which it was published will allow. Leith’s Simple Cookery is a substantial, elegant volume. It has no pictures, but over 700 simple, easy-to-follow recipes for many of the things you are actually likely to want to make. The by-product of Leith’s School of Food and Wine in London, this is one of those desert island cookbooks. If you could only take one with you, you could do worse than Leith’s Simple Cookery. -- Aaron Blanton

Postcards from Portugal by Tessa Kiros (Whitecap Books) 760 pages
This is the whole package: a literary visit to a country via wonderful photos, a talented author’s carefully crafted musings and -- most important in a cookbook -- well considered recipes across the full table spectrum -- from essential basics of the cuisine to appetizers to dessert after a wonderful meal -- brilliantly photographed and shared with us in a way that is clear and easy to follow. Highlights for me: the Coffee Steak is so simple, anyone could prepare it. But the balance of flavors make for a memorable meal, especially with Batatas A Murro (squashed potatoes) on the side. I adored the Gratineed Mussels and think they may well become one of my cocktail party standards. (Elegant, relatively easy and inexpensive, even for a crowd.) And the Tuna or Sardine Pate, which I initially thought fairly bizarre, but now can’t get enough of. In all ways, Tessa Kiros’ Postcards from Portugal meets my criteria for a truly successful cookbook. -- Linda L. Richards

Turquoise: A Chef’s Travels in Turkey by Greg and Lucy Malouf (Chronicle Books) 356 pages
Turquoise is the perfect cookbook. It has everything. Perhaps more. A big, lush presentation, you can leave this one on a coffee table just to delight. Part travel memoir -- with wonderful photos -- part chef’s diary and part classic cookbook, I find it difficult to imagine the foodie that wouldn’t devour this book. In their native Australia, the Maloufs are a well known team when it comes to Middle Eastern food. That might be why they’ve gotten it really, really right here. The authors point out that Turquoise is not meant to be the final word on Turkish cooking. Those books already exist, they say. “In Turquoise we wish to share the story of our journey with you, to inspire you to learn more about this country and about the aromas, flavors and textures of its wonderful cuisine.” And they hit it perfectly. The memoir portions of the book are enchanting, well illustrated and just right. Meanwhile the recipes invite you back time and again. And, as promised, these include not only Turkish classics, but Greg’s modern interpretations for western markets and palates. -- Monica Stark

Best Books of 2008: Children’s Books

The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara with Susan McClelland (Annick Press) 216 pages
As I read The Bite of the Mango, Mariatu Kamara’s account of, at 12, suffering at the hands of soldiers in Sierra Leone, I thought often about the first time I read Anne Frank’s story of hiding in a Dutch attic during WWII. The major difference, of course, was the thing that so upset me about Frank’s tale when I was a child: the outcome was very dire. Kamara, on the other hand, survived, while certainly not unscathed, at least seemingly stronger. Like Frank’s story, though, Kamara’s journey is very real: sometimes distressingly so. Soldiers -- some of them still children themselves -- cut off both Kamara’s hands. Kamara survives, however, and makes her way ultimately to Toronto where she meets journalist Susan McClelland. It was McClelland who would help Kamara craft her experience into a compelling, unmissable book.
“What does it feel like,” asks Ishmael Beah in a touching foreword, “to be unable to wipe away your own tears of deep sadness, to stand without hands to push you up?” As Beah points out, The Bite of the Mango is a chillingly honest account of one child’s journey through tragedy, brutality and -- ultimately -- to survive and thrive in a new place. -- Sienna Powers

Born to Read by Judy Sierra, illustrated by Marc Brown (Knopf) 40 pages
Born to Read makes you smile. It’s like you just can help it. From the cadence of Judy Sierra’s signature rhymes to Marc Brown’s bold, colorful and exceedingly cheerful illustrations, every column inch of Born to Read is packed with happy goodness. It’s a great book. Young Sam just knows he was born to read and, using his special talent, he sets on a mini version of what looks a bit like a Forest Gumpian expedition. Until he meets up with book stealing baby giant Grundaloon, that is. Sam has to use his hard-won reading skills to outwit and outsmart the determined baby. Four to eight year olds must suspend belief and ride along. It shouldn’t be hard, Born to Read is a wonderful book. -- Sienna Powers

Crossing The Line by Dianne Bates (Ford Street Publishing) 215 pages
Crossing the Line tackles a serious problem, among teenage girls in particular: self-harm. The book doesn’t promise all the answers, but it does take an honest and brave look at a nasty subject, and allows us to feel sympathy for the heroine, Sophie, when she isn’t scaring us. We can understand why she does what she does, even as we shudder. When you have little or no control over your life, you may feel that this is something you can control, as anorexics do, even if the perception is wrong. It’s the sort of novel that teenage girls will find gripping and thought-provoking. Certainly, it fulfils my own criteria for a good book: a good story and characters you can care about. -- Sue Bursztynski

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum by Kate Bernheimer and Nicoletta Ceccoli (Schwartz Wade Books) 40 pages
This is one of those rare children’s picture books that just works on every level. Though Kate Bernheimer has never before written for children, her writing is well known and respected and as the editor of Fairy Tale Review, she’s certainly never out of depth with the material she’s chosen here. On the other hand, Nicoletta Ceccoli is a highly regarded illustrator of children’s books. It’s not difficult to see why. In 2006 she was awarded the silver medal by the Society of Illustrators. In 2001 she won the Anderson Prize, awarded annually to Italy’s top children’s book illustrator. Her illustrations for The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum are wonderful. This is work so luminous, it seems backlit even on the page. The details are splendid, as are the colors and the otherwordly quality you see throughout works very well with Bernheimer’s story about a girl trapped within her magical world. The book is recommended for children aged four to eight, but this is a stunning book: it’s my guess many of this edition will end up in the hands of collectors. -- Monica Stark

The Dragon in the Sock Drawer by Kate Klimo (Random House) 176 pages
I don’t remember the last time I encountered a children’s book with a premise as clever as the one Kate Klimo’s The Dragon in the Sock Drawer (Random House) is based upon. Here’s the idea: when an ordinary rock -- a thunder egg -- tucked into a 10-year-old’s sock drawer hatches into baby dragon, there are a few challenges. For one thing, it turns out that baby dragons are extremely noisy. For another, as cousins Daisy and Jesse discover, finding out what to feed an infant dragon is nearly impossible. The Dragon in the Sock Drawer is the whole package: smart, sometimes wise, thoughtful and funny. Klimo’s debut effort has the feel of an instant classic. -- Monica Stark

The Incredibly Ordinary Danny Chandelier by Laura Trunkey (Annick Press) 212 pages
Danny Chandelier is not as socially or physically impressive as his sisters. He’s not real smart or exceptionally good looking or great at sports. Or anything. His parents pack him off to boarding school: Lily Brook in Poplovastan where, the brochure tells him, “being not so good will finally be enough.” Once he arrives, however, he discovers, that not only is nothing as promised, it’s not even what it seems… if the school is even there at all. This is the first novel of a wonderfully talented new author who tells her story with skill and enchantment. With elements of magic, an engaging plotline bent on a thrillerlike pace and characters that breathe… and make horrible mistakes, The Incredibly Ordinary Danny Chandelier is a perfect debut. I can hardly wait to see what Trunkey dreams up next! -- Linda L. Richards

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (HarperCollins)
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a timely book which teases out the implications of the war on terror and comes in a year which Neal Shusterman’s Unwind was published in the United Kingdom. Both novels challenge us to ask “what type of world are we now living in?” Doctorow asks us to continue questioning the underlying logic of the post 9/11 world which has been presented to us. Marcus, a teen hacker, is caught up by the security services in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. His treatment leads him to start using technology to subvert the increasingly authoritarian environment and to link together with his friends and acquaintances. It is a call to arms but it does consider the implications of technology in a social context rather than just seeing it as a panacea. It is quite possibly his most thought-provoking novel to date. – Iain Emsley

Loathing Lola by William Kostakis (PanMacMillan) 352 pages
A laugh-out-loud novel with a serious point to make about our obsession with celebrity and the way we drool over gossip column stuff, whether it’s true or not. Nerdy Courtney Marlow sees her selection as star of television reality series Real Teens as a chance to be a good role model for the teenagers who watch the show, and to raise money for charity. Boy, has she got it wrong! Worse still, everyone wants a piece of the action, including her father’s dippy second wife, the Lola of the title. The author, a teenage boy with no sisters, somehow manages to get it absolutely right about girls. A very promising start to what is sure to be a great career. Plenty of laughs. -- Sue Bursztynski

Poison Ink by Christopher Golden (Delacorte) 279 pages
Christopher Golden has been writing for young adults for a long time and with great success. If you have to ask why, you haven’t read him: he’s terrific. And he also knows what older kids and teenagers like to read: his bibliography is likely as tall as you are. I loved Poison Ink, one of Golden’s most skillful books to date for his handling of several delicate topics. Poison Ink starts out like a straight-up peer pressure story and ends up completely ensnarled in a tale that leans towards magic realism and teen horror. So what is Poison Ink? It might be best not to try to nail it down. The book is engrossing, well-conceived and written and very tough to put down. A terrific book that should enchant those young women it’s targeted at, plus quite a few more. -- Monica Stark

Pool by Justin D’Ath (Ford Street Publishing) 188 pages
Centered around a community swimming pool in which a miracle once occurred and which has become a part of a flourishing pilgrimage industry in a small town in Victoria, Australia. Teenager Wolfgang Mulqueen, pool attendant and butterfly expert, has personal and family problems. His friendship with a blind girl and fascination with the black butterflies which have started to appear in the town are all mixed up with the miracle that turned his town into a place of pilgrimage. The mystery is solved, sort of, and Wolfgang becomes closer with his family -- more I can’t tell you without giving it away. This book was deservedly short-listed for the Young Adult section of this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. In my opinion, having read all the short-listed books, it should have won. Buy it, even if you’re not a fantasy fan. -- Sue Bursztynski

Screw Loose by Chris Wheat (Allen & Unwin) 336 pages
A very funny novel about a bunch of over-the-top Melbourne teenagers -- bossy rich girl Chelsea, who’s having to handle the idea of her mother shacking up with a man who is not only working-class vulgar, but the father of a schoolmate she doesn’t like, Matilda the dingo girl who has pinups of Inspector Rex in her room; obsessive-compulsive Zeynep, who boils her boyfriend’s shoelaces and gets arrested for suspected terrorism; streetwise Khiem who’s trying to reform from his life of crime; Georgia who is planning to come out of the closet while fleeing an arranged marriage with a nutty prince. Screw Loose is even crazier than Looselips, to which it’s a sequel, possibly even funnier. All I can tell you is that one of our students defied her bedtime curfew, reading this one under the blanket. -- Sue Bursztynski

Word of Honour by Michael Pryor (Random House Australia) 433 pages
Third in the delightful Laws of Magic series set in an alternative Edwardian England. The hero, Aubrey Fitzwilliam, has barely started university when he and his friends George and Caroline find themselves having to save the world again, this time from an old enemy who is building something nasty under the city streets and performing light opera above them. And someone is trying to steal from the museum this world’s version of the Rosetta Stone, which might just be able to help Aubrey overcome his condition (he’s technically dead). You’ll need to go back and read the others if you haven’t read them yet, but it’s well worth the effort. If you like steam punk, the Bartimaeus trilogy or even Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom stories, you’ll love this series. -- Sue Bursztynski