At some point I got into the habit of using my Amazon wish list as a repository for book recommendations. I jot down the names of the some of the things on it and take the list when I go to the library. It's a handy way to keep track of books, although I always forget to note where I got a book recommendation from -- a friend? NY Times Book Review section? on-line? This month, I started out with Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd, which was on my list although I can' t remember who recommended it to me. This book aspires to be a Hitchcock-like tale about an American man visiting London for an interview. Adam gets pulled into a conspiracy by stumbling onto a murder scene. Of course, Adam's presence at the scene of a freshly-murdered corpse makes him the prime suspect in the police's eyes, and he has to go off the grid while trying to figure out what is really going on. This was an entertaining, quick read; the biggest drawback was that the initial chapters where Adam gets pulled into the murder weren't very believable, and having never suspended my disbelief, I wasn't able to really get into the book as much as I would have liked.
Next I went on a binge of reading the latest books from a handful of writers whose work I've enjoyed in the past, starting out with One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming. The main characters in this series are Clare Fergusson, who is a very unconventional Episcopal priest, and Russ Van Alstyne, the sheriff of a small town in the Catskills. Through several earlier books, we've seen Clare and Russ solve various murder mysteries while fighting their intense feelings for each other. This book begins as Clare returns from service in the Iraq War. I liked the way that the book combines an interesting whodunit with a thoughtful look at the wrenching effect wartime service takes on American soldiers returning from the Middle East.
The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell. Mankell has said that this is the last Kurt Wallender novel, and after reading it, I believe him. Wallender is a Swedish police inspector, a sad soul trying to do his best in a bleak job.
In his last book, Wallender greets his first grandchild while stepping in unofficially to help track down the father of his daughter's baby. Hakan von Enke is a retired naval officer who goes missing while out on his evening walk. Wallender's daughter asks her father to help find von Enke. A short time later, von Enke's wife goes missing. Wallender struggles with issues of his own throughout, facing his own mortality, worrying about episodes of memory loss, meditating on his long career as a detective. While there was a lot of sadness in this book, I enjoyed it as a fitting sendoff for Wallender: brooding, dark, thoughtful, with a good mystery at its core.The Inspector and Silence
by Hakan Nesser may or may not be the last case of Inspector Van Veeteren, another Scandinavian police inspector. In the middle of summer, an anonymous phone call claims that a teenager has gone missing from a religious camp in the countryside. But everyone at the camp denies that anyone is missing. Van Veeteren steps in, and soon a girl's body is discovered in the woods near the camp. Van Veeteren must deal with a strange fringe religion and its followers, a media circus and his own desire to retire after lengthy service in the police force. Nesser's style is much more cerebral than action-driven, but I've enjoyed this series.Blue Lightning
by Ann Cleves, is the last of her "Shetland quartet," in which Jimmy Perez, living on a remote island off the coast of northern England, brings his fiancee Fran home to the island of Fair Isle to meet his parents. While they are visiting, a prominent bird expert is brutally murdered. Jimmy -- who is a police inspector himself -- is on the scene and takes charge of the case until another crime team from the mainland can arrive. In the meantime, a second murder takes place. Jimmy feels growing discomfort investigating the lives of the people in his hometown -- including his parents. This book has a plot twist that will not please all readers, but I won't ruin it for you by saying any more.Revelation by C. J. Sansom is another installment in the series set in Tudor England. Matthew Shardlake is a hunchback lawyer living in King Henry VIII's London. I really like this series, partly because it's such a fascinating time period but also because the series is really well-written.
This book takes place during the later years of Henry VIII's reign, when he is seeking to make Catherine Parr his sixth wife. Shardlake, who wishes to stay out of royal intrigue, is pulled in to the fringes of court life by Parr when she asks him to look into the case of a young man who has been held in Bedlam, the London prison in which mentally ill persons were held. At the same time, Shardlake vows to find the murderer of his dear friend and fellow barrister.
The Fourth Man
by K.O. Dahl continues my Scandinavian noir streak. In this Norwegian thriller, a police detective saves a woman from being shot in an armed robbery. Their paths cross again and they begin an affair. The detective later learns the woman is the sister of a gang member, creating a nasty conflict of interest for him. The plot takes off as the detective becomes the prime suspect in a series of murders and hhe as to unravel the murders and the motivations of the woman who has seduced him. This was a quick, entertaining read, although not as good as some of the other Scandinavian writers I've read.The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths enticed me by its archaeological theme. Ruth Galloway is a professor who specializes in archaelogy, living near a desolate salt marsh in Norfolk. A police inspector asks for her help when a body is found in the marsh. The inspector thinks he's discovered the remains of a girl who went missing several years ago, but Ruth dates the remains as two thousand years old. When another child goes missing, Ruth helps the inspector in his quest to save the child's life, in part by helping him decipher some bizarre anonymous letters that he receives. More plot than character development, but a diverting enough mystery.
The Fates Will Find Their Way
by Hannah Pittard. I received a free copy of this short novel from the Amazon Vine program. The book is a little hard to summarize: it tells the story of a missing sixteen-year-old girl, Nora, but it does so from an unusual perspective. The book is told by a group of boys who were her neighborhood friends -- as a group, not as individual and identified voices. It's amazing that it works so well. The book examines the effects of Nora's disappearance on the boys -- how they try to deal with the sense of loss and ambiguity surrounding her abrupt departure from their lives -- but it also contains the boys' reflections on growing up, moving on, and living in the moment. It's the kind of book you can read in one sitting and it doesn't end with a neat, tied-up-in-a-bow resolution.
by Ann Cleeves, which is the third installment in a series of mysteries set in the Shetland Islands. (Why, yes, I did pick up the first one because I wanted to learn more about the place that gave us such great knitting. We already know I'm a huge knitting dork, right?) Jimmy Perez is the lead detective and he is called to investigate a possibly-suspicious death: an old woman is found dead in her yard, having been shot at night. It looks like her neighbor/grandson accidentally shot Mina Wilson when out hunting that night, but Perez isn't quite sure that it was an accident. When a visiting grad student working on an archeological dig is found dead near Wilson's house, Perez has to figure out whether the deaths are related and who is/are responsible. A good solid mystery (I didn't figure out who did it), an interesting part of the world, snappy writing.
by Arnaldur Indridason, was another one that Anmiryam lent me (thanks!!) so fear not, the brooding Scandinavian detectives are back this month. Inspector Erlandur is called out to investigate the stabbing of a boy, the dark-skinned son of a Thai immigrant. The death of the boy raises all sorts of questions about immigration, xenophobia, and racial prejudice -- along with the usual heartbreak and suspicion that descend upon the families and friends of murder victims. Another good police procedural.
by Charles Todd. I like the Ian Rutledge series, but I have to say that by now, the conceit which once seemed original and even daring is now starting to seem annoying. Rutledge is a veteran of the brutal trench warfare of WWI, and his post-traumatic stress disorder (WWI was when the phrase "shell shock" came into wide usage) takes the form of a voice in his head -- the Scot-accented voice of a dead soldier who served with Rutledge and whose death causes Rutledge on-going guilt and grief. Rutledge goes through his everyday life as a Scotland Yard inspector with the voice of this young Scot ringing in his ears, talking to him as clearly as someone in the room (although no one but Rutledge can hear him.) Rutledge thus tries to cope with his PTSD and hide the existence of the voice in his head from those around him, while solving tricky murder mysteries. After about ten books, though, I'm starting to find the voice in Rutledge's head more irritating and distracting than anything else, even though Todd is an excellent writer.
by Dave Cullen. My pal 
by Alan Bradley. This was the perfect book to round out the reading year. Bradley's book won the Dagger award for best first mystery novel. The main character is Flavia DeLuce, an eleven-year-old girl living in her family's dilapidated manor house in the British country in the early 1950s. Flavia is obsessed with chemistry, has two older sisters who annoy her, and longs for the attention of her eccentric but distant father. When a murdered man is found in the backyard, and her father is the prime suspect, Flavia decides to exonerate her dad by finding the real murderer.
by Michael Greenberg. Greenberg is a free-lance writer who saw his fifteen-year-old daughter experience a psychotic break one summer in the 90s. With her permission, he wrote a memoir describing the experience from his perspective. The book is at its most powerful in describing Greenberg's shock and anguish at watching his beloved daughter behave in inexplicable ways, his fear that she'll never once again be the daughter he knew and loved, and his concerns that the treatments given to her are as bad as the disease.
by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is a book written for middle schoolers that was recommended for Elvis by a neighbor who is a teacher. Elvis didn't get into it (I think he gave up too soon) but I thought it was interesting and finished it myself. The book is a fictionalized account of a fifteen-year-old girl named Mattie living in Philadelphia in 1793. As the book opens, a yellow fever epidemic (which actually happened) has begun to descend upon the city; given the rudimentary treatments available at the time, and the lack of understanding about what causes the disease, the death rate was high. Mattie watches as the epidemic devastates the city and people she loves. I like the way that the book seamlessly integrates historical detail with an exciting first-person story. If you've got a middle-school-aged kid interested in science or history, they might like this one. Or maybe you'd enjoy it yourself!
by Sarah Waters. 
by Sarah Vowell. I've read and liked a lot of Sarah Vowell books and although this one has some good points, it was definitely not my favorite. Vowell is a contributor to 
by Zadie Smith. This is a book I've been meaning to read ever since it got shortlisted for the Booker prize a few years ago. It's a thick book, and even though I finished it about 2 weeks ago, I'm still not quite sure what I thought of it.
, by Yrsa Sigurdadottir, was the sequel to 
by Terry Cheney, was recommended by a blog-reader (Hyphenated Carol, maybe?) and I found it to be a quick and fascinating read. The author is a former entertainment lawyer who is bipolar, and she has written a memoir discussing her life and how being bipolar has affected it. What I found especially compelling were Cheney's vivid descriptions of what it is like to be manic (well, as she experiences it; apparently, different people experience different flavors of mania) and the crippling depressions that followed her manic episodes. She also describes the toll that her disease has taken on her personal life -- her job, relationships, friendships. If you're bipolar or know someone who is, you might want to take a look.
by Ake Edwardson. This was another (all together now) brooding Scandinavian mystery -- although a new series for me. The protagonist is Erik Winter, Sweden's youngest chief inspector, mulling over the impending birth of his first child. He's called in to solve a creepy double murder in which an extremely violence-laden form of heavy metal music plays a role. The book seemed a bit slow and a bit long to me, although it wasn't a bad read by any means. This was one of those books that may have suffered simply because I read it stretched out over a longer-than-usual period of time (and I went to Rhinebeck in the middle of it, which totally discombobulated me).
by Ruth Rendell. Rendell's debut novel isn't as complex or as polished as her later ones are, but it's still damn good. A classic English mystery, set in the countryside, in which a limited number of suspects are winnowed down until the climatic scene, in which the clever inspector (in this case, Reg Wexford) reveals how it was done, as the suspect confesses. I suspect the twist in the ending was a bit more unexpected and controversial when this book was first published (1964ish) but still a good read.
by Nicole Dickson. I received a review copy of this book which falls into the category I think of as "knit lit" -- works of fiction intended to appeal to knitters, or at least female knitters of a certain age, in which knitting plays a role in plot or character development. I tend not to read these books, partly because I find myself irritated whenever the books get something wrong about knitting but mostly because I tend to look for books that take me out of my daily life rather than remind me of it.
by Matthew Hall. This book was recommended by a commenter during one of my last book reports -- and I did enjoy it. The main characters are Sharon, a psych-ward nurse who is recovering from the death of her husband and son in a car accident, and Bill, a patient in her ward who strikes Sharon as unusually intelligent, albeit seriously disturbed. The relationship between Bill and Sharon is complex; as it turns out, Bill is a brilliant guy who uses a sort of Robin-Hood-inspired terrorism to make New York better for everyday people, and has pretended to be schizophrenic to avoid being arrested for breaking and entering. Sharon feels a connection to Bill, although she is bothered by the violent means he uses to accomplish his ends, and doesn't know where his sanity ends and his underlying madness begins. When Bill hatches a complex but well-meaning scheme to finance a large-scale community development center, at the expense of a Donald-Trump-like real estate mogul, Sharon decides to use her instinctive rapport with Bill to help the FBI stop him. It's a fairly quick read, with a fast-moving plot, and an unusual spin on the typical thriller.
by Karin Fossum. Scandinavian police inspectors, part II: This one's set in Norway, and thoroughly creeped me out, not because it was graphic or salacious, but because it was thoughtful and nuanced. The crime to be solved is the murder and molestation of a young boy. Fossum shows how the crime has a ripple effect in the small community where the boy lived -- the effect on the victim's teacher and classmates, his mother's attempts to cope, even the way that discovering the body alters the status quo for the married couple who happened across the corpse while hiking. Inspector Sejer must also contend with the disappearance of a second boy, while examining his own ideas about ped0philia. (Believe me, this book does not defend or glamorize ped0philia, I'd have no patience for that, but it does talk about how difficult it is to discover what "makes" someone into a ped0phile and how hard it is for convicted offenders to avoid recidivism.)
by Valerie Laken. I read a review of this book in the NY Times Book Review, and I was a bit intrigued since it was set in Ann Arbor, where I went to school for a few years. It's the story of a couple, Kate and Stuart, who buy a somewhat dilapidated old house. Kate becomes fascinated -- obsessed? -- with renovating the house and plunges into the intense work of gutting the house. Stuart is ambivalent about the house, and as it turns out, ambivalent about being an adult. When Stuart is laid off, their marriage fractures. At the same time, Kate starts to learn more about the history of the house; it turns out that twenty years ago, someone was killed there. I thought that Laken did a great job of making the house itself a kind of character in the book, winding Kate and Stuart's story -- and the story of Walker, who lived in the house at the time of the killing -- around it. Some of the reviews describe this as a ghost story, but I think it's more a story about how houses can develop a kind of atmosphere and character of their own that seems to transcend the people living in them.
by Johan Theorin. Yes, another brooding Scandinavian mystery.... am I in a brooding Scandinavian mystery rut? But they're just so good -- and this one is no exception. The main character is Julia Davidsson, whose young son Jens went missing in 1972. Twenty years of grief and uncertainty have taken their toll on Julia. One day she gets a call from her elderly father, who has just received a small sandal in the mail. The sandal looks just like the ones Jens was wearing when he disappeared. Julia heads north, to a rural Swedish island to see the shoe; her father tells her that together, they'll ask around and see if they can learn anything about Jens' fate. The book slowly but inexorably leads to an exciting finish (I thought I knew where it was going but I was wrong), and Theorem mixes flashbacks from the past -- the post-war years through 1972 -- with the action to keep things interesting.
by Rennie Airth. Airth based this post-World-War-I era novel on his late uncle's wartime scrapbook. If you like the Charles Todd books about Ian Rutledge, you'll want to give this one a try. Like the Todd books, the main character is a WWI vet who is haunted by what he experienced during the war. But John Madden is a bit more down-to-earth and less emotionally traumatized than Todd's hero. Madden is sent to figure out who is behind the gruesome murder of a family in the Surrey countryside, and comes to the conclusion that the murderer has done this before. The way that Madden analyzes and tracks a serial killer before the development of modern forensics and even forensic psychology is fascinating.
by Deanna Raybourn, is the third book in the Lady Julia Grey series, and was definitely a lighter -- though still suspenseful -- read. Set in Victorian England, we see Lady Julia off on a trip to wild and remote Yorkshire, ostensibly to help Nicholas Brisbane, the mysterious man she loves, settle into an old manor home. Her wacky sister accompanies her, as chaperone -- and comic relief. The story features suitably wild moors, the mysterious family whose ancestors built the manor house, a gypsy fortuneteller, and all sorts of romantic drama. Thoroughly enjoyable and perfect for the beach.
by Rhys Bowen. Another in the frothy, beach-reading vein, not as well-written as the Raybourne series, but still enjoyable. The protagonist is Georgie, an English lady 38th in line to the British throne. She's got no money and no job, and her dopey brother, who owns the family estate in Scotland, doesn't have any cash to spare. Georgie doesn't want to get married for convenience's sake, so she heads off to London to try to make her fortune. She stays in the shuttered family home in a posh neighborhood, but has no way to support herself. So she starts a maid service for noblewomen who need their city homes aired out when they return to the city from their country estates. When Georgie returns home one day, she is horrified to find a dead body in the bathtub, and her brother is the prime suspect. Hijinks ensue as George tries to solve the murder and clear her brother's name... and will she hook up with the dashing but impoverished Irish lord she keeps running into?
by Peter Abrahams, was a thriller in which a cop-turned-private-investigator finds himself in the hospital with brain cancer. The cancer surgery has caused him to loses pieces of his memory -- including any recall of the weekend before he was admitted to the hospital. He tries to reconstruct the missing portion of his memory, and solve the missing persons case he was working on, although he isn't quite sure what memories are real or what they mean. This was a quick and fairly easy read, and although I didn't think it was terribly hard to figure out where the plot was going, it was a decent read -- if a bit Lifetime-tv-movie-ish.
by Steig Larsson was the follow-up in a trilogy of thrillers by the late Swedish journalist Steig Larsson. I liked this installment even better than the first (which I thought took a long time to get going). This book focuses more on Lizbeth Salander, the troubled but kick-ass character who played such an important role in the previous book. Salander -- an anti-establishment computer hacker -- is suspected of several murders and needs to clear her name, by conventional or unconventional methods. Suspenseful and exciting.
by John Harvey. I stumbled across a list of the best detective novels of all time, and the series of Charlie Resnick novels by John Harvey, were mentioned in it. This is a book featuring a different detective, Frank Elder, who has retired from the police force and moved to an isolated cottage on the Cornish coast. Elder is haunted by the unsolved disappearance of a girl fourteen years ago, and when the prime suspect in her death is released from prison (after being convicted of a similar crime), Elder finds himself again obsessed with solving the 14-year-old crime. A solid detective story with a suspenseful ending.
by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, is the latest in my Scandinavian mystery binge. Set in Iceland, the main character is a thirty-something lawyer retained to look into the murder of a grad student by the students' parents, who believe the police's prime suspect isn't the real killer. The grad student was fascinated by historical witchcraft, torture, unusual body piercings and drugs, so the search to uncover what really happened takes many a dark and twisting path. Although the murder victim was nasty and his interests a bit gruesome for my tastes, I did enjoy reading this book.
and 
by Deanna Raybourn. Talk about beach reading: this is perfect summertime reading, set in Victorian England. The protagonist is Lady Julia Grey, one of 9 children of an English nobleman. In the first book, Lady Julia's husband is killed. Although she is at first inclined to believe that he died of a congenital health problem that runs in his family, she subsequently discovers that he was murdered. She enlists the help of the dashing Nicholas Brisbane to help solve her husband's murder. In the sequel, Lady Julia has just finished an extended stay in Italy with two brothers, when she and her brothers are recalled to their family's ancestral home for Christmas. The vicar's curate is found murdered in the chapel, and Lady Julia-- and the dashing Nicholas Brisbane, natch -- must solve yet another mystery. I read these while we were in Cape May, and really enjoyed them. They were sufficiently frothy to be fun (silk dresses! English manor houses! romantic tension!) yet the mysteries were well-written enough to engage my interest.
by John Harwood. This book felt very much like it had been written 125 years ago (in a good way). You've got your family secrets, old crumbling house in the country, a woman unsure of the truth about her parentage, mysterious bequests from distant relatives, and seances/hypnotism. A cracking good read.
by Erin Hart, had an interesting premise: an Irish man finds a woman's remains while cutting peat in the bogs near his home. It turns out she's been preserved in the peat for hundreds of years. Archeologists are called in to preserve and examine the remains, and they end up trying to figure out what happened to the woman -- and what happened to another local woman who disappeared much more recently. I don't want to spoil the end, but this one started out promising and ended up rather contrived. A conveniently-found document at the end conveniently fills in the missing blanks -- boo. Not awful, but room for improvement.
by Kate Summerscale, is a nonfiction book that got good reviews. It examines the beginnings of the use of specialized detectives by the British police, set against the backdrop of a curious murder case of the mid 19th century. I enjoyed the way that Summerscale connected up the history of British detectives at Scotland Yard and the popular literature of the day, which reflected changing attitudes about the police and the use of specialized murder detectives.
by Gillian Flynn. I read Flynn's second novel a few months ago and thought it was a good mystery/thriller, so I went back to find her first. Both novels feature a deeply-flawed narrator with major family baggage; in this case, Camille is a just-barely-recovered cutter, who copes with the unresolved issues of her messed-up childhood by carving words in her skin with the titular sharp objects. She's managed to escape the small Missouri town in which she was raised and is a reporter for a second-rate Chicago newspaper. As the novel begins, her editor sends her back to her hometown to cover the story of a girl's disappearance, possibly linked to the year-old murder of another girl. The mystery of the girls' disappearances is unraveled against the backdrop of Camille's attempt to unravel and understand her family's dysfunction. Good and suspenseful, with some funny one-liners mixed in the text.
by Barbara Vine. Barbara Vine is the pen name of British mystery writer Ruth Rendell, who is one of the most prolific yet consistently good mystery/thriller writers out there. The novels she writes as Ruth Rendell are more traditional mysteries, usually featuring an English police inspector named Wexford. The books she writes Barbara Vine tend to be stand-alone, and I think are a bit creepier. What is remarkable to me is the way Vine/Rendell manages to write suspenseful and creepy thrillers without very much blood and guts. Instead she has a way of getting into the head of characters who seem very normal on the outside; she then peels away the outer, normal layers to show you the twisted psyche inside, or in some cases, shows how a character flaw or twist of fate turns a law-abiding citizen into a criminal. The Birthday Present concerns a handsome Member of Parliament who at the beginning of the book is guilty of only adultery. But by the end of the novel, his life is in ruins.
by Cornelia Read. I read Read's first Madeline Dare mystery last year, and liked it, so when I found the sequel at the library, I grabbed it. Dare is a recovering debutante who, in this book, finds herself teaching troubled high school students at a residential school led by a controversial, charismatic leader. When two students die after drinking poisoned punch at a school party, Dare jumps right in to find justice for them.
by Arianna Franklin -- and I really enjoyed it. I had to skim some of the more squeamish scenes, but a very engrossing mystery set in 12th century Cambridge. I liked the historical tie-ins, the good characterization and the twist at the end.
by C.S. Harris is the first in a series of novels set in Regency England. A nobleman is accused of murdering an actress and has to find the real killer to clear his name. Okay, not great.
by Charles Todd is the latest in a series of mysteries written by a mother-and-son writing team. Their protagonist, Ian Rutledge, is a veteran of World War I who carries lingering emotional scars from his experiences in the trenches. He struggles with his own ghosts, while trying to solve this convoluted mystery of a prominent investment adviser found murdered and strung up at his country home. This one wasn't as good as some of the previous ones, but still well done.
by Brunonia Barry. This is one of only a few non-mystery/thrillers I read. When the narrator tells you on the very first page that she's a big fat liar, you kind of expect there to be some plot twists, but I sure didn't expect the gigantic and convoluted twist that came at the end. The book isn't about lace knitting, but what sounds like a form of tatting from the colonial era, and the lace is really secondary to the characters and what happens to them. The book is set in modern-day Salem, Massachusetts, and the author's description of how the town has capitalized on its connection with witchcraft is interesting and amusing.
by Anne Perry was recommended by a GKIYH reader. I read this when I was recovering from some virus, and I can't tell if it was the fact that I wasn't feeling as clear-headed as usual or if it just wasn't my cup o' tea. It wasn't awful, but it seemed very slow, with way too much conversation and not a lot of action.
by Arianna Franklin is the sequel to 
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, was one I started -- a non-mystery even -- and just couldn't get into, so I abandoned it. I don't know if you've ever heard people say that you should subtract your age from 100, and the number you get is the number of pages you should read in a book before giving up on it. I'm 44, so I'm supposed to give a book 56 pages before bailing, but I can tell you I didn't get that far in this one (more like 20 or 25). The book is set in post-WWII England, and is written in the form of a series of letters from an author to various people in her life. I found it just too cutesy-poo and self-conscious to get into it, so I gave it up. 
