Good Reads & Views

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Fiction

Edgar Sawtelle is born on a Wisconsin farm in the 1950’s to a family of dog breeders. Despite being mute, he communicates effectively in sign with others as well as with the dogs and is even able to raise and train his own litter. When his paternal uncle Claude comes to stay with Edgar and his parents, however, things start to go awry. Then his father dies suddenly, and Edgar and his mother must come to terms with their loss and find a way to maintain the family farm.

A Hole in Texas: A Novel by Herman Wouk
Fiction

A playful novel about a physicist who worked on a fictional top-secret project to discover a subatomic particle in the 1980s until Congress discontinued funding; and then faces problems with his wife and the CIA when the Chinese announce in the 1990s that they have found the particle and it turns out that the physicist has had a secret romance with the woman who is the chief scientist on the Chinese team.

Winter’s Bone, A Novel by Daniel Woodrell
Fiction

Woodrell grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, and the eight novels he has written since graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop focus on some of the more violent, poverty-stricken hill people in the Ozarks. In Winter’s Bone, most of the extensive Dolly family make their living by producing and selling crank cocaine, and they use the same first-names over and over to confuse lawmen looking for a specific culprit. The heroine, 16-year-old Ree Dolly, is responsible for the care of her mentally-ill mother and two younger siblings; she faces the loss of their home when her father posts the home and other property as bail and then fails to show up for a court hearing. Different factions of the Dolly family are at war with each other, so Ree faces danger and brutality while searching for her father and trying to learn whether he is still alive.

The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe
Fiction

This is a highly suspenseful novel about a serial killer who is invited into the homes of terminally ill people to end their suffering with his deadly herbal medicines. The killer does not stop after he ends his clients’ lives as promised, though, but instead proceeds to mutilate their bodies, leaving quite a bloody scene. Det. Insp. Hazel Micallef of Port Dundas, a remote Ontario town that has gone years without a homicide, is just as determined to catch the killer as the murderer is to finish out his “calling.” Micallef has some serious problems in her own life—she was recently divorced and uses alcohol and painkillers to mask her intense back pains. Yet, she avoids confronting her own problems by delving into solving the mystery of the serial killer. This book is full of twists and will keep you guessing till the end.

Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
Fiction

Warning: if you start reading this you may not be able to stop until you finish. Set in London and the Continent during the 1930s, this is the third Maisie Dobbs novel by Winspear, a native of the United Kingdom who moved to the United States in 1990 and now lives in California. Maisie Dobbs (2003), Birds of a Feather (2004), and Pardonable Lies have all won the Agatha Award and similar awards for mysteries. A former nurse near the battlefields in France during World War I and now a “psychologist and investigator” in London, Maisie’s most recent case starts when an English lord asks her to investigate his dying wife’s belief that their aviator son, long thought dead in a crash in German-occupied France during the Great War, was really still alive. Maisie has recurrent nightmares about her own experiences in France during the war, and her investigation prompts attempts to kill her, but she follows the leads back to France and a realization that wartime espionage by Allied intelligence services was involved. But there are other unexpected twists in the story.

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
Fiction

The Sonoran Desert is far different than any place cosmopolitan poet Maggie Black has ever lived. But her mentor has left her his home there, along with his papers. And she badly wants to understand the mystery of his life, and his death. His poetry spoke of the spirits of the land as if they walked beside him. Was one there when he drowned in the desert, in a place which had seen no water in 40 years? As she searches, she gradually grows to share his love of the land and the people who live on it. But that love may not be enough.

The Story of Noichi the Blind by Chet Williamson
Fiction

This gruesome yet evocative tale is a tribute to the Japanese legends and ghost stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn at the turn of the 20th century. In fact, the tale itself is surrounded by the story of the author’s son finding the long lost manuscript of the story, and an academic interpretation of its stylistic origins and possible authorship. The woodcutter Noichi has developed a magical affinity to the forest and the creatures that dwell within. He takes in a young servant woman, Noriko, who is a fugitive after she accidentally slays a samurai. The couple falls in love, but Noriko becomes deathly ill. Noichi desperately wants to believe she will get well and becomes blind to the fact that she’s wasting away before his eyes. Noriko is also pregnant with a baby that is barely human.

Snake Agent by Liz Williams
Fiction

Earth, Heaven, and Hell now have their interactions so well organized that they have a bureaucracy to arrange the transfer of souls to the appropriate place. But when souls destined for heaven go badly astray, Detective Inspector Chen, of Earth, and his counterpart from Hell, Zhu Irzh, begin an investigation. From Singapore’s elite to the lowest denizen of Hell, their hunt uncovers a conspiracy of people and demons who are making a fortune sending innocents to Hell. And a fortune can buy a lot of influence—anywhere.

A Garden in Paris by Stephanie Grace Whitson
Fiction

Mary Kathleen Davis finds the framed motto in the back of a dusty antique shop, and it haunts her. After 26 years as the trophy wife of a powerful man, Mary is a widow with no sense of identity. She finds herself wondering "what might have been," and torments herself with guilt over her treatment of an old flame. She has the notion that if she can return to Paris with her increasingly distant daughter, perhaps she’ll be able to reconcile with the past and find a new future. The trip to Paris will change everything for these two women, in ways neither could imagine.

Dancing with Einstein: A Novel by Kane Wenner
Fiction

A troubled woman with nightmares of nuclear holocaust seeks peace with the help of four psychoanalysts and a study of her father’s diary with its accounts of how he helped develop the atomic bomb and his friendship with Einstein, reminding her of her own encounters with Einstein as a child.