July 2009
July 2009
Amateur Barbarians by Robert Cohen – Teddy Hastings is more of a doer than a thinker, a man who measures his life by what he has built: a successful career as a middle school principal, a solid marriage, two lovely if distant daughters. But once he hits fifty, in the shadow of his younger brother’s death and a health scare of his own, Teddy feels the gravitational pull of his mortality and realizes he is no longer quite so in the middle, no longer building a life but maintaining one. He yearns for delivery and transcendence, for a hint of the sublime, and is determined to find it. What he gets instead is the “intrusion of the irrational in his affairs.” (July 2009) 
A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias – Told from a husband’s point of view, with revelartory and sometimes disarming candor; alternating between the first weeks of their acquaintance (comic and romantic misadventure) and the bittersweet final weeks. Yglesias first novel in thirteen years. (July 2009)
Ravens by George Dawes Green – When Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko pull up at a convenience store off I-95 in Georgia, their only thought is to fix a leaky tire and be on their way again to Florida-away from their dull Ohio tech-support jobs. But this happens to be the store from which a $318,000,000 million dollar Jackpot ticket has just been sold — and when a pretty clerk accidentally reveals to Shaw the identity of the winning family, he hatches a ferociously audacious scheme. (July 2009)
Killer Summer by Ridley Pearson – In this third installment of Pearson’s Sun Valley series, Killer Summer takes us back to the high-stakes world of the wealthy and politically connected — just in time for the area’s 17th Annual Wine Auction. The world’s most elite wine connoisseurs have descended on Sun Valley to taste and bid on the world’s best wines, including three bottles which are said to have been a gift from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams.(July 2009)
Dead Men’s Boots by Mike Carey – You might think that helping a friend’s widow to stop a lawyer from stealing her husband’s corpse would be the strangest thing on your To Do list. But life is rarely that simple for Felix Castor. A brutal murder in King’s Cross bears all the hallmarks of a long-dead American serial killer, and it takes more good sense than Castor possesses not to get involved. He’s also fighting a legal battle over the body – if not the soul – of his possessed friend, Rafi, and can’t shake the feeling that his three problems might be related. With the help of the succubus Juliet and paranoid zombie data-fence Nicky Heath, Castor just might have a chance of fitting the pieces together before someone drops him down a lift shaft or rips his throat out. (July 2009) 
Get Real by Donald E. Westlake - Being caught red-handed is inevitable in Dortmunder’s next production, when a TV producer convinces this thief and his merry gang to do a reality show that captures their next score. The producer guarantees to find a way to keep the show from being used in evidence against them. They’re dubious, but the pay is good, so they take him up on his offer. (July 2009)
Cherry Bomb by J.A. Konrath – Jack Daniels series (July 2009) 
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy – Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. (July 2009)
Rain Gods by James Lee Burke – Second novel to feature Hackberry Holland, Texas Sheriff. First book was published in 1971 and will be reprinted early 2010. (July 2009)
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott – In October 1931, a station agent found two large trunks abandoned in Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. What he found inside ignited one of the most scandalous tabloid sensations of the decade.Inspired by this notorious true crime, Edgar®-winning author Megan Abbott’s novel Bury Me Deep is the story of Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband. (July 2009)
The Blue Notebook by James A Levine – An unforgettable, deeply affecting tribute to the powers of imagination and the resilience of childhood, The Blue Notebook tells the story of Batuk, a precocious 15-year-old girl from rural India who was sold into sexual slavery by her father when she was nine. The novel is powerfully told in Batuk’s voice, through the words she writes in her journal, where she finds hope and beauty in the bleakest circumstances. (July 2009)
The Devil’s Company by David Liss – A superb new historical thriller set in the splendor and squalor of eighteenth-century London. In Benjamin Weaver, David Liss has created one of fiction’s most enthralling characters. (July 2009)
The Idea of Love by Louis Dean РWhen a cluster of expatriate families converges on Provence, it seems as if sunshine, good wine, and an endless round of parties will make for a better life. Then Richard, a pharmaceutical salesman married to sexy Val̩rie, lands a plum assignment: introducing antidepressants into Africa, virgin territory for the drug industry and for the womanizing he has honed to a science. (July 2009)
The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder by Rebeccas Wells - From the Ya-Yas author. (July 2009)
Old Girlfriends: Stories by David Updike – As you would expect from the name, this collection of stories, which skillfully portray the multi-faceted nature of love and of the heart, iswritten by John Updike’s son. (July 2009)
Fire and Ice: A Brady/Beaumont Novel by J.A. Jance – (July 2009)Â
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant – The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God’s protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa Caterina’s new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core. (July 2009)
One Response
I just finished a great book by a new author and could not find your book review. “A World I Never Made” by James Lepore was superb! I picked it up at Barnes and Noble in Nashua NH and was riveted…Please check it out…
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