weather that calls one to take a book out to the shade of ye olde favorite reading tree. But the best part of summer reading can be in the anticipation. And this year I’m anticipating many pleasurable hours in the company of a carefully chosen stack.• I began my summer reading with a book I’d squirreled away for a delicious treat. Since Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn (Bond Street Books) was published in 2006, I knew no one would expect me to write about it. That seemed reason enough for it to be the book I brought out to the tree when the skies cleared enough to invite a few well-spent outdoor hours. I’d heard enough about One Good Turn that I figured I’d enjoy it, but I didn’t plan on being staggered, and I am. One Good Turn follows up Case Histories, the novel that introduced former detective Jackson Brodie, now a retired millionaire living a life of leisure in France. In One Good Turn he meets up with sometime girlfriend Julia, an actress, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and ends up on the side of the law he’s less familiar with. One Good Turn is brilliant. The writing here is sharp and vivid, often moving and occasionally even humorous in a way that provokes thought. One Good Turn is not the sort of book that wants a qualifier--if you like this, then you’ll enjoy that. If you like to read any sort of mystery and enjoy a tightly written and tautly plotted book, you won’t go wrong with One Good Turn.
• I’ve been enjoying M.J. Rose’s novels ever since Lip Service, her self-published debut, came out back in 1998. In the years since, Rose’s writing has grown ever stronger--and, needless to say, she’s no longer self-published--and she’s drawn a large readership for her Butterfield Institute stories featuring sex therapist Morgan Snow. It seems appropriate to me that, a decade after reading that first engagingly crafted novel, Rose has taken a very different path with her latest work, The Reincarnationist (Mira Books). Here we have ancient tombs bearing powerful secrets and, as the title suggests, the theme of reincarnation pulling us through time to solve a mystery centuries old. The Reincarnationist will be published this coming September, but I feel very lucky to have a big, fat advance reading copy sitting on my desk. It’s scheduled for some under-the-tree time with me in the very near future.
• Is everyone on the planet looking forward to getting their meaty paws into Queenpin (Simon & Schuster)? Certainly most of Megan Abbott’s fellow Rap Sheeters have been. But it’s not just our fraternity (and there are too many boys writing around here for me to be tempted to call it a sorority) that makes this so. With her Anthony-, Barry-, and Edgar-nominated debut novel, Die A Little (2005),
Abbott proved herself to be a deeply talented writer with the ability to not only tell a story, but to make it live and breathe. And, seriously, could anyone with even the smallest affection for noir resist those crackling covers?• Pandemic, Dan Kalla’s 2005 debut novel, made something we all fear seem all too possible, all too likely. It had me avoiding inhaling in public places for weeks. Kalla, himself an emergency-room physician, has a knack for taking the everyday and spinning it into something too big to think about, while also bringing it all to street level. A neat trick. I guess Kalla is a thriller writer’s writer of thrillers. The pages in his books can’t turn fast enough and you end up feeling less safe in your world. Booklist has said that Kalla’s latest novel, Blood Lies (Forge), is the best of this author’s novels to date, “fast paced and smartly written.” I can hardly wait.
• I can’t think of anyone on the planet with a better résumé for writing crime novels than Alafair Burke. In the first place (and I wonder if she gets tired of people mentioning this), she is the daughter of crime-fiction superstar James Lee Burke. In the second, she is a former deputy district attorney and now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School in Hempstead, New York. The short scoop: Burke knows these streets, she knows her stuff. In her upcoming fourth novel, Dead Connection (Henry Holt), Burke brings us a new heroine, New York City police detective Ellie Hatcher. I’m expecting authenticity and I’m expecting sharp. I can’t imagine that Burke would deliver anything less.
• And speaking of James Lee Burke, I’m looking forward to the master’s Tin Roof Blowdown (Simon & Schuster). It’s the end of summer 2005 and Hurricane Katrina has left Detective Dave Robicheaux’s Iberia Parrish in tatters. Clearly, Robicheaux has his hands full. I love that father and daughter have major works of crime fiction reaching bookstores in the same month--July. And, from a purely personal perspective, I love that they are both giving me such great reading to anticipate.
• Although Dick Lochte’s Croaked! (Five Star) was published in April, it’s taken a while for it to cross my desk. Lochte is one of those T-Bone Burnett-style writers that everyone knows about, but who, at the same time, doesn’t seem terribly well known. At one time or another he’s been nominated for just about everything, and his 1985 novel, Sleeping Dog, won the Nero Wolfe Award. Croaked! will be the
first of Lochte’s novel that I’ve read. I’m looking forward to it. It’s historical--Los Angeles in the 1960s--and the action takes place around a men’s magazine called Ogle.• Let’s face it: being editor of one of the most powerful women’s magazines in the solar system will probably help get you a book contract. However, even all that power will not keep said contracts coming if the books in question aren’t both accomplished and infectious. Five novels into her series featuring gossip columnist Bailey Weggins, you’ve gotta figure that Kate White is doing something right. For my part, I’ll say it in public: I’ve enjoyed all of this author’s novels to date. White, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan) can really write. Her novels are extremely engaging. They have verve and style and wit. Her latest work featuring gossip columnist Weggins is called Lethally Blond (Warner), and the cover makes me think it will be just the thing to share some tree time with this summer.
READ MORE: Stephen Miller’s Summer 2007 Reading Picks; J. Kingston Pierce’s Summer 2007 Picks; Anthony Rainone’s Summer 2007 Reading Picks.
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