Bluegrass: A true story of murder in Kentucky (2009) by William Van Meter

Thanks to Barnes and Noble Internet Site for this overview.

By the lights of absolutely everyone who ever knew her, Katie Autry never harmed a hair on a dog's head.

She came from a tiny village in Kentucky. The State moved her as a child into a foster home in a town so small it had one stoplight. New to her own beauty and a little awkward, Katie had the biggest smile on her high school cheerleading squad. In September 2002, she matriculated as a freshman at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. She majored in the dental program, but as it was for many college students her age, partying was of equal priority. She worked days at the smoothie shop, nights at the local strip club, and fell in love with a football player who wouldn't date her.

Five feet two in heels and without a bad word to say about anyone, Katie Autry was sweet, kind, and utterly naïve. She was making the clumsy strides of a newborn colt, discovering what the world was like and learning to be her own person. And on the morning of May 4, 2003, Katie Autry was raped, stabbed, sprayed with hairspray, and set on fire in her own dormitory room.

In telling the true story of this shocking crime, Bluegrass describes the devastation of not one but three families. Two young men, whose lives seem preordained to intertwine, are jailed for the crime: DNA evidence places Stephen Soules, an unemployed, mixed-race high school dropout, atthe scene, and Lucas Goodrum, a twenty-one-year-old pot dealer with an ex-wife, a girlfriend still in high school, and an inauspicious history of domestic abuse, is held by an ever-changing confession. The friends of the suspects and the foster and birth families of the victim form complex and warring social nets that are cast across town. And a small southern community, populated by eccentrics of every socioeconomic class, from dirt-poor to millionaire, responds to the horror. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this tale is redolent with atmosphere, dark tension, and lush landscapes.

With the keen eye of a talented young journalist returning to his southern roots, Van Meter paints a vivid portrait of the town, the characters who fill it, and the simmering class conflicts that made an injustice like this not only possible, but inevitable.

Book of secrets (2013) by Elizabeth Joy Arnold

This thoughtful review has been copied and pasted from an excellent blog, "That's What She Read" by Michelle.  Thank you Michelle for your analysis and sharing. 22/10/14

“Tending to their small bookstore while trying to reach Nate, Chloe stumbles upon a notebook tucked inside his antique copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Written in a code that Nate and his sisters created as kids, the pages contain long-buried secrets from her and Nate’s past, and clues to why he went back to Redbridge after all these years. As Chloe struggles to decipher the notebook’s hidden messages, she revisits the seminal moments of their youth: the day she met the enigmatic Sinclair children, their increasingly dangerous games a magical escape from their troubled childhoods; the first time Nate kissed her, camped out on the beach like Robinson Crusoe; the elaborate plan she and Nate devised, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, to break away from his oppressive father, and how the thwarted attempt upended their lives forever. As the reason for Nate’s absence comes to light, the truth will shatter everything Chloe knows—about her husband, his family, and herself.”

Thoughts: Chloe and Nate have been through a lot over the years but have managed to stay together in spite of everything they’ve experienced. Their marriage is shaky however, continuing only because of their long friendship more than any remaining passion. When Chloe wakes up one morning to find that her husband has inexplicably and very suddenly gone back to the same hometown they fled so many years ago, she does not begin to worry until a call to her sister-in-law reveals that not everything is as she was lead to believe. Elizabeth Joy Arnold’s The Book of Secrets revolves around Chloe’s search for answers, the lies we tell ourselves and others, and the dangerous secrets such lies can contain. The Book of Secrets is first and foremost a mystery. Chloe grapples with many unanswered questions, the least of which is why her husband would go back to their hometown with all of its horrible memories. Making good use of flashbacks and memory sequences, the truth unfolds in sections, with each section marking a significant milestone in Nate’s and Chloe’s burgeoning relationship as well as showcasing just how much things have changed since then. The mystery for the reader becomes not the reasons for Nate’s sudden departure but why their relationship has declined so much over the years. Chloe hints at events that she is eventually forced to revisit, and the final picture reveals in startling clarity all of the horrors they have had to face and how they lost each other in the aftermath.

The Book of Secrets is as much a love story as it is a mystery. First there is the love story between Chloe and Nate, two lost souls searching for the love that is missing in their lives and who love each other enough to stay together through the worst that life can throw at you. While the story explores the fracturing of their relationship, it also highlights the mending of it, so that the end is as beautiful and poignant as one might hope. Then there are the books. Stories and their love of them are what bring Nate and Chloe together, and through their bookstore, that shared love is the one thing that keeps them together when things get tough. This is seen through their bookstore, their interactions, and even little statements that will leap out at fellow book lovers.

“I ran my fingers over the text then held the book up to my face, closed my eyes and inhaled the sweet-sour scent of old paper and binding glue. Did everyone who loved books do this when they encountered a new one? I loved the physicality of books just as much as the stories inside, the feel of pages between my fingers, the intricacies of classic fonts winding along the neatly lined rows of words.”

One would be remiss in failing to discuss the cast of characters. All of them are truly and realistically flawed, and a reader will have serious issues with their decisions throughout the novel. Yet, it is this realistic behavior that lends credence to the novel, thereby preventing it from being too fanciful. The character development is surprisingly robust, given that it only occurs in the many flashbacks, and extremely effective in allowing readers to understand each character’s motivation and mindset. One may not agree with Chloe’s behavior behind her husband’s back, but one can appreciate her reasons for acting that way. This is due solely to the careful layering of the entire story within a story, of the use of beloved childhood classics to help further their tale of love, loss, friendship, family, heartache, and betrayal.
The beauty of The Book of Secrets  is multi-layered. For one, there is the oft-hinted tragedy regarding Nate’s and Chloe’s past, the clues to which Ms. Arnold methodically sprinkles throughout the novel in such a way that a reader never becomes impatient for the lack of answers. For another, each of the characters are wonderfully complex, evoking both love and hate, joy and disappointment in a reader. Then there is the fact that it is a complete adoration and celebration of books and the stories they contain. Ms. Arnold superbly captures the essence of a bibliophile. Between the loving descriptions of Chloe and Nate’s book store to the frequent reminiscences of influential books shared and discussed at length among the group of friends, readers can only sigh with pleasure at how accurately Ms. Arnold portrays the profound impact a well-written book can have on someone at any age. To Chloe especially but to all the Sinclair children, books are magical, and it is this aspect of The Book of Secrets  which imbibes the entire story with an enchanted quality bibliophiles will appreciate.

The probable future (2003) by Alice Hoffman

The women of the Sparrow family have lived in New England for generations. Each is born in the month of March, and at the age of thirteen, each develops an unusual gift. Elinor can literally smell a lie. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams as they’re dreaming them. Granddaughter Stella, newly a teen, has just developed the ability to see how other people will die. Ironically, it is their gifts that have kept Elinor and Jenny apart for the last twenty-five years. But as Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance, the unthinkable happens: One of her premonitions lands her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. The ordeal leads Stella to the grandmother she’s never met and to Cake House, the Sparrow ancestral home full of talismans and fraught with history. Now three generations of estranged Sparrow women must come together to turn Stella’s potential to ruin into a potential to redeem.

Thanks to Goodreads for the above synopsis.

The cottage at glass beach (2012) by Heather Barbieri

Thanks to the book jacket for this summary:

Married to the youngest attorney general in Massachusetts state history, Nora Cunningham is a picture-perfect political wife and a doting mother. But her carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she, along with the rest of the world, learns of the infidelity of her husband, Malcolm.

Humiliated and hounded by the press, Nora packs up her daughters and takes refuge on Burke’s Island, off the coast of Maine. Settled by Irish immigrants, the island is a place where superstition and magic are carried on the ocean winds, and wishes and dreams wash ashore with the changing tides.

Nora spent her first five years on the island but has not been back to the remote community for decades–not since that long ago summer when her mother disappeared at sea. One night while sitting alone on Glass Beach below the cottage where she spent her childhood, Nora succumbs to grief, her tears flowing into the ocean. Days later she finds an enigmatic fisherman named Owen Kavanagh shipwrecked on the rocks nearby. Is he, as her aunt’s friend Polly suggests, a selkie–a mythical being of island legend–summoned by her heartbreak, or simply someone who, like Nora, is trying to find his way in the wake of his own personal struggles?

My thoughts:  Lack of connection between characters.  Are we to believe that Owen is a mythical creature?  Liked Aunt Marie, as she tried to make amends for perceived injustices.  Wanted to know more about Mauve and her husband.

'till death do us pur (2012)l by canadeo

The fourth in the charming knitting mystery series that is “sure to hook cozy fans” (Publishers Weekly) featuring Maggie Messina and her close circle of knitting-club friends, who must unravel another murder in their cozy coastal town of Plum Harbor, Massachusetts. 

The Black Sheep Knitters new project is helping a bride-to-be knit shawls for her upcoming wedding. Days after the ceremony, the groom dies in a freak accident. As the knitters comfort the family, many secrets and betrayals—both business and romantic—are revealed. When the groom’s body turns up after the funeral in a motel room, dead again, the newlywed widow is the prime suspect, The Black Sheep must prove her innocence and find the real killer among a large circle of family, friends, and foes. 

Thanks to Simon and Schuster, March 2012.

The Senator's Wife (2008) by Sue Miller

What might it feel like to be married to a charming and handsome man, highly accomplished, in many ways admirable, who propelled himself from modest beginnings to the highest reaches of our government, who professes undying love for you and appears to feel it, but who can’t stop himself from repeatedly cheating on you in the most public and humiliating ways? What might it be like to stay married to this man, to spend years of your life campaigning for him, covering for him, while at the same time living apart, leading a separate life and discovering new and personally gratifying pleasures and ambitions? What would it be like to reunite with him, on your own terms, with your own power base, to love him more fully, perhaps even to trust him — only to have your faith finally, fatally shattered? These are the questions Sue Miller addresses in her latest novel, “The Senator’s Wife,” a two-family saga about life on either side of a two-family house in the early years of the Clinton administration.
Whitewater, Jennifer Flowers and the president’s sexual wanderings are the snippets of news that stray into daily conversation in the New England college town where the senator’s wife — with occasional “ceremonial visits” from the great man himself — lives her proud, solitary existence. Across the dividing wall, in the adjoining house, are Nathan and his wife, Meri, who move in after Nathan takes a teaching job at the college. It’s a big step in his career and a great leap forward socially for Meri: she has worked her way up from a marginal childhood to what feels like a very tenuous perch in the professional class.
Both are thrilled when they discover the identities of their new neighbors. Nathan, a political scientist, is delighted to be living so close to former Senator Tom Naughton, a veteran of the greatest days of Great Society liberalism. Meri, who has lost her mother to breast cancer, is desperate to find a meaningful womanly connection (even when her own mother was healthy, Meri remarks, she was “brain-dead”) and hopes that in the elegant and lively Delia she’ll find the salve to soothe her achy soul.
Unfortunately for Meri — whose hurting, leaking, blushing, exploding physicality inspires even this rather ascetic reviewer to indulge in sensory-rich, overwrought and earnest phrases — Delia is destined to disappoint. She’s got too many of her own “issues” to take on a needy surrogate daughter. Notably, there’s her gorgeous lug of a no-good husband, who cheated on her publicly and cheated on her privately and finally cheated on her unforgivably by taking up with their daughter’s roommate — the “beauteous” Carolee.
In the wake of this affair, which began right under Delia’s nose at a Christmas gathering in 1971, the Naughton family scatters and Delia finds herself a pied-à-terre in Paris, where she begins to spend several months of the year. (“The croissant, the seedless raspberry jam, the rich dark coffee with steamed milk. ... The consolation of the daily.”)
Try as she might, though, Delia can’t shake the man out of her hair. Or her bed. Although separated, she and her husband remain lovers, painfully, wistfully. Over time, they begin to conduct their marriage as if it were a secret affair. This goes on for decades until Tom has a stroke, and Delia, called back from Paris by one of her husband’s mysterious lady friends, brings him home to New England. With her husband broken in body, mind and spirit, Delia at last finds true happiness. (Shades of “Jane Eyre,” Meri muses.) Until, in the final turn of the plot, in a playful moment of dramatic genius that redeems this ponderous, often irritating book, Delia’s heart is broken and she unties the knot for good.
I won’t reveal how the final betrayal occurs, but will just say that in this particular moment Miller plays her hand in a masterly fashion. Shock, deceit, desire and despair come together at once in a way that feels simply like fate. In that remarkable bit of novelistic choreography, I saw in Miller what her fans have always seen: a clever storyteller with a penchant for the unexpected and a talent for depicting the bizarre borderline acts, the unfortunate boundary crossings and the regrettable instances of excessive self-indulgence that can destroy a world in a blink.
These final chapters provided a cathartic conclusion, an end-of-birthing experience that all but erased the painful labor of reading that preceded it. (Once again, I’ve been moved to this use of metaphor by Miller’s Meri, who grunts and screams her way through the delivery of her first child in the most miserable way.)
Sue Miller is a highly popular, well-respected and successful writer. But her writing here will appeal primarily to readers who love sensual, earthy and earnest fiction — the sort of fiction that brings you lots of “shiny red apples” and “pale green grapes,” oysters with a “briny, sweaty, animal flavor” and characters whose carnal attunements far exceed their capacities for intelligent self-awareness. (“Oil sparks out from the skin of the orange as she bends it, sparks out and disappears in the air, leaving its scent behind,” is the kind of sensation that drowns out Meri’s cognition.)
Confronted with such earthiness — and such very deep earnestness — coupled with Delia’s and Meri’s penchant for two-bit philosophizing, I wanted to run for an exit. Or, perhaps, to run off the page with Tom Naughton, the one character who seems capable of wit and self-parody. “Do you remember when everyone thought Bush had a mistress too?” he asks in the course of a Clinton-era conversation. “But she was rumored to be someone wealthy and WASPy, of course. ... The problem here is the goddamn Democrats, who sleep down, you see. They love that white trash. ... And white trash loves publicity, so the Democrats are the ones who get into all the trouble. As opposed to the Republicans. They sleep up. ... Up, where all is Episcopalian and quiet as death itself, and no one ever has to hear a thing about it.”
I somehow feel that if I were a right-on woman, I would identify deeply with Miller’s hurting, bleeding, lactating heroines and greet her sensuous descriptions of fruit and soft rain with a great sigh of satisfaction. But I’m not and I don’t. For me, the world of her lushly invoked senses seems intensely claustrophobic, as precious and cloying as a purple-painted, patchouli-scented room.

Thanks to Judith Warner, New York Times, Jan 13, 2008 for this review.
Judith Warner, the author, most recently, of “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” writes the Domestic Disturbances blog for The New York Times on the Web

Devil's star (2003) by Jo Nesbo

I can never get enough of Jo Nesbo!

By Patrick Anderson
Monday, March 15, 2010

In this novel, a serial killer is on the loose. We're told they're rare in Norway and are viewed as an American disease. This one kills women, cuts off one of their fingers and leaves a tiny red diamond with their bodies. As Harry struggles with this mystery, he's also doing battle with a colleague who seemsdetermined to corrupt or kill him.It's a complex plot, one that will have you scratching your head from time to time, trying to remember who did what to whom. The pieces fit together in the end, but I have two reservations. One is that when the serial killer is unveiled, he proves to have a modus operandi that Agatha Christie introduced in "The A.B.C. Murders" more than 70 years ago.Of course, this might be unfair and pedantic; plot-wise, there's not much new under the sun in crime fiction. It's characterizations, sophistication and levels of violence that have changed dramatically since Christie's day. But my other complaint is more serious: It's another hoary tradition that the villain gets the hero in his clutches and then proceeds not to kill him but to prattle on until help arrives. Nesbo manages thus to save Hole not once but twice near the end of this novel. That's at least once too often.Still, it's a novel worth reading, for its characters, for the quality of its writing and for its wealth of detail. Nesbo is a rock musician as well as a novelist, and he offers asides on figures as diverse as Duke Ellington and Iggy Pop. He does fine things with relatively minor characters, too. One murder victim is given five vivid pages of life before she meets her fate.Nesbo also brings to life a burly theatrical director who was the husband of one of the victims. He was directing her in a new production of "My Fair Lady," and he hastily arranges for his wife's less talented younger sister to replace her. Hole and his girlfriend attend the premiere in one of their attempts at reconciliation. We also meet a woman who in her youth was impregnated by a Nazi officer and in her old age becomes an improbable but importantfigure in the serial-killer mystery"The Devil's Star" is the third of Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo's novels about the alcoholic Oslo detective Harry Hole to be published in this country. Reviewing "The Redbreast" a few years ago, I said that it ranked with today's best American crime writing.This new arrival, first published in Norway in 2003, reinforces that view. "The Devil's Star" is a big, ambitious, wildly readable story that pits the protagonist against a serial killer and an enemy within the Oslo police department. The novel has itsflawsbutfor most of the way it's compelling.Harry Hole -- not the most inspired moniker in all crime fiction -- can be compared to the early, hard-drinking, rebellious Harry Bosch of Michael Connelly's series, and Connelly has been generous in his praise of this Norwegian. But Nesbo's novels are both less focused and more expansive than Connelly's; he's willing to slow the crime-solving process to introduce strange characters and odd corners of Oslo. In this he sometimes recalls Ian Rankin's John Rebus novels with their rich, far-flung portrait of Edinburgh.
But Nesbo always returns to the talented, tormented Hole. We flash back to traumatic scenes from his childhood, and then forward to his present-day nightmares and hallucinations and to his drinking, always to his drinking. Harry is the kind of alcoholic who wakes up in the morning wanting a drink, who always knows where the nearest bar is but can't always remember which bars have banned him. He's losing the woman he loves because of his drinking and would have long since lost his job but for an almost mystical ability to solve crimes that baffle everyone else.The character I'll remember longest is a young woman who's really just a throwaway. Hole, desperate for a computer, knocks at random on her dormitory door. He's too frantic to notice that she's wearing no pants. She says that maybe she ought to apologize because her room's a mess but, "Hope you don't mind if I don't give a damn." She gets the mistaken idea that he's interested in sex and confides that she only does that on weekends, then she proceeds to dress, "sniffing a sock before she put it on." That is, in its perverse way, lovely. I'll remember that girl sniffing her sock the way I remember certain desolation-row denizens of Dylan's early songs. For moments like that, we can forgive a novelist much.

Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for The Post.

In one person (2012) by John Irving

John Irving’s new novel, In One Person, opens in First River, Vt., the small logging community where narrator Billy Abbott is being raised by his wounded, priggish mother, who has been abandoned by his (supposedly) caddish father. Growing up in the shadow of this betrayal, Billy worries he has inherited some unsavoury genetic trait from his father.

Specifically, he worries about his propensity to form crushes “on the wrong people.” The riddle of how crushes are formed and the constellation of unanswerable questions it raises – do we shape our desires or are we shaped by them, and are we in any way capable of judging them – is at the core of this searching, deeply affecting novel.

One of the people Billy develops a crush on is the handsome Richard Abbott, a newly arrived English teacher at the local private school. After Billy confides in him, Richard tries to be reassuring. “There are no wrong people to have crushes on,” he asserts. “You cannot will yourself to have, or not to have, a crush on someone.”

Thinking that literature will lend credence to this opinion, Richard takes Billy to the public library, where they encounter public librarian Miss Frost. She is broad-shouldered and powerful, with mannish hands and delicate, girlish breasts, and Billy immediately develops a crush on her.

When, soon after, he discovers Miss Frost is a transsexual – a former wrestling champion who used to be known as Al Frost – it only deepens his attraction to her. “In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing,” Billy tells the reader, “I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost – not necessarily in that order.”

Billy’s mother marries Richard and the three of them move into his faculty apartment on campus. Here he meets (and develops a crush on) his lifelong friend Elaine (who arouses him most when she allows him to wear her bra) and Jacques Kittredge, a debonair and macho wrestler on whom Billy develops another crush.

Even as Billy persists in this understanding of his longings as misplaced or misdirected, they define him, belong to him wholly. “I know myself best by my persistent crushes on the wrong people,” he tells the reader, “the way I was formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved.”

Billy emerges intact from the insularity of Vermont, but the assurances that should arrive with adulthood are withheld because of his bisexuality, which remains troubling to his lovers. “My very existence as a bisexual was not welcomed by my gay friends; they either refused to believe that I really liked women, or they felt I was somehow dishonest (or hedging my bets) about being gay.” His denial of category and community takes on a particular significance in the final third of the novel, when AIDS appears and he must watch as most of the characters who peopled the early part of the book die, painfully.

Does it make sense, now, to speak of late John Irving? Does In One Person bear the same relationship to The World According to Garp that, say, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night does to The Tempest? As Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to Midnight in Paris? Irving’s characters in this novel do spend a great deal of time talking about Shakespeare, about the gender-bending cross-dressing at the heart of the Elizabethan theatre, of course, but also the inextricably the comic from the tragic, and the attempt in Shakespeare’s late plays to look forward, to imagine the world as a different, more humane place.

“If you live long enough,” Billy’s stepfather, Richard Abbott, advises him, “it’s a world of epilogues.” The line takes us back to the closing pages ofGarp, the novel that made Irving a household name more than 30 years ago. “An epilogue,” according to Garp, “is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future.”

It is a deliberate echo, one that situates In One Person as a defiant response to the increasingly regressive and reactionary currents that persist on the U.S. political scene and continue to darken its horizon. This is a novel that reaffirms the centrality of Irving as the voice of social justice and compassion in contemporary American literature. His work has been iindispensable over the past four decades, and it will prove more important, more urgently resonant and more prescient, in the decades to come.

Thanks to Steven Hayward teaches in the English department at Colorado College. His most recent novel is Don’t Be Afraid.

Maya's notebook (2013) by Isabel Allende

As Maya Vidal writhes on a filthy mattress, hog-tied with an electrical cord, she wonders how much worse this confinement by killers is going to get once the pangs of her drug addictions kick in.

Readers of Isabel Allende's new novel, “Maya's Notebook,” may well wonder what else can possibly happen to this disheveled, homeless young woman. She's already seemingly hit bottom about a dozen times. Is this finally it? Is this maybe the end of her?

On the surface, we've seen this familiar fable many times before, from "Go Ask Alice" on. Addiction, recovery, relapse, re-recovery, bad men and an anchoring cast of surrounding characters who serve as magnets to the straight and narrow.

That narrator, Maya, recounts her story through the notebooks she has kept during her frenetic ride into young adulthood. Maya obviously knows how to tell a tale. She begins: "A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me."

Maya, 19, is flying to her grandmother's native Chile, where she will journey farther to a hideout in a small village in Chiloe, the archipelago off the coast. In a series of brief entries, she alternately shifts between past and present, recounting what has forced her to this remote, strangely healing place.

Since her "memory goes in circles, spirals, and somersaults," Maya decides to safely get down the facts of her family's story first. The people who become her grandparents fled Chile following the 1973 military coup (Allende's uncle, Salvador, the country's president, was killed in the takeover.) The pair meet during a Canadian exile. Their son grows up to be a pilot and marries a Danish flight attendant. The marriage doesn't take, and they cavalierly deposit their little girl, Maya, with her grandparents. The older couple now lives in a grand, colorful, old house in Berkeley, Calif., where Maya encounters wisdom, love and an atmosphere laced with folklore.

All is well until Maya turns 16, when — almost without warning — her life jumps the rails. She falls in with a couple of bad kids and starts drinking, drugging and goth-ing up. Her little posse quickly advances into crime. They answer ads placed by men looking for young girls and then violently blackmail the sleazes.

When Maya is involved in a car accident, she's forced to head up to Oregon for rehab. She escapes, but in short order is raped by a truck driver and ends up in Las Vegas, where she instantly falls under the spell of a medium-time criminal. As his courier, Maya delivers drugs to customers in the hotels and casinos and also witnesses his involvement in a counterfeiting scheme. When things go south, she's back in big trouble. Maya goes on the lam and is soon strung out and homeless on the back streets of Vegas. Her captivity on that mattress in the drug den quickly ensues.

With the miraculous help of friends and family, Maya ends up on the plane to Chile (but not before — in a scene like something out of "Breaking Bad" — burning satchels of possibly fake dollars in the desert).

Whew! This Maya's a handful. Though Allende artfully and compellingly depicts her fall from grace, the depths Maya reaches — repeatedly — and her willingness to often dig herself into a deeper hole put a nagging strain on belief.

What sets "Maya's Notebook" apart from the usual teen-in-trouble fare is the soaring redemption Maya finds in Chile. The village's peaceful pace is a tonic to both Maya and the reader. Sheltered from the havoc, she is introduced to a world of simplicity and everyday magic. It's a place where the food comes from the earth and the sea, where all property is ultimately communal, where sea lions can become friends, where drugstore medicines are used only when all other remedies fail, and where the dead sometimes make appearances.

Maya gradually comes back to life in this land of legend and folklore, helped also by the good "witches" of the island, the women who meet on the nights of the full moon for hours of sacred talk and sharing. She also unravels a few potent family secrets along the way for good measure.

While not terribly deep (and too terribly obvious in its intentions), "Maya's Notebook" is still a captivating read by a great storyteller. Allende may be overly explicit in contrasting Good Maya and Bad Maya, but it's the other dichotomies she teases out that ultimately give the novel its punch: the old world versus the new, North America versus South America, youth versus age, urban versus rural, and how the real and the unreal can unexpectedly intersect.

John Barron is the former editor-in-chief and publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in Oak Park.

After I'm gone (2013) by Laura Lippman

What an intriguing novel.  The interplay of characteristics is well cone.  Is greed at the core?

"Laura Lippman, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, returns with an addictive story that explores how one man’s disappearance echoes through the lives of the wife, mistress, and daughters he left behind.

When Felix Brewer meets Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk at a Valentine’s Dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative—if not all legal—businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes.

Though Bambi has no idea where her husband—or his money—might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. When Julie disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she’s left to join her old lover—until her remains are eventually found.

Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer.

Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And when he does, no one will ever be the same."

Thanks to www.harpercollins.com for this annotation.