Kingdom Come by Jane Jensen
Detective Elizabeth Harris has left her job with the NYPD
after her husband is murdered and returns to her home county, Lancaster, PA,
hoping the quieter pace, peace loving Amish peoples who live there will restore
her mind, spirt and soul. Elizabeth’s hopes
are dashed when “an English” (non-Amish) young woman is found dead, barely
clothed, in the barn of an Amish farmer.
The young woman is identified as Jessica Travis who Elizabeth learns,
lives with her single mother in near poverty conditions. When she learns that an Amish girl, Katie
Yoder, has been missing since October and that Jessica, with whom she was very
close, reported her missing, Elizabeth fears the worse, fears that are realized
when the body of a girl washes up on the shore in Maryland. Quickly the Amish community closes ranks and
insists that God’s will has been and will be done and it is not up to them to
judge, but Elizabeth and her colleagues feel differently and begin to suspect
the girls were involved with sex for money and that Katie may have even been
abused as a young child, perhaps by someone in their community. Complicating matters, and the case, for
Elizabeth is Ezra Beiler for whom she feels an instant, intent and mutual
attraction, something impossible to act upon were it not for the fact that Ezra
has been planning on leaving his community for several years. Elizabeth’s boss’s continue to look for an
outsider, though Elizabeth’s gut tells her to look within the community, a
trail she follows even as she is afraid of what she’ll find at the end and
whose lives may be altered, even ruined if she uncovers what she fears is
true. A well-written, well-paced mystery
that accurately portrays life in the Pennsylvania Dutch country with a damaged
heroine who has come home to heal and may find more than she bargained for in
the process. This is the first in a
series that will have readers eager for the next installment.
The Crooked House by Christobel Kent
As a teenager, Alison was known as Esme and lived with her
slightly eccentric family in a dismal house in a dismal town. After the events of an horrific evening, Esme
is the only true survivor and goes to live with an aunt becoming Alison and
living a quiet life, trying to overcome her memories and her past. When her boyfriend invites her to accompany
him to a wedding in the her old town, she comes face to face with not only her
personal recollections but those of a village who hasn’t quite forgotten and
somewhere in the retelling of the tragedy, Alison begins to feel that the
conclusions about that evening which were originally arrived at may be too pat
and that someone in the village still holds the key to what really happened
that night. Deeply disturbing, full of
twists and turns, this suspense thriller offers many layers of each character
as what they know of the events of that fateful night are slowly revealed.
Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin
This delightfully dishy novel perfectly captures the glamour
and glitz of mid-20th century New York, breathing life into such characters as
Truman Capote and William and Babe Paley making them and their friends seem
alive. The novel starts with Capote’s
“swans” as Babe Paley and her crowd where known as, gathering to skewer the now
estranged Capote for revealing all their secrets in his writings, blaming him
for the death of one of their own. The
novel goes back and forth between this meeting during the mid-70’s to the
mid-century as the story of Babe and how she came to be the wife of the
president of CBS unfolds, and how she, and others in her circle became the
close confidant of Truman Capote. While
most of the story is told through the eyes of the swans, there are rare glimpses
into how Capote views the events and relationships and his slow downward spiral
from literary darling to being despised by his dearest friends. Details of the rich and famous, glamourous
parties, gorgeous clothes and likable, real to life characters make this novel
and enjoyable read. Melanie Benjamin has
written another novel full of historical and marvelous, larger than life
characters.
The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian
As his brother’s best man, Richard Chapman thinks hosting
Philip’s bachelor party in his suburban Westchester home is safer than a night
on the town of drunken debauchery. With
Richard’s wife Kristin and their daughter are spending the weekend with Kristin’s
mother in Manhattan there will be plenty of time for the party and to clean-up
any mess left over. What Richard doesn’t
expect is that the two strippers his brother’s friend hired are more than
strippers and come with Russian bodyguards, bodyguards that one of the women
kills before the pair run off into the night with the money and the bodyguards’
car. At once, Richard is thrust into the
public eye in a not so good way: his home is a crime scene, precious items he
and Kristin have collected together over their lifetime have been ruined beyond
repair, Richard’s investment banking firm has put him on leave, he has lost the
trust of his wife and daughter and he is being blackmailed by the man who hired
the entertainment for the party. Far
worse than Richard’s situation is one of the girl’s, Alexandra, who is on the
run from the police as well as the men who brought her to America and, if it is
possible, from this life she is leading through none of her own choices. The story alternates between Richard’s story
in the here and now, and Alexandra’s as she relates the events that led her to
this place and time and the despair they each feel of ever having a chance at
redemption for Richard and survival for Alexandra. These two stories deftly juxtaposed against
each other reveal some of the same emotions, shame, fear and guilt, expressed
and felt in much different ways but revealing nonetheless how tightly wound and
held our lives can be. This
heart-pounding thriller is woven into a reflection of how quickly all that we
hold dear, no matter how insignificant it may seem to others, can be lost and
the costs we face in order to regain ourselves.
What She Left by T. R. Richmond
One snowy night in London, twenty-five-year-old journalist
Alice Salmon falls into the river and drowns.
Everyone who knew Alice is shocked, and those closest to her try to make
sense of what happened as she becomes a media darling, the world trying to decide
her death was a tragic accident, a suicide or even murder. Alice’s former professor, anthropologist
Jeremy Cooke has taken an unhealthy interest, bordering on obsessive, interest
in Alice’s death and decides that, being at the end of his academic career, he
will chronicle Alice’s life through the digital footprint, diaries, blogs,
articles she wrote, tweets, Facebook posts and e-mails, perhaps finding meaning
in her death. Alice’s friends and family
are appalled at the temerity of this almost stranger delving into the young
woman’s private life with such bravado, but little by little, Alice is
revealed, as are her friends and family, and even Cooke himself, forming a
different picture of the young woman everyone loved so dearly, a picture that
might shed a different light on her death.
A modern take on the epistolary novel, What
She Left Behind also inserts the observations and opinions of an academic
mind as Cooke draws conclusions from what he finds in Alice’s own words, the
words of others and news stories about her.
As more about Cooke is revealed, his project also becomes something of
an apology, a way to mend past wrongs he may have committed. The intriguing structure of this novel will
draw readers in quickly though quietly and will make them look beyond the Alice
she carefully cultivated to show the world and find the secrets that led to
this young woman’s death.
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
Anna isn’t even forty and she is already seeing the signs of
early onset Alzheimer’s and voluntarily agrees to go into an assisted living
facility where she meets Jack, a man also not yet forty who has a disorder that
will cause him to lose his language skills over time. The two are naturally drawn to each other and
eventually, to the horror of Anna’s family, fall in love with each other. Eva has lost almost everything in her
carefully constructed life and takes a job as the cook at the care facility to
try and keep together what is left.
While she is cautious with her own life and heart, Eva recognizes the
love Anna and Jack share and finds an opportunity to help the couple be
together, almost as if this is a way to help reconstruct the life she can no
longer have, but at great cost to her and her daughter. There is a startling authenticity to Anna’s
story as she struggles through the stages of dementia; though an imagined one
for both Hepworth and reader, it feels right.
Eva becomes almost a mirror for Anna as Eva chooses the things that she
will keep and deem important as Anna struggles to find importance in the things
that remain. A tragic event is seen in
retrospect given more depth and layers to all the characters. A story to be held onto long after the final
page is turned.
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
In the mid-80’s, Lucy Barton is healing in a Manhattan
hospital after an appendectomy turns into an infection and fever that threatens
her life and brings her estranged mother from Illinois to sit at her bedside
while Lucy’s husband spends most of his time at work and home with their two
young daughters. Lucy is a stranger to
her mother, haunted by the poverty of her childhood, unable to connect with her
mother, missing her daughters, reflecting on her life in New York, feeling
isolated much of the time, watching the AIDS epidemic as it affects someone
close to her without her realizing it until it’s too late. So much of Lucy’s life feels just out of her
grasp, her story an achingly beautiful one as she learns to love, at the same
time seeking forgiveness and finding it within herself to let go and
forgive. Much of the time Lucy’s story
feels familiar and yet we recoil from it as we see ourselves in her or her
mother. A short, densely packed story
with nary a wasted word, this reflection on a woman’s life will resonate with
many readers.
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