Griffiths, Elly. The Night Hawks.

NY: Mariner Books, 2021.

You may not be aware that “Elly Griffiths” is the pseudonym of Domenica de Rosa, that she has several series going, and that she has won an Edgar as well as several other major awards. But while I’ve enjoyed all her books, my favorites are still those featuring Dr. Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist of Norfolk, and DCI Harry Nelson, head of CID in King’s Lynn — and also the father of Ruth’s now ten-year-old daughter, Kate. Nelson is married, with two grown daughters and a new infant son, so it’s a complicated relationship, and as interesting as the murder plots, actually.

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Yoon, Nicola. Everything, Everything.

NY: Delacourt, 2015.

This was the author’s first novel and it’s a very strong debut. Madeline Whittier of Southern California just celebrated her eighteenth birthday and she hasn’t been outside her house in seventeen years. She’s a “bubble baby,” a victim of the extremely rate Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease — SCID. “Basically, I’m allergic to the world.” There’s just her, her widowed mother (who is conveniently an M.D.) and Carla, the full-time nurse (and practically Madeline’s second mother) who has been there every day for fifteen years.

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Jackson, Holly. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.

NY: Delaware, 2019.

This debut work is an unusual sort of murder mystery, marketed as a YA novel because the protagonist is a high school student, but it’s a good deal more than that. Pippa Fitz-Amobi was in middle school in Fairfield, Connecticut, when Andi Bell was presumed murdered (she disappeared and her body was never found), supposedly by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then apparently killed himself. With no arrest and no trial, none of the evidence was ever presented in court, but the police were satisfied and closed the case. And the Singh family has suffered under their small town’s condemnation ever since.

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Moriarty, Liane. Apples Never Fall.

NY: Henry Holt, 2021.

I’ve become a definite fan of Moriarty’s fat novels over the past half-dozen years, ever since discovering Big Little Lies. Though the plots vary widely, they all have certain things in common: They’re all set in or around her native city of Sydney Australia, though there’s almost nothing overtly “Australian” about them. There’s always a rather large cast of disparate characters, all of whom will interconnect in odd and unexpected ways. And the story line will go off in unpredictable directions that will seem perfectly reasonable in retrospect. And though the narrative will therefore almost always catch you off-guard more than once, the author never, ever loses control. I think all of Moriarty’s nine adult novels have been above the average, but this is one of her best so far.

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Macdonald, Janet. Feeding Nelson’s Navy: The True Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era.

Barnsley, Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books, 2004.

If you’re a Horatio Hornblower or Jack Aubrey fan, or a student of the maritime aspects of the Napoleonic wars, then you’re familiar with the stories of British sailors subsisting on rotten, maggot-ridden salt beef and rock-hard biscuit filled with worms and weevils. These stories have been repeated so often, they’re now taken for granted. Macdonald is an expert in food history, however, with more than thirty books to her credit, and a parallel interest in naval history of the Age of Sail.

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Turrisi, Kim. Just a Normal Tuesday.

Toronto, ONT: Kids Can Press, 2017.

For 16-year-old Kai Sheehan of Fort Lauderdale, it’s an ordinary Tuesday afternoon: Catch a ride home with her best guy friend, T. J., complain about pop quizzes, play with the dog, collect the day’s mail. What’s this? Three letters from her older sister, Jen, who only lives nearby, one for her and one for each of her parents (who are still at work). And Kai ‘s letter starts with “If you are reading this, I am already gone.”

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King, Stephen. The Colorado Kid.

NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

If an experienced reader found a copy of this tale without a cover or title page, he probably could tell within half a dozen pages that it was written by Stephen King. The fact that the setting is Moose-Lookit Island on the Maine coast would be a start. The protagonists are two old newspaper men, almost the entire staff of the Weekly Islander, and a young female graduate intern from Ohio who’s only there for a few months but is already thinking about sticking around.

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Riordan, Rick. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Book 1, The Lightning Thief.

NY: Hyperion Books, 2005.

Since I had a long career in a very large public library system, I’ve never hesitated to read books intended for a much younger audience. I retired several years before this first volume of a very popular fantasy-adventure series came out, though, so I never got around to picking it up — but I have a twelve-year-old grandson who was appalled that I’d never read about Percy Jackson, so I’ve begun making up for that lapse.

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Levy, Marc. The Strange Voyage of Alice Pendlebury.

Paris: Robert LaFont,2011 (trans., 2019).

Levy is the most popular author currently writing in French, though he now lives in New York and a number of his novels are very “English” in plot and style. Oddly, this one features two protagonists, the first being the Alice of the title, but the original edition was called L‘Etrange Voyage de Monsieur Daldry. So, it’s 1950 in London and times are still tight but the British are beginning to recover from the war’s privations. Alice, now in her mid-30s and unmarried, lives alone in a very small flat, her parents having been killed during the Blitz (and which she witnessed, having just left the house when the bomb hit).

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