Brown, Jaye Robin. The Meaning of Birds.

NY: HarperCollins, 2019.

Jess Perez is in the fall of her senior year of high school in a suburb of Charlotte. She’s gay and has known it for a while, and she’s comfortable with it, and her mother accepts it (after some initial misgivings about the inevitable social pressures her daughter will face in the South). But Jess’s father was military and was killed in Iraq by an IED when she was starting middle school. “My therapist, Samantha, said I was a ticking time bomb. Between unexpressed grief from my dad’s death and me figuring out I was gay, the two things built up inside me — and mixed with puberty hormones, I went nuts.” The result was constantly simmering anger and outbursts of rage. And because Jess was naturally strong and athletic, she got into a number of fights — including beating the crap out of a couple of bigoted boys who pushed the wrong buttons.

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Wax, Wendy. While We Were Watching Downton Abbey.

NY: Berkley, 2013.

I’m a big fan of Downton Abbey, just as I was of Upstairs, Downstairs back in the ’70s, so the title is what caught my eye about this one when I happened to see it mentioned somewhere. It was published almost a decade ago, and I’m a little embarrassed that I never heard of it or its author until now. It’s published as “women’s fiction,” a marketing ghetto I strongly dislike, just as I do “young adult” as a label, as if no one else should even consider reading it. But a novel is either well-written or it isn’t, and that’s all that matters.

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Adams, Jeanne M. The Body in the Transept.

NY: Walker, 1995.

My wife is a big fan of British “cozy” mysteries (often involving an amateur female detective who runs an inn or a tea shop or something), while my own preference is for more realistic police procedurals. But she really liked this one (which is the first in the “Dorothy Martin” series, now up to a dozen and a half books), and it won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1995. So I gave it a shot. And it’s not bad. Dorothy is a nice lady in her sixties, the widow of an American academic, and they had first visited the fictional Sherebury in the southeast of England some years before when her husband was there to do research.

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Rowling, J. K. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay.

London: Pottermore Publishing, 2016.

First of all, if you’ve seen the movie, you already know it has nothing whatever to do with the book written by Newt Scamander (except the title), and there’s nothing except a passing mention of Hogwart’s. And it’s set in New York in 1926, so none of the characters you know from the original series are in it either. That said, it’s a highly enjoyable fantasy adventure, and it’s written by Rowling, so it’s everything you might expect.

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Brueggemann, Wibke. Love Is for Losers.

NY: Macmillan, 2021.

This is the author’s debut novel and it’s both well-written and very funny, presented in the form of entries in an online diary. It’s a British YA rom-com in which the main character is fifteen-year-old Phoebe Davis, angst-ridden and overflowing with self-protective sarcasm. Her mum is a doctor who spends all her time working in war zones and natural disasters, and she’s presently in Syria for six months, so Phoebe is living with her godmother, Kate, as she has done for a large part of her life. Kate runs a charity-owned thrift shop where Phoebe helps out and which supplies her with several interesting friends.

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Perry, Thomas. Fidelity.

NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.

Perry is one of the more generally reliable writers of crime thrillers; he’s done about thirty now and I’ve read more than half of them. He’s not perfect and some of them are much better than others, but this one is (mostly) pretty good.. The set-up is straightforward: Phil Kramer, a somewhat intimidating ex-Marine, has been a successful private detective in Los Angeles for twenty years, now running an agency with a number of other PIs working under him. On about the third page, he’s walking back to his parked car on a residential street late one night, he gets careless, doesn’t pay enough attention to the van parked across the street, and ends up with a bullet in his head. And we’re told almost immediately that the killers are an ex-con named Jerry Hobart and his partner, who drove in from Vegas to do the job, so there’s no mystery about that. The mystery is why Kramer had to die. He wasn’t even working on a case, and hadn’t been for a while.

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Mayhew, Margaret. Old Soldiers Never Die

London: Severn House, 1999.

This is the first in the author’s “Village Mysteries” series, now up to six volumes. It qualifies as a “cozy,” but with a bit of a twist, as the character who does most of the detecting is a retired army colonel (first name Hugh, last name never mentioned), who is at loose ends and very bored since the death of his wife a decade before. There isn’t much a military career trains you for in modern civilian Britain, and after most of a lifetime abroad, he doesn’t have a real home, either. And London is much too expensive for his pension, so he finally throws up his hands and buys a rather run-down thatched cottage in the village of Frog’s End somewhere in the southeast.

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Matson, Morgan. Second Chance Summer.

NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Matson has been a bestselling YA novelist for a dozen years now, beginning with the excellent Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, and while she has mostly produced rom-coms (though with a serious side to them), this one is different. Taylor Edwards is part of a rather well-to-do Connecticut family, daughter of a high-powered courtroom lawyer and a retired ballerina, with a ridiculously smart but socially awkward older brother and a very talented younger sister. In her own mind, she’s the “ordinary” one, but that’s okay. And the Edwardses have a small summer home on Lake Phoenix in the Poconos, where they spent all of every summer for Taylor’s first twelve years, and where she had two close “summer friends” in Lucy and Henry, with whom she spent all of her time for a quarter of every year. And Henry was her first kiss when she was twelve.

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Addison, Katherine. The Witness for the Dead.

NY: Tor, 2021.

This is a follow-up short novel (a little over 200 pages) to Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and it demonstrates the same inventive world-building, but also shares certain problems with that earlier work. (This is a pen name, by the way, of Sarah Monette, who also has published a number of horror and weird fantasy novels under her own name.) The narrator is Thara Celehar, who was the investigator responsible for uncovering the facts behind the assassination (by airship) of the Emperor Varenechibel IV in the first book, which led to the accession of the present young emperor, so a certain amount of fame (or notoriety) has attached to him. He’s actually a religious professional, a “prelate,” though that word has nothing to do with its English meaning.

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Scalzi, John. The Kaiju Preservation Society.

NY: Tor, 2022.

John Scalzi basically does two types of novels. The first are adventures that mostly come in series and have a slightly more serious flavor. The others are standalones, like Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream, that display a special sort of of Scalziesque off-the-wall geeky nutball humor, and this is very much one of the latter. Which means you’re going to want to strap yourself in extra tight before take-off.

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