Johnson, Abigail. Every Time You Go Away.

Don Mills, ONT: Harlequin, 2023.

Abigail Johnson is an always reliable author of high-quality romcoms, and this one is no exception. But in most of her books, while there’s plenty of romance, there often isn’t a lot of comedy. Johnson doesn’t go in for fluff, and that’s true here, as well. Rebecca James has lived in the same house in Arizona nearly all her life, and next door lived Ethan Kelly, “He was my first friend, my first kiss, and the one person I trusted with all my secrets even as he held back so many of his.” The thing is, it was actually his grandparents’ house and Ethan only lived with them intermittently — when his addictive mother periodically felt guilty for dragging her young son around with her, from flophouse to druggie boyfriend to living in their car. And then she would park Ethan with her parents and disappear for a month or two or ten while she made an effort to rehabilitate herself.

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Harkaway, Nick. Karla’s Choice.

NY: Viking. 2024.

I will say first that while I enjoy espionage novels — some of them — my tastes in that regard are pretty specific. James Bond is pure comic book. That stuff makes for exciting movies, but it bears not the slightest resemblance to real world intelligence work, and never did. Tom Clancy is not much better, frankly. Graham Greene and Eric Ambler and Len Deighton and Mick Herron are quite good. But John Le Carre is several heads and shoulders above all of them. He gets down into the nuts and bolts of the secret Cold War, a very gritty, cold-blooded and psychologically enervating world indeed. I’ve read every book and novella he ever wrote, and all the Smiley books at least twice each. And I always emerge with newly-discovered nuances and understandings. So this engrossing tale is custom-made for me.

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Swierczynski, Duane. Secret Dead Men.

London: Titan Books, 2024.

This was Duane’s very first novel, first published in 2004, but I didn’t discover it until after I had read a couple of his early noir crime novels, Revolver and The Wheelman, which hooked me on his idiosyncratic style. Secret Dead Men is very different from his later work; the theme is organized crime but the structure of the story is strongly science fictional, and he pulls off the genre-bending very successfully. This new 20th anniversary edition has been reworked and heavily reedited in the light of two decades of subsequent writing experience, and the style is now much smoother that I remember.

The protagonist, if you can call him that, is Del Farmer, and he’s literally a dead man walking. Five years ago, he was an investigative journalist working a story about a criminal organization based in Las Vegas, but the people he was looking into took it poorly and ha him blown up. Now he’s a collector of other souls and he’s still investigating the Bad Guys, but he’s also out for revenge.

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Phillips, Rebecca. These Things I’ve Done.

NY: Harper, 2017,

Seventeen-year-old Dara Shepherd is the narrator throughout this definitely non-comedic Young Adult romance novel, but the narrative progresses in alternating chapters. It starts with her return from a year of self-imposed exile, living with her aunt and uncle across the state and attending a private school surrounded by strangers. A couple of months before she made the decision to leave, her best friend since elementary school, Aubrey McCrae, tripped and fell into the street during a bit of after-school horseplay, and was run over and killed by a pickup that seemingly came out of nowhere. And Dara is convinced it was all her fault, for a number of reasons, which we will learn about in some detail as the story progresses. What’s more, she’s sure everyone else blames her, too — especially Aubrey’s younger brother, Ethan.

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Moriarty, Liane. Here One Moment.

NY: Crown, 2024.

Moriarty, probably Australia’s best-known author these days, has a way of hooking you right off the bat, and usually in a seemingly ordinary way. This time, she takes the whole first chapter to describe the late-middle-aged gray-haired lady traveling alone on a delayed flight from Hobart to Sidney by all the things she doesn’t do. She doesn’t require assistance boarding, or get drunk, or complain to the cabin crew about the crying baby, or do anything else to make people notice her. She’s completely unremarkable and unmemorable, “until she does what she does.” And if that line doesn’t get your attention, I can’t imagine what would.

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Nowlin, Laura. If He Had Been With Me.

Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2013.

This very involving story was marketed as a Young Adult romcom, but I don’t think that’s accurate. There’s a strong romantic theme, yes, but almost no humor in the usual sense, and definitely no comedy. (Plenty of irony, though.) What’s more, it all ends with a terrible tragedy — and we are informed of that impending event in the opening pages, so it will be hanging over you constantly as you read. So, it all begins — and ends — with the death of nineteen-year-old Phineas Smith, known everywhere as “Finny,” and about to depart for college, on a highway late at night in a small town near St. Louis. He and Autumn Rose Davis, the narrator, were best friends in the womb, their mothers (whom they jointly refer to as “The Mothers”) having been best friends since childhood and then being “co-pregnant.” They were born two weeks apart and this is the story of their lives together, especially their four years in high school. Or, as Autumn says, “This is the story of me.”

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Dawson, Maddie. Match Making for Beginners.

Seattle: Lake Union, 2018.

This author has been developing a reputation for her romance novels with plots of depth and complexity and with characters the reader really comes to care about. She also has a knack for colloquial and very individualistic dialogue, which is a lot of fun to read. Also, like many heavy readers who are also film fans, when I read a particularly cinematic novel like this one, I like to cast it in my mind for the big screen. And I honestly can’t imagine who I would cast in the role of 85-year-old Blix Holiday, one of the two stars of the story, but it would certainly be a plum role for an inventive actress.

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Giffin, Emily. The Summer Pact.

NY: Ballantine, 2024.

Three young women and one guy meet randomly in the basement lounge of their dorm at the University of Virginia a few days into their freshman year — Hannah is from Atlanta, Summer is from the Chicago suburbs, Tyson is from the Washington, DC elite, and Lainey is from Encinitas, a surfer town near San Diego. They fall into a long, rambling getting-acquainted conversation, and within weeks, they’re a foursome. And while they’re all very different, by the end of college, they’re lifelong best friends — “my people,” as Hannah says. (The three women all are white, by the way, while Tyson is black — and that will become both a personal issue and a background theme in the story.) And then, just a few days before graduation, Summer, the acknowledged leader of the group, a stellar student headed for med school, and a multiple All American marathon runner, kills herself.

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Forman, Gayle. If I Stay.

NY: Dutton, 2009.

This is something of a landmark young adult novel and its basic theme has been successfully adopted, with original variations, by several other authors since — though this first one also invites comparison with Alice Seebold’s The Lovely Bones. And the story opens with a line that will certainly get your attention: “Am I dead? I actually have to ask myself this?” The narrator is Mia Hall, the oldest of two kids in a happy and loving family near Portland, Oregon. Her dad used to be a punk rocker of some regional renown and is now a sort-of hipster middle school history teacher. Mom was a rocker chick with a passing resemblance to Debbie Harry, the language of a stevedore, and a knack for getting her own way.

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Connelly, Michael. The Waiting.

NY: Little, Brown, 2024.

This is the 25th novel that Harry Bosch has appeared in since the series began in 1992. He had a long career as an LAPD detective, but real time passes in the series, so he’s definitely getting on in years. There are also two popular spin-off series — one featuring his half-brother, the “Lincoln Lawyer,” and the other focusing on Detective Renée Ballard, whom he unofficially mentored. Harry is a supporting character to a greater or lesser extent in all of the later books, too. And this time, his daughter, Mattie, who has been a background character in the past dozen books, has been on uniformed patrol for three years, but now she’s joining the active cast. Continue reading “Connelly, Michael. The Waiting.” →