The Winter Girl by Matt Marinovich Doubleday/Penguin Random House, $24.95, 205 pages, ISBN 978-0-385-53997-5 It won’t officially be winter until the Twenty-first of December when the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year, happens. Mother Nature says otherwise. It’s been cold, gray and low freezing temperatures for some weeks in many parts of the country . . . a great time to start your personal reading
The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke Simon & Schuster, $27.99, 382 pages, ISBN 978-1-5011-0720-7 There’s a time in everyone’s life that only lasts for a few weeks of a certain special summer that many of us look back upon with nostalgia, affection, and sometimes, a genuine longing. Filtered through the long lens of a half century, we remember those days and weeks and months during the ‘50s as
Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters Mulholland Books/Little Brown, $26.00, 322 pages, ISBN 978-0-316-26124-1 Wow! The bad news is; it’s the last week of October and time for the last installment of our second annual MBR Freak Fest. But the good news is; we’ve saved the best for last . . . and it’s timely, as well as controversial and thought provoking given what’s been in the news of
The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, $26.00, 400 pages, ISBN 978-1-4555-2824-0 Ever had the flu? Not a run-of-the-mill cold with sniffles and sneezing, but the real deal, with chills, fever, congestion . . . the kind that makes every bone on your body ache and hurt so much you just can’t get out of bed? The kind that can put you in the hospital
The Bone Labyrinth by James Rollins WM. Morrow/Harper Collins, $27.99, 471 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-238164-4 Anyone who’s passed by a mass-market paperback book rack has probably seen the name James Rollins, even if they have never read one of his many action-adventure yarns featuring Commander Gray Pierce and the Sigma Force Team. In Rollins’s fictional world, the Sigma Group acts as the operational arm of DARPA: the Defense Advanced Research
The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin Ballentine Books/Random House, $28.00, 598 pages, ISBN 978-0-345-50500-2 Hey out there . . . it’s October . . . the month of election surprises, all Hallows Eve and the Day of the Dead. Here in America, most folks celebrate by dressing their kids up in weird or outlandish costumes and going house-to-house, begging for candy on the last day of the month.
Dodgers by Bill Beverly Crown Publishers, $26.00, 0290 pages, ISBN 978-1-101-90373-5 Regular readers and fans of the Mysterious Book Report are all aware by now that our primary focus is to encourage reading by discovering new and unknown crime fiction writers who show a lot of promise . . . someone an enthusiast can read, enjoy and grow with for years to come. An author you can tell your
Night Work by David C. Taylor Forge/Tom Doherty, $25.99, 318 pages, ISBN 978-0-7653-7485-1 Author David C. Taylor hit the literary ground running last year when his first crime-fiction novel entitled Night Life, featuring tough-guy Michael Cassidy was first published. Cassidy’s a classic, Phillip Marlowe kind of detective, working the mean streets of 1950s New York City at a time when the Cold War—with it’s potential threat of nuclear Armageddon—was
Mysterious Book Report No. 256 Cambodia Noir by John Dwaine McKenna Nestled between south Thailand and south Vietnam is the small Asian nation of Cambodia. Fronted on the Gulf of Thailand and bisected by the Mekong River, the capitol city is Phnom Penh. It’s a transit point for the opium-producing region known as the Golden Triangle. As such, it’s a lawless place where corruption is rampant, drugs are plentiful
Off the Grid By C.J. Box Putnam/Penguin Random House, $27.00, 371 pages, ISBN 978-0-399-17660-9 In today’s hi-tech world, it’s almost impossible to get away from all the must-see, must-have, must-buy devices that didn’t even exist as recently as fifteen or twenty years ago . . . gizmos we didn’t need or want until relentless, incessant, slick and highly persuasive advertising coupled with good old-fashioned peer pressure convinced us otherwise