DCL Book Chat

The setting for this novel begins during the mid-1960’s in riot torn Detroit and then moves to rural Rooks County, Kansas. Arthur Scott left a small Kansas town 20 years ago but is forced to return with his family to the farm life to escape the violence and racial strife in Detroit.

The family’s return to Kansas reopens several family and community secrets which includes the mysterious death of Arthur’s sister Eve, two missing little girls and the fact that Arthur’s sister Ruth is being beaten bloody by her husband.

The story is told mainly through the eyes of Arthur’s younger daughter, Eve-ee and son Daniel. Eve-ee becomes obsessed with her dead namesake and begins to ask uncomfortable questions. Daniel, the city boy, is trying to fit in with the rough and tumble farm boys and hopes that Kansas will make a man of him.

The author creates a haunting picture of the isolation and harshness of life on a Kansas farm. It is also an insightful look at the passion and violence that simmer just below the surface of a small town. There are elements of mystery, romance and coming of age with dark implications. One review called this story “Midwestern noir with gothic undertones.”

Susan

Love you more is the latest installment in Gardner’s series featuring Boston cop D.D. Warren and Massachusetts State Trooper Bobby Dodge. Brought together across jurisdictional lines and with awkwardness as former lovers, the two must work together to find a missing six-year old girl and find out why the girl’s mother, State Trooper Tessa Leoni, is claiming she killed her husband in self-defense when all the evidence points in another direction. I loved the chemistry between the main characters and their differing approaches to solving the crime. This book is very fast-paced and character driven.

Allison

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? is a book about nothing much. Just about a life slowly unfolding and a talent unused. Just about a life spinning out of control as fast and as quietly as a rocket orbiting the moon. It’s a book about the distance we have to travel in order to make relationships work. It’s a book about the footprints we leave behind and the untamed territory ahead; like the first step on the moon.

Twenty-nine-year-old Mattias had been content, no, he has worked, to be an anonymous cog in life. He wants to be useful, but like a superhero he wants any rescues to be incognito. He wants nothing to change and for things to be fixed for all eternity – just like the moon footprints of Buzz Aldrin, the person Mattias admires most in the world. Mattias thinks that, like Buzz, it’s always best to be in second place, to not be noticed and fussed over. But it turns out that Mattias is wrong about Buzz. He didn’t fade away. Being in second place didn’t protect Buzz from life’s hardships, and it doesn’t protect Mattias either.

Told from an intimate first-person rambling perspective, with run-on sentences to rival Faulkner, Norwegian author Johan Harstad has created an intensely sensitive character in Mattias. As he stumbles through his young life the reader is drawn into his world of doubts and fears at the same time that we are cheering him through his successes. By focusing on his quotidian movements we become attached to Mattias as if he were sharing our space, and when he responds with humor and truth we burst with pride.

The harsh landscape of the Faroe Islands provides the perfect setting for Mattias as he and a crew of other sensitive souls heal their wounds and find their rightful places in life. When Mattias suddenly inspires the group to set themselves adrift, we realize that this journey might as well be a moon walk, and it just might be the step that changes a life forever.

Harstad won the 2008 Braga award – previously won by Per Petterson. This, his first novel and his first book to be translated into English, was published in 2005 in Norway and has already been made into a Norwegian television series.

Laura J.

Ten years ago forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway helped uncover an Iron Age henge at the Saltmarsh on the Norfolk coast of England. Now she has been asked by DCI Harry Nelson to assist when bones are found in the marsh. Are they the bones of a girl who has been missing for ten years or are they another Iron Age find like the henge?

Griffiths deftly describes the harsh and lonely Saltmarsh which Galloway now calls home. She has also created very personable characters and an intriguing plot. This is the first in a series and is followed by The Janus Stone and The House at Sea’s End.

Griffiths won the 2011 Edgar Allen Poe: Mary Higgins Clark award for The Crossing Places.

Allison

Back of Beyond is another thriller from NYT best-selling, Edgar Award Winner C.J. Box. Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop that readers first met in Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, and he left Denver at the end of that story. Now, in Box’s newest thriller Back of Beyond, Hoyt is back home in Montana, where the Lewis and Clark Co. Sheriff’s Dept. has grudgingly hired him.

Hoyt drinks too much, chain smokes, makes snap decisions that don’t serve him well (like shooting the coroner), but he tries. He loves his son and wants to be closer, but due to his alcoholism his ex-wife isn’t real keen on getting drunken calls or visits. His partner, Larry, doesn’t like him, trust him or want to work with him. And to top it off – someone has murdered the only person who had befriended him and supported him – his AA sponsor.

After the murders start stacking up and lead him to a pack trip heading into Yellowstone – the one his son, Justin, is on with his ex’s boyfriend, Hoyt spins out of control and the wild ride into Yellowstone Park begins. Hoyt can barely keep his addictions at bay, let alone ride a horse into the wilderness. Readers will find they, too, are holding on tightly as the story twists, turns and bucks them from one dangerous scene to the next.

Box lets readers know that each person has come on the trip for a reason. There’s a dad trying to connect with his two daughters, one who loves nature and the other who loves cell phones, Hoyt’s son, Justin, and “Mr. Richness” who is hoping to gain the teen’s approval, the Wall Street guys seeking a City Slickers fantasy, the estranged couple, a mysterious single woman and the loner. They just don’t know that there’s a murderer among them.

Box writes of Yellowstone’s beauty and deadly features honestly because he’s been there so many times as a guide. He’s probably done more than 80 trips with a variety of nature enthusiasts, fly fishermen and greenhorns. This is exactly why his all of his books ring true. He writes what he knows. He creates a believable cast of characters that are as real as your next door neighbor. Back of Beyond will keep readers turning pages until the last one when they can finally let go and breathe again.

Lisa