INCOMING

Incoming:  There was a-knocking at my door and every book this side of the Mississippi walked in.  From Pensacola's Open Books Labor Day book sale to Saturday's Scratch Ankle Books sale, plus a ew stopovers at various thrift stores, there's a lot to catch up on...  

• Edward S. Aarons, Assignment Maltese Maiden.  A Sam Durrell spy-guy novel.  "Twice before Sam had crossed the infamous Madame Hung.  Each time he had endured agony, escaping at the final moment.  Last time he had finished her off -- he thought.  But apparently she was like the cat with nine lives -- and now she had kidnapped his boss, General McFee.  And without McFee the heart, the core, the brain of K section was gone.  The man who held all the top-secret, confidential, intelligence items locked in his cool, calculating, and impersonal mind was gone.  It was a crisis, a full-scale world crisis.  It was also bait...to get Sam Durrell."
• Mario Acevedo. The Undead Kama Sutra.  Humorous fantasy, the third (of seven) in a series.  "Felix Gomez returned from the war in Iraq a changed man -- once a soldier, now forever a vampire.  So the undead underworld put his skills to work as a private detective, specializing in the sordid, the sexy, and the supernatural.  After surviving aliens, nymphomaniacs, and x-rate bloodsuckers, it's high time for a vacation.  Now the aliens are back in a fiendish conspiracy with the U.S. government, and only Felix stands between them and the Earth women they covet.  But when an army hitman attacks Felix and the bodacious vampire sexpert, Carmen, not even the astonishing erotic powers of the Kama Sutra for the undead may be able to save hem."
• Peter Ackroyd, Three Brothers.  Literary novel, "An alternate autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume." (Sunday Telegraph)  "Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway are a trio of brothers born on a post-war council estate in Camden Town.  Marked out from the start by strange coincidence, each boy makes their own distinctive, curious path through 1960s' London.  From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs.  Everything is possible -- not only in the new freedom of the tie but also in London's timeless past.
• Steve Alten, Domain.  Thriller with science fictional elements.  "For thirty-two years archaeologist Julius Gabriel has investigated the Mayan calendar, a 2500-year-old enigma of time and space that predicts humanity will perish at the inter solstice of 2012.  Julius believes the Great Pyramid of Giza, Stonehenge, the desert drawings of Nazca, the site of Angor Wat, Teotihuacan, and the Kukulcan Pyramid in the Yucatan Peninsula -- the site of the ancient asteroid impact -- all represent ancient pieces of a global puzzle linked to the salvation of our species.  Ridiculed by his peers, Julius dies  before he can solve the doomsday prophecy.  Now, only one person can prevent our annihilation -- Julius's son, Michael, a patient locked up in a Miami mental asylum [...] Psychiatry major Dominique Vazquez reports to the Miami asylum to complete her graduate internship.  The new director assigns her to a special patient -- Mick Gabriel, a paranoid schizophrenic with a high IQ who attempts to charm her into believing his father's theory of the Apocalypse so he can escape.  What Dominique doesn't realize is that she represents Mick's last hope of saving humanity [...] As it has done for a thousand years, a serpent's shadow appears on the northern balustrade of the Kukulcan Pyramid...then as a rare galactic alignment occurs, a deep space radio transmission reaches Earth, activating the remnants of an object buried in the Gulf of Mexico.  It is the beginning of the end..."
• Dan Ames, A Hard Man to Forget:  Three Complete Reacher Books.  An omnibus of the first three Jack Reacher books, written with Lee Child's permission, by Ames:  A Hard Man to Forget, The Right Man for Revenge, and A Man Made for Killing.  These flew completely under my radar.  As far as I can tell Ames has published twenty books in the Jack Reacher Cases series, as well as four books in the Joe Reacher series, and four books in the Jack Reacher's Special Investigators series, as well as a whole lot of other novels.  With his brother Andrew taking over the reins of the original Reacher series, and with Yasmin Angoe starting a spin-off series about Frances Neagley (and an upcoming Neagley television series), it looks like Child is ready to sit back on his haunches and rake the money in.   Full disclosure:  I have no idea if Ames is worth the prive of admission, never having heard of him before, and I will probably never read these books -- but they are there, just in case,
• Ace Atkins, The Broken Place.  The third book in the Quinn Colson series.  "A year after becoming sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, Colson is faced with the return of an infamous murderer, released as part of a massive pardon by the outgoing governor.  James Dixon comes back to Jericho a changed man, preaching redemption and forgiveness.  Many people believe him -- even Colson begins to wonder -- but not the victim's family.  For them, it's a miscarriage of justice.  Another group doesn't believe Dixon -- the men in Parchmont prison who confided to him about their last job, a Wells Fargo armored-car robbery.  That money was sunk at the bottom of a Tibbehah pond, and they're sure that Dixon has returned to claim it all for himself.  There is only one thing they do about it:  break out of prison and head straight for Jericho themselves.  With Dixon, the escaped convicts, and their unknown connection to county kingpin Johnny Stagg, Colson and his deputy Lillie know  they've got their work cut out for them.  But they don't count on one more unwelcome visitor:  a tornado that touches down, creating complete havoc in the county for days...just as events come to a head.   Communications are out, the roads are impassable, and the rule of law, often tenuous, is just about to snap."  Also, The Heathens, the tenth book on the Quinn Colson series.  "Before he was Tibbehah  County Sheriff, Quinn Colson was a kid who got into a lot of trouble -- a lot of it.  So when juvenile delinquent TJ Byrd insists that she doesn't know who killed her mother, Quinn's inclined to believe her.  But no none else does -- not the town, not the local officials, nor her mother's boyfriend, and certainly not Quinn's friend and former deputy, U.S. Marshal Lillie Virgil.  Tj's  no fool, and when she senses she's about to take the fall for her mother's murder, she, her  boyfriend, her best friend, and her nine-year-old brother go on the run.  As Lillie Virgil tracks the kids across a trail of burglaries, stolen cars, and even a kidnapping, Quinn sets out to find the truth.  As the bloody evidence piles up, Quinn knows someone truly evil is at work here -- and that puts TJ and her friends in more danger than they can imagine."
• Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories.  Science fiction collection with eleven stories, 1999-2008; the limited edition and e-book versions of this book contains a twelfth story.  The book won a 2009 Locus Award for Best Collection; one story won the 2013 Seiun Award for Best Translated Story; one story won the 2006 Sturgeon Award for Best Science Fiction Story; one story won a 2007 Asimov Reader's Award; one story won a 2009 Locus Award for Best Novelette; while a number of the stories have been nominated for the Locus, Locus Online, Hugo, and Nebula Awards.
• Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch.  Mainstream novel.  "This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch.  Neil, the narrator, takes her class 'Culture and Civilization,' taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this withholding yet commanding woman.  While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil's grasp, Elizabeth's application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does.  In Elizabeth Finch, we are treated to everything we cherish in Barnes:  his eye for the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, a compelling swerve into nonfictional material (this time, through Neil's obsessive study of Julian the Apostate, following notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography especially, as nourishment and guide in out current lives."
• Mark Billingham,  Bloodline.  A Tom Thorne novel, the eighth (of thus far nineteen) book in the series.   "Murder squad veteran detective Tom Thorne solves the London police department's most difficult cases.  When he is called in to what seems like an ordinary domestic murder, he thinks he has caught a break,  A woman has been murdered by someone she knows.  A positive pregnancy test is found on the floor beside her.  Thorne plans to question the husband, arrest him, and return home to deal with his own deteriorating personal life.  But a mysterious sliver of bloodstained X-ray is found clutched in the victim's fist, and when similar evidence is discovered at other crime scenes around the city, Thorne realizes that this is not a simple case.  Is a serial killer at work?  The victims seem to have nothing in common but the X-rays, which begin to come together to form a terrifying picture that harkens back to the Raymond Garvey killings of the 1980s.  Garvey terrorized the women of London, killing seven in four months, and he would have killed more if he hadn't been arrested after a bar fight.   But Garvey was convicted years before.  He died in prison.  Does his legacy of terror live on?  It becomes clear that whoever the killer is, he knows his prey all too well and is moving through a list that was started long ago."
• Cara Black, Murder in the Marais.  The first novel featuring Paris private investigator Aimee Leduc.  "Aimee Leduc has always sworn she would stick to tech investigations -- no criminal cases for her.  Especially since her father, the late police detective, was killed in the line of duty.   But when an old Jewish man approaches Aimee with a top-secret decoding job on behalf of a woman in his synagogue, Aimee unwittingly takes on more than she was expecting.  When she drops off her findings at her client's house in the Marais, Paris's historic Jewish quarter, she finds the old woman strangled to death, a swastika carved on her forehead.  With the help of her partner, Rene, Aimee sets out to solve this horrendous murder, but finds herself in an increasingly dangerous web of ancient secrets and buried war crimes."  Nominated for an Anthony for best first novel.
• Ben Bova, Triumph.  Science fiction novel.  "What if...Winston Churchill had assassinated Stalin?...1945:  As the War in Europe winds to its bloody close, and a crazed Adolph Hitler awaits he end in n underground bunker in Berlin, the Allied forces -- led by FDR, Churchill, and Stalin -- look warily at the post-war world -- and at each other.  Once the war is over, who will control Berlin, as well as the future of Eastern Europe?  In the world we know, the Red Army marched on Berlin and the Cold War began.  In Triumph, however, Bova imagines another possible twist of fate, whose consequences result in both in a new world order and a gripping human drama that will keep you turning pages until the powerful conclusion.  Convinced that Stalin poses a threat to democracy as great as Hitler, Churchill launches a risky, covert operation involving a ceremonial sword, future cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and a small dose of lethal plutonium.  Mixing startling fictional surprises with genuine historical figures such as General George S. Patton and British spy Kim Philby, Triumph is an irresistible and compelling peek at a world that might have been."
• Dorothy Bowers, Postscript to Poison.  Golden Age detective novel.  "Cornelia Lackland ruled her home with an iron fist and a firm grasp on the pocketbook.  Her late husband -- she was his second wife -- had left her in charge of his two granddaughters and his self-made fortune.  John Lackland had risen from nothing to something, only to see his own children rebel against him and make bad, impulsive marital choices.  He was determined that his granddaughters would not follow in their footsteps.  Cornelia, a former stage actress whose own past was a  bit colorful, was more than up to the task.  Jenny and Carol lived as virtual prisoners, albeit quite comfortably, in a large house filled with servants in the old cathedral town of Minsterbridge, located just thirty miles from London.  What's more, the two cousins couldn't even be sure if Mrs. Lackland's death would set them free, since the provisions of their grandfather's will were sealed.  Things came to ahead one hot summer night in the 1930s when the old lady took ill, hovered on the edge of death, and then miraculously recovered.  But the night before she was to meet her solicitor to make yet lone more change in her will, she was found dead, the apparent victim of a poisoner.  Chief'  Inspector Dan Pardoe of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate an ever-growing list of suspects."  Bowers' writing career was cut short when she died from tuberculosis at age 46 after completing only five well-regarded novels.
• "Carter Brown" (Alan G. Yates), The Ice-Cold Nude.  A Danny Boyd mystery.  "Diamonds are a girl's worst friend, that's what I always say.  and take it from me, DANNY BOYD, I'm right -- dead right.  This particular case started with a gorgeous gal and a dazzling diamond tiara -- a $100,000 fiery fascinator that any girl might be tempted with....  this particular girl wasn't.  And because she wasn't she paid for her mistake with her life.  And I almost did...with mine."  Yates was an Australian writing phenom who inked 215 Carter Brown novels and some 75 novella-length stories over a period of 30 years.  When I was in college I sometimes would read five fast and easy Carter Browns in a day -- why study when you have a pile of Carter Brown books  by your side? 
• Freeman Wills Crofts, Inspector French's Greatest Case.  Mystery classic, the first novel to feature Inspector French, who went to appear in 29 further novels and  more than three dozen short stories.  "At 10 o'clock on a dreary November night in the back streets of London's Hatton Garden, a dead man is discovered beside an open safe in the offices of a firm of diamond merchants.  Inspector Joseph French arrives to investigate -- it doesn't take him long to realize that he's up against master criminal.  But, working his way through a snarl of false clues, hidden identities and devious motives, French finds a solution."  (Well, that  blurb doesn't tell you much about a book that can be "ingenious, lucid, reasonable, intricate, and exciting," as The Daily Telegraph has it.)
• Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying.  Urban fantasy.  "Lily is a photojournalist, stealing away from the music scene she usually covers to pursue bizarre rumors of 'animal people' living in the ruins of the Tombs -- the city's darkest slums.  Hank, on the other hand, knows the crumbling Tombs all too well.  This is the part of the city he calls home, creating a life and a ragtag family on streets where many fear to tread.  One night, in a  brutal incident, their lives collide -- uptown Lily and downtown Hank, each with a quest and a role to play in the street drama of the city's oldest inhabitants:  the animal people.  For the animal people walk among us.  Native Americans call them the First People, but they have never left, and they live disguised among us.  And they claim the city for their own.  Coyote the Trickster, wily, dangerous, and utterly compelling.  Jackdaw the storyteller, nursing the secret wounds of tragedy.  Raven, guarding the pot that holds the birth and destruction of life itself.  The unpredictable Fox, the deadly Cuckoos, the Wolves that prowl city streets.  And the Crow Girls, two charming young punks who delight in mischief, gossip, thievery...and who are much, much more than they seem.  Not only have Hank and Lily stumbled onto a secret, they've stumbled into a war.  But in this battle for the city's mythic soul, nothing is quite as it appears."
• Peter Dickinson, The Ropemaker.  Fantasy.  "Tilja has grown up in the peaceful Valley, which is protected from the fearsome Empire by an enchanted forest.  But the forest's power has begun to fade, and the valley is in danger.  Tilja is the youngest of four brave souls who venture into the Empire together to find the mysterious magician who can save the Valley.  and much to her amazement, Tilja gradually learns that only she, an ordinary girl with no magical powers, has the ability to protect her group and their quest from the Empire's sorcerers."  Winner of the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award.
• Brendan DuBois, Resurrection Day.  Alternate history science fiction.  "In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, a full-blown nuclear war erupted.  It decimated Russia and crippled the United States -- now a second-rate power dependent on European allies for survival.  Supplies are rationed.  Martial law rules.  And John F. Kennedy -- believed killed in the war -- is the most revile president in history.  In the shadow of this devasting chaos, a reporter has stumbled upon a story that'll change the course of history once again:  the murder of veteran of the '62 war.  A keeper of secrets.   The one man who knew the reality of the great war's origins, the lies about Kennedy's death, the identity of those who will kill again to keep history's secrets buried.  and the stunning truth that could give rise to America's resurrection -- or its ultimate destruction..."  This one won a 1999 Sideways Award for Best Long Form Alternate History.  DuBois, a talented two-time Shamus winner, blew his writing career after being sentenced to 3.5 to 7 years in prison in 2025 for possession of child pornography.
• George Alec Effinger, The Wolves of Memory.  Science fiction novel featuring Sandor Courane, who has appeared in a number of short stories by Effinger.  "When the bumbling idiots of the human race turned over their cares and woes to the infinitely superior mechanism of TECT, they clearly made a wise choice.  Take the case of Sandor Courane.  TECT offered to make him a college basketball star.  When it turned out he could barely dribble, TECT gave him a second chance as a science-fiction writer.  And when no one bought his books, TECT offered hm a comfortable job on the assembly line of a Japanese auto plant.  When Courane has the audacity to flunk as a screw-turner, TECT was even kind enough to send him to a rehabilitation progtam on a lovely pastoral plnet.  The end-of-the-line world called Home."
• Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter.  the classic nightmarish thriller.  "When Ben harper is taken to the gallows for a bank robbery killing, he leaves his young children John and Pearl to hide the $10.000.  Soon a strange preacher coms to town and claims to have known their daddy.  his knuckles are tattooed with the words 'LOVE' and 'HATE' and while he preaches to word of the Lord, darkness lurks in his heart, a knife lies in his pocket and he wants that money.  Davis Grubb's haunting Gothic masterpiece flows through the rural Depression era landscape with a lyrical magic of a fairy tale as John and his younger sister flee their malevolent hunter to a terrifying end."  Faithfully adapted for Charles Laughton's magnificent 1954 film featuring Robert Mitchem.
• Frank Gruber, The Gamecock Murders (originally published as The Scarlet Feather).  A Johnny Fletcher-Sam Cragg mystery.  " 'Something struck his arm:  there was a cutting sound and Johnny, shooting a glance down at his arm, saw that there was an eight-inch gash in the sleeve.  A gaff had cut it neatly.'  Johnny Fletcher has dodged all manner of two- and four-legged creatures in his hairbreadth career, but he really moved fast when he got penned up with a blood-crazed, steel-spurred fighting cock.  He moves almost as fast through this wild yard about poultry fanciers, blackmail and murder.  Starting off with a cold plunge into Lake Michigan (to rescue a damsel in distress, naturally), proceeding to he discovery of a corpse under a chicken coop, Fletcher and his cohort Cragg mix it up with millionaires, cops, ham-fisted farmers, and slick gamblers.  No tricks barred in this double-barreled mystery of fast talk and hard knocks."
• Mick Herron, The Last Voice You Hear.  The second in the Zoe Boehm (Down Cemetery Road) series.  "Oxford private investigator Zoe Boehm struggles with the aftereffects of her violent past as she hunts for a killer -- or has she become the hunted?  Zoe Boehm has harbored a distinct aversion to death ever since she shot the man intent on killing her.  So when Caroline Daniels takes a deadly fall in front of a train and her lover fails to turn up at the funeral, Zoe wants nothing to do with the case.   But Caroline's boss is persistent, an as Zoe attempts to unlock the secrets of a woman she's never met while in search of a man who could be anywhere, she starts to wonder if he's found her first.  And if he has, will that make her the next victim, or prove to be hdr salvation from a paralyzing fear?"
• L. Rust Hills, editor, Great Esquire Fiction:  The Finest Stories from the First Fifty Years.  Anthology with 38 stories from some of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century, only five of which are women.
• Stan Jones, Village of the Ghost Bears.  A Nathan Active mystery.  "Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active must figure out what connects a dead hunter on a remote Arctic lake with a year-old fatal plane crash in the Brooks Range and an arson at the Chukchi Recreation Center.  That fire killed eight people, including the police chief and the town's basketball star.  Active's investigation leads him to a lucrative polar-bear poaching operation and a brother an sister with an intense bond from a village famous for twins, polar bears, and schizophrenia."
• Stephen Graham Jones, The Angel of Indian Lake.  Horror novel, the third book in the Indian Lake trilogy.  "It's been four years since Jade Daniels last set foot in Proofrock, Idaho.  Since then, her reputation, and everything around Indian Lake, has changed drastically.  There's a lot of unfinished business in her hometown, from serial killers cultists to the rich trying to  buy Western authenticity.  But there's one aspect of the savage history of Proofrock, Idaho, no one's got the mettle to confront -- no one except a final girl, making her stand, this time for everything [...] It's the story of the American West written in blood.  And it's the story of one girl who doesn't know how to give up.
• Martin Limon, Jade Lady Burning.  The first novel in the George Sueno and Ernie Bascom mystery series set in 1970s South Korea.  "Almost twenty years after the end of the Korean War, the US Military is still present throughout South Korea, and tensions run high.  Koreans look for any reason to hate the soldiers who drink at their bars and carouse with their women.  When Pak Ok-suk, a young Korean woman, is found brutally murdered in a torched apartment in the Itaewon red-light district of Seoul, it looks like it might be the work of her American soldier boyfriend.  Sergeants George Sueno and Ernie Bascom,  Military Police for the US 8th Army, are assigned to the case, but they have nothing to go on other than a tenuous connection to an infamous prostitute.   Repressed resentments erupt around them, the pair sets out on an increasingly dangerous quest to find evidence that will exonerate their countryman."
• Elizabeth Linington, No Villain Need Be.  An Ivor Maddox mystery.  "The famous husband-and-wife sleuths, Sergeant Ivor Maddox and his wife, Detective Sue Maddox, both of the L.A.P.D., return again.  This time they are juggling half a dozen investigations at once.  To begin with, there is an enterprising team of daytime burglars, as well as a scandalous sex ring that is on the loose.  Fatal accidents occur that look quite suspicious, and somebody's lovely gray-hired grandmother and her two-year-old granddaughter have been brutally murdered with the murderer still unaccounted for.  Besides all the  burglaries, orgies, and murders the Maddoxes are in the midst of moving.  Sue is trying to persuade her widowed mother to come live with them when..."  (See also "Del Shannon," below.)
• Seanan McGuire, The Unkindest Tide.   An October Daye fantasy, the thirteenth in the series.  "Hundreds of years ago, the Selkies made a deal with the sea witch:  they would have the sea for as she allowed it, and when the time came, she would call in all their debts at once.  Many people assumed that day would never come.  Those people were wrong.  When the Luidaeg -- October 'Toby' Dayd's oldest and most dangerous ally -- tells her the time has come for the Selkies to fulfill their side of the bargain, and that Toby must be a part of the process, Toby can't refuse.  Literally.  The Selkies aren't the only ones in debt to the Luidaeg, and Toby has to pay what she owes like anyone else.  They will travel to the fabled Duchy of Ships and call a convocation of the Selkies, telling them to come and meet the Luidaeg's proce...or face the consequences.  Of course, nothing is that simple.  When Dianda Lorden's brother appears to arrest Dianda for treason against the Undersea, when a Selkie woman is stripped of her skin and then murdered, when everything is falling apart, that's when Toby will have to answer the real question of the hour.  Is she going to skink?  Or is she going to swim?"  
• Patricia Moyes, Johnny Under Ground.  A Henry Tibbett mystery.  "Emily Tibbett goes to her RAF reunion with an inexplicable sense of foreboding.  As a naive nineteen-year-old auxiliary officer she had fallen in love with handsome pilot 'Beau' Guest.  After the reunion, Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett suspects his wife is on the brink of uncovering a dangerous secret but he can't prevent her from delving into a past that is dark with menace."
• Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source.  Crime novel with surfers.  "People go to Huntington Beach in search of the endless parties, the ultimate highs, and the perfect waves.  Ike Tucker has come to look for his missing sister and for the three men who may have murdered her.  In that place of gilded surfers and sun-bleached blonds, Ike's search takes him on a journey through a twisted world of crazed Vietnam vets, sadistic surfers, drug dealers, and mysterious seducers.  He looks into the shadows and finds parties that drift toward pintless violence, joyless vacations, and highs you may never come down from...and a sea of old hatreds and dreams gone bad.  And if he's not careful, his is a journey from which he will never return."  This one was a finalist for the National Book Award and was the inspiration for the movie Point Break.
• "Flann O'Brien" (Brian O'Nolan [or O Nuallain], also known as "Myles na gCopaleen"). At Swim-Two-Birds.   The classic Irish novel of fantasy and farce.  "Flann O'Brien's first novel tells the story of a young, indolent undergraduate, who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin and spends far too much time drinking with his friends.  When not drunk or in bed he likes to invent wild stories peopled with hilarious and unlikely characters -- but somehow his creations just won't do what he wants them to.  A dazzling, impressionistic jumble of farce, satire, mythology and nonsense that gives full rein to its author's dancing intellect and Celtic wit.  [It is] both a brilliant comic send-up of Irish literature and culture and a plortrayal of Dublin to compare with Joyce's Ulysses."
• Thomas Perry, Fidelity.  Thriller.  "When Phil Kramer is shot dead on a deserted suburban street in the middle of the night, his wife, Emily, is left with an emptied bank account and a lot of questions.  How could Phil leave her penniless?  What was he going to do with the money?  And, most of all, who was he he if he wasn't the man she thought she married?  Jerry Hobart has some questions of his own.  It's none of his business why he was hired to kill Phil Kramer.  But now that he's been ordered to take out Kramer's widow, he figures there's a bigger secret at work -- and maybe a bigger payoff.  As they race to find the secret Phil Kramer so masterfully hid, both Hobart and Emily must question where their true loyalties lie and how much they owe those who have been unfaithful to them."
• Tim Powers, Last Call.  Fantasy, the first in the Fault Lines trilogy.  "Set in the gritty, dazzling otherworld known as Las Vegas, Last Call tells the story of a one-eyed professional gambler who discovers that he was not the big winner in a long-ago poker game...and now must play for the highest stakes ever as he searches for a way to win back his soul."  "A novel of the supernatural and the occult that is as hard-boiled, seamy and suspenseful as the best film noir." - Tom Robbins.  This one won the 1993 World Fantasy Award for best Novel and he 1993 Locus award for best Fantasy Novel.
• Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Diablo Mesa.  A Nora Kelly novel, the third in the series.  "Lucas Tappan, a wealthy and eccentric billionaire and founder of Icarus Space Systems, approaches the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute with an outlandish proposal -- to finance a careful, scientific excavation of the Roswell Incident site, where a UFO is alleged to have crashed in 1947.  A skeptical Nora Kelly, to her great annoyance, is tasked with the job.  Nora's excavation immediately uncovers two murder victims buried at the site, faces and hands obliterated with acid to erase their identities.  Special Agent Corrie Swanson is assigned to the case.  As Nora's excavation proceeds, uncovering things both bizarre and seemingly inexplicable, Corrie's homicide investigation throws open a Pandora's  box of espionage and violence, uncovering bloody traces of a powerful force that will stop at nothing to protect long-held secrets -- and threatens to engulf them all in an unimaginable fate."  The Preston & Child novels are one my most recent obsessions.  Case in point, Dance of Death, their sixth novel in the Pendergast series and Book 2 of the Diogenes Trilogy.  When last we left Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast, he had been entombed, a la "The Cask of the Amontillado," for several weeks by the evil Count Fosco (borrowed from Wilkie Collins' The Lady in White) and is presumed dead.  Well, so much for presumptions! "Two brothers.  One a top FBI agent.  The other a brilliant, twisted criminal.  An undying hatred between them.  Now, a perfect crime.  And the ultimate challenge:  Stop me if you can...  Dance of Death -- Vengeance is in the blood."  Also, two standalones:  Mount Dragon and The Ice Limit.  Dragon:  "Mount Dragon:  an enigmatic research complex hidden in the vast desert of New Mexico.  Guy Carson and Susana Cabeza have come to Mount Dragon to work shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet.  Led by visionary genius Brent Scopes, their secret goal is a medical breakthrough that promises to bring incalculable benefits to the human race.  But while Scopes believes he is leading the way to a new world order, he may, in fact, be opening the door to mass human extinction.  And when Guy and Susana attempt   to stop him they find themselves locked in a frightening battle with Scopes, hiss henchmen, and the apocalyptic nightmare that science has unleashed..."  Ice:  "The largest known meteorite has been discovered, entombed in the earth for  millions of years on a frigid, desolated island off the southern tip of Chile.  At four thousand tons, this treasure seems impossible to move, a nightmare of physics requiring incredible human ingenuity.  New York billionaire Palmer Lloyd is determined to have this incredible find for his new museum.  Stocking a cargo ship with the finest scientists and engineers, he builds a flawless expedition.  But from the first approach to the meteorite, people begin to die.  A frightening truth is about to unfold:  The men and women of the Ralvaag are not taking this ancient, enigmatic object anywhere.  It is taking them."
• Peter Robinson, Many Rivers to Cross.  A DCI Alan Banks novel.  "In Eastvale, a young Middle Eastern boy is found dead, his body stuffed into a wheelie bin on the East Side Estate.  Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team know they must tread carefully to solve this sensitive case, but tensions rise when they learn the victim was stabbed somewhere else and dumped.  Who is the boy, and where did he come from?  Then, in a decayed area of Eastvale scheduled for redevelopment, a heroin addict is found dead.  Was this just another tragic overdose, or something darker?  To prevent tensions from reaching to a boiling point, Banks must find answers quickly.  Yet just when he needs to be at his sharpest, the seasoned detective finds himself distracted by a close friend's increasingly precarious situation.  Banks needs a break -- and gets one when he finds the connection to a real estate developer who could be the key to finding the truth.  With so many loose ends dangling, there is one thing Banks is sure of -- solving the case will come at a terrible cost."
• Andrzej Sapkowski, The Tower of Swallows.  A Geralt, the Witcher, fantasy.  "The world has fallen into war.  Ciri, the child of prophecy, has vanished.  Hunted  by friends and foes alike, she has taken on the guise of a petty bandit and lives free for the first time in her life.  But the net around her is closing.  Gerralt, the Witcher, has assembled a group of allies determined to rescue her.  Both sides of the war have sent brutal mercenaries to hunt her down.  Her crimes have made her famous.  There is only one place left to run.  The tower of swallows is waiting..."  Trnslated by David French.
• John Scalzi, The Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony.  Science fiction novels in The Old Man's War series.  War:  "John Perry did two things on his seventy-fifth birthday.  First he visited his wife's grave.  Then he joined the army.  The good news is that humanity finally made it to the stars.  The bad news is that, out there, planets fit to live on are scarce -- and alien races willing to fight us for them are common.  So, we fight.  Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades:  brutal, bloody, unyielding.  Earth itself is a backwater.  The bulk of our resources is in the hands of the Colonial Defense Forces, and everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join up.  The CDF doesn't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living.  You'll be taken off Earth, never to return.  You'll serve two years in combat.  And if you survive, you'll be given a homestead of your own, on one of our hard-won planets.  John Perry is taking that deal.  He thinks he knows what to expect.  But the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine -- and what he will become is far stranger."  Ghost:  "The Ghost Brigades are the Special Forces of the Colonial Defense Forces, elite troops created from the DNA of the dead and turned into the perfect soldiers for the CDF's toughest operations.  They're young, they're fast and strong, and they're totally without normal human qualms.  The universe is a dangerous place for humanity -- and it's about to become far more dangerous.  Three races that humans have clashed with before have allied to halt our expansion into space.  Their linchpin:  the turncoat scientist Charles Boutin, who knows the CDF's biggest military secrets.  To prevail, the CDF must find out why Boutin did what he did.  Jared Dirac is the only human who can provided answers -- a superhuman hybrid, created from Boutin's DNA.  Jared's brain should be able to access Boutin's electronic memories.  But when the memory transplant appears to fail, Jared is given to the Ghost Brigade.  At first, Jared is the perfect soldier, but as Boutin's memories slowly surface, he begins to intuit the reasons for Boutin's betrayal.  As Jared desperately hunts for his 'father,' he must also come to grips with his own choices.  Time is running out:  the alliance is preparing its offensive, and some of our enemies plan worse things than humanity's mere military defeat..."  Colony:  "John Perry [the hero of Scalzi's Old Man's War] has found peace in a violent universe, living quietly with  his wife and daughter on one of humanity's many colonies.  It's a good life, yet there's something...missing.  When John and Jane are asked to lead a new colony world, he jumps at the chance to explore the universe once more.  But Perry quickly finds out that nothing is what it seems.  He and his new colony are pawns in an interstellar game of diplomacy and war between humanity's Colonial Union and a new, seemingly unstoppable alien alliance that has ordered an end to all human colonization.  As this grand gambit rages above, on the ground Perry struggles to keep the colonists alive in the face of threats both alien and familiar, on a planet that keeps its own fatal secrets.  For the survival of his colony and his family, Perry  must unravel the web of lies, half-truths, and deception spun around him and uncover the shockingly true purpose of his colony -- and fight to prevent a war that not only threatens to engulf his new home, but promises the destruction of the Colonial Union.  There are few options, and no margin for error, for Perry to keep his colony from becoming the last colony of the human race."
• "Dell Shannon" (Elizabeth Linington), With a Vengeance.  A Luis Mendoza mystery.  "The man was unusually well-dressed, his papers and his money undisturbed.  But obviously somebody had a grudge against him, for he had been neatly strangled, and left with a hand-printed card on his chest which read:  The Vengeance is Just.  That was just the beginning, and in the seven murders, or attempts at murder, which followed, there seemed not the remotest connection among the victims to provide a clue for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza and his hard-pressed colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department..."
• Whitley Streiber, The Omega Point.  Apocalyptic novel.  "December 21, 2012, did not mark an end, but a very dangerous beginning.  The year 2012 came and went.  The world prepared itself for impending disaster -- and nothing happened.  Or so it seemed.  But by 2020, energy from a supernova is disrupting the sun.  Solar storms ravage the globe with unprecedented ferocity, and debris in the form of comets and asteroids threaten to end life on Earth.  the wealthy of the world hide in vast underground bunkers, but even they know that they cannot survive without a miracle.  It all comes down to one man -- a young psychiatrist named David Ford -- who may hold the power to save he world.   Newly employed at the extravagant Acton Clinic, Ford encounters people who seem to understand what's happening...some may even possess an extraordinary knowledge of what's to come.  One of them is the beautiful and enigmatic Caroline Light, who demands more from Ford that he could possibly give.  Another is a cunning ex-CIA operative Mack Graham, a skilled killer with questionable loyalties...December 21, 2012, was not the end.  The end is the Omega Point:  where time stops."
• "Josephine Tey" (Elizabeth McKintosh), Four, Five and Six by Tey.  Omnibus of three mysteries.  The Daughter of Time: Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is bored while confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg.  He becomes obsessed with King Richard III and the case of the Prince in the Tower and decides to do his own historical investigation into their disappearance in 1483.  In 1990 the book was ranked as number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list by Britain's Crime Writers' Association.  The Singing Sands:  Grant's final case.  while taking an overnight sleeper to the Scottish Highlands, Grant comes across a porter trying to rouse a passenger, but the passenger is dead.  Grant continues on his way but is eventually unsatisfied when he learns that the inquest has ruled death by misadventure.  The man is finally linked to the discovery of the legendary lost city of Wabar in the Arabian desert.  A Shilling for Candles:  Grant investigates the death of film actress Christine Clay, who had instructed her lawyer to add a codicil to her will ln the day before her murder.
• Helene Tursten, Night Rounds.  An Inspector Irene Huss investigation.  "Irene Huss is a former Ju-Jitsu champion, a mother of twin teenage girls, the wife of a successful chef, and a Detective Inspector in the Violent Crimes Unit of Goteborg, Sweden.  And now she's back in the gripping follow-up to Detective Irene Huss.  One nurse lies dead and another vanishes after a local hospital is hit by a blackout.  The only witness claims to have seen Nurse Tekla doing her rounds,  but Nurse Tekla died sixty years ago.  Irene Huss of the Violent Crimes Unit has the challenge of disentangling wandering ghosts and complex human relationships to get to the bottom of this intriguing case."  Translated by Laura A. Wideburg.
• Jill Paton Walsh, The Attenbury Emeralds.  A Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mystery, the third by Walsh.  "It was 1921 when Lord Peter Wimsey first encountered the Attenbury emeralds.  the recovery of the magnificent king-stone in Lord Attenbury's dazzling heirloom collection made headlines -- and launched a shell-shocked young aristocrat on his career as a detective.  Thirty years later, a happily married Lord Peter has just shared the secrets of that mystery with his wife, the detective novelist Harriet Vane, when the new Lord Attenbury -- grandson of Peter's first client -- suddenly seeks his help to prove who owns the gigantic emerald. As Harriet and Peter contemplate the changes that the war has wrought on English society and their own lives, Jill Paton Walsh brings us a masterful new chapter in the annals of one of the greatest detectives of all time."
• Richard S. Wheeler, The Witness.  Western.  "Amos Burch is the most charitable man in Paradise, Colorado.  As owner of the bank, several businesses, and many of the outlying ranches, he's also the richest.  Paradise owes Burch its very existence, so when his bookkeeper, Daniel Knott, discovers him in a compromising position with one of his 'clients,' he accepts his employer's offer of a promotion in exchange for his silence.  But Burch is not the benevolent philanthropist the town believes him to be.  And when Burch's wife brings forth a suit for divorce on the basis of adultery, Daniel Knott finds himself in the middle of a scandal that will affect not only his family's future, but the entire town -- and pit him against the most powerful man in paradise..."  Wheeler, who published 73 western and historical western novels, was a five-time winner of the Spur Award and the recipient of the Owen Wister Award for his lifelong contributions to Western literature.  His books are always worth picking up.