Fiction

Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Cogan. "Photojournalist Elizabeth Burns passes out while attending a production of Medea with her husband. The play caused a painful childhood episode to resurface in her mind – the disappearance of her best friend, April Cassidy, at the age of 6. What happened had always been a mystery, and Elizabeth is compelled to investigate."

Big, Little Lies by Liane Moriarty.  This was on the list last year, but so many of you told me you loved it, I'm promoting it to a top pick this year. VERY beachy.  (NB: Moriarty has another book coming out in July called Truly Madly Guilty)  “Another hilarious novel from Moriarty whose familiar female characters share all of the petty conceits the rest of us do – but articulate them far more humorously. Voted top comedy on Goodreads last year, this story involves a murder at an elementary school parents’ party, but neither the killer nor the victim are revealed until the end.  Among the hysterically recognizable cast of characters: the members of a “support group for the parents of gifted children.” "Murder mystery among parents at a private school in Australia.  Twists and turns.  Characters you will love and hate and fight for." "I had an absolute blast reading this book about parents at a little school in Australia. It is clear from the start that someone was killed at a school fundraising event, though we don't know who or what the circumstances were. Moriarty takes us back through the months leading up to the event, tying the stories of various characters together in an artful fashion. She intersperses this with little snatches of dialogue that are evidently from police interviews with parents who attended the party. These are HYSTERICAL. So, yes, it's a satire. But it's not an over-the-top, cover-to-cover campy satire (those exhaust me). It's also a murder mystery, a romantic story, a friendship story. It's very clever but also very human with endearing characters and love-to-hate characters, and some in between. I just had the best time." "Why did I resist this book for so long? This book was a blast - - overall the story has a light tone and yet Morriarty covers some pretty heavy topics including spousal abuse and bullying. The characters were well drawn, sympathetic, the humor was actually quite funny and the observations about marriage, the parenting culture, and class differences among friends were all spot on. I originally dismissed this as chick lit and I guess it is but it makes me realize that not all chick lit is created equal."

Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore.  Gothic suspense.  From Amazon:  Plain scholarship student Mabel Dagmar is surprised when her glamorous blue-blooded roommate at their prestigious east coast university befriends her, even more when Genevra "Ev" Winslow invites her to spend the summer at Bittersweet, her cottage on the sprawling Vermont estate owned for generations by her family.  Mabel falls in love with the place, finds a love interest and begins to feel like one of the Winslows.  But she soon discovers a dark side to this family - will she keep the secrets?  Lots of twists will keep you turning the pages.

The Black Cat: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) by Martha Grimes. "DC writer Martha Grimes brings back her hero Richard Jury for a moody, funny, twisty-turny mystery. I love the way she writes - it's like Dorothy Sayers meets PG Wodehouse." (Ed: Now I am wondering if Dorothy Sayers ever met PG Wodehouse. They were about the same age.)

Black List: A Thrillerby Brad Thor. “This is the eleventh book in Thor’s series about ex-Navy Seal Scot Harvath. It opens with an attempt to kill Harvath and his entire company in what turns out to be part of an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. The pseudonymous black list is buried in some government basement somewhere, seen only by the president and a handful of advisors. Once your name is on the list, it never comes off, until you are dead. Great thriller.”

Blessings by Anna Quindlen. “…low-brow but is engaging and has big themes.” Amazon: This powerful new novel by the bestselling author of Black and Blue, One True Thing, Object Lessons, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life begins when a teenage couple drives up, late at night, headlights out, to Blessings, the estate owned by Lydia Blessing. They leave a box and drive away, and in this instant, the world of Blessings is changed forever. Richly written, deeply moving, beautifully crafted, Blessings tells the story of Skip Cuddy, caretaker of the estate, who finds a baby asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep her, and of matriarch Lydia Blessing, who, for her own reasons, decides to help him.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. A story within a story within a story of two privileged girls raised by a distant single father.  The book opens as one of the girls commits suicide in 1945 but leaves behind a novel, which becomes famous, about lovers who write a story of a blind assassin on a distant planet.  Her sister recounts their lives and explains the family history and tragedies since her sister’s death, her chapters intertwined with chapters from the novel. Reality and fiction come together in the end.

Blindness by Jose Saramago. A description from Amazon: "In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind….Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness…So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege…"

Blood and Beauty: The Borgias by Sarah Dunant.  “Despite the frothy title, this is actually a beautifully written and researched novel of the notorious Borgia family in 15th century Rome. The characters are so vividly sketched that it reminded me of of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy ("Wolf Hall," etc.) Definitely superior to Dunant's earlier novels set in Florence. And the best news:  Dunant says a sequel is coming soon.”

The Bloodletter's Daughter by Linda Lafferty - This is a historical fiction novel set in the 1600's in Austria that was inspired by a real-life murder that threatened to end the Hapsburg Dynasty. It follows King Rudolf's illegitimate son, Don Julius and his descent into madness and obsession with the daughter of the town barber/bloodletter. This book utterly fascinated me. It is dark, definitely depraved at times, but not without hope and redemption.