PROPHET SONG by Paul Lynch

Unease escalates into an avalanche of chaos when a totalitarian regime takes over Ireland.  Eilish, a microbiologist, is left to manage her three teenagers and an infant after her husband is detained.  Plus, Eilish’s father’s dementia is getting worse, but he refuses to leave his home.  She has her hands full, and then her seventeen-year-old son joins the rebellion after he receives a conscription notice from the regime.  Eilish’s sister lives in Canada, so that it would behoove her to get the rest of her family out, but she stubbornly refuses to believe that things can get any worse, and she holds out hope that her son and husband will return home.  The situation continues to spin out of control, and the breakneck pace of the novel makes it frightening, to say the least.  In fact, this novel may supplant The Exorcist, which I read in 1974, as the scariest book I have ever read, and there is nothing supernatural about this one.  Also, the title is misleading for a book this gripping that feels all too real.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

What a refreshing departure this book is from the not-so-great critically acclaimed books I’ve read this year.  Ok, maybe refreshing is not the best word for a book about the grisly torture and murder of several Black children, but it definitely held my attention.  Titus Crown is the Black sheriff of a Virginia county with its share of Southern white nationalist racists, including some of Titus’s deputies.  The novel opens with a Black school shooter who kills only one person—a beloved white teacher.  Titus’s deputies bring down the shooter, and the county is divided along race lines in its support of the shooter or the victim, who turns out to be a violent pedophile.  The teacher had a partner in his crimes against children, and that sicko is still at large, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies in his wake.  Titus has his hands full not only with this case but also with his hot-headed brother, a deputy on the take, an old girlfriend who materializes, and his current girlfriend, who is not quite the firecracker that the old girlfriend is.  Plus, Titus is still wracked with guilt over a case that spelled his departure from the FBI and desperately wants a better outcome for this one.  He is a good man and a good sheriff, but he is also serving as a detective here, and we are rooting for him to find the clue that will be the linchpin to identifying the monster who is still out there before the body count goes any higher.

LOOT by Tania James

Abbas is a teenager who does woodworking in 18^th century India, alongside his brothers and his father.  His talent for making beautiful toys has come to the attention of the local ruler, despite Abbas’s father’s disdain for such trivial pursuits.  Soon Abbas finds himself employed to carve a large tiger that will also roar and play music; a French clockmaker named Du Leze will supply the sound effects.  This collaboration launches Abbas on an unexpected life of adventure that includes a deadly battle, a sea voyage, an attempted heist, and a conflagration.  I devoured this novel that features a variety of settings, an eventful plot, and charming characters.  Who could ask for more?  Plus, although the characters here are fictional, the tiger that was created for a sultan actually does exist and is currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  I must add a visit there to my bucket list.

THE MIGHTY RED by Louise Erdrich

Kismet Poe is graduating from high school and has two boyfriends.  One of them, Gary, is a popular athlete with a tendency toward recklessness, but he presents Kismet with an engagement ring, and she is too shocked to say no.  Her other boyfriend, Hugo, is planning to find a job in the oil fields so that he can earn enough money to win Kismet’s affection, whether she is married to Gary or not.  As for Kismet, she seems smart and industrious but allows Gary to coax her into a marriage she doesn’t really want.  Why she cannot extricate herself from this plan is somewhat of a mystery.  Her mother, Crystal, is devastated that Kismet is abandoning her college plans to marry Gary, while Gary’s mother is ecstatically planning a lavish wedding.  After Kismet reluctantly and hilariously says her wedding vows, she becomes something of a Cinderella figure, but Gary is no prince.  We, and Kismet, finally become privy to the details of an event that puts Gary in an even worse light, if that is even possible.  Since this book takes place in an agricultural community, Erdrich manages to weave in her concerns about the ecological impact of sugar beet farming, but she also sprinkles in more humor than I recall from her other novels.  In fact, this is my favorite book of hers since The Master Butchers Singing Club.  Crystal and Kismet are the delightful anchors here, and the storyline makes for an entertaining read.  Even Gary, with all his flaws, is more pathetic than despicable.

THE CHALK ARTIST by Allegra Goodman

At its heart, this book is a love story, and it is almost as addictive as the immersive video games described in it.  You can somewhat predict what happens when a very talented artistic young man named Collin---meets the daughter—Nina—of a mogul who owns a video game empire called Arkadia.  This book predates Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by years, and I liked this one much better, although I have to say that the gaming sections were not my favorites.  A side plot involves two sibling students at the high school where Nina teaches English lit.  One of those student’s schoolwork is suffering, since he sometimes games all night, aided and abetted by a female Arkadia employee—Daphne.  She has a dark allure that even Collin falls victim to, jeopardizing his relationship with Nina.  I felt that Arkadia was the villain here, somewhat personified by Daphne, replacing real life with a soul-grabbing fantasy world and preying on teenagers.  However, novels can be immersive as well, and one could argue that some of us are addicted to books, so who am I to judge gamers for their obsession or, for that matter, gaming companies for giving them what they want?  Then again, I don’t know any compulsive readers whose personal lives suffer because of books, do I?

HOLLY by Stephen King

The title character is a private investigator who has been hired by the mother of a missing young woman named Bonnie.  We readers know that Bonnie was abducted by two conniving and depraved elderly professors—Emily and Rodney Harris.  In other words, this is a thriller but not a mystery, or at least not a whodunnit.  We also know that Bonnie is not the first abductee whom the Harrises have locked in a cage and forced to eat putrid raw liver.  What?  In fact, we get to know all of the victims, so that the grisly fate that befalls them is all the more heartbreaking.  Holly is diligent in her quest to find out not only what happened to Bonnie but to determine if a serial killer is at work, as she becomes aware of one disappearance after another.   What these victims have in common, besides being acquainted with the Harrises, is that their disappearance is not deemed strange enough to warrant investigation, at least until Bonnie comes along.  Even in Bonnie’s case, the police are not entirely convinced that a crime has taken place.  If gruesome stories are not your thing, then you are probably not going to pick up a Stephen King book anyway, but be warned that he pulls no punches here.  Holly as our intrepid sleuth has no idea what motive is behind these abductions, but we readers learn soon enough and can only hope that Holly will prevent any further abductions.

IRON FLAME by Rebecca Yarros

Buckle up!  Fourth Wing was not a one-hit wonder, as this follow-up is just as breathtaking.  The author keeps a lot of plates spinning in the air without dropping a single one.  Violet and Xaden tackle a whole new set of problems in this world of dragons and magic that includes wielding lightning and commanding shadows.  Here we get some additional insight into Xaden’s past, some of which does not sit well with Violet.  I finally realized that their world does not seem so primitive, since magic basically replaces electronics, particularly when it comes to communication.  Magic even fuels their lighting.  Does it go too far?  Maybe occasionally, as new forms of magic keep popping up.  I can’t help wondering how much of this was in the author’s master plan and how much she makes up as she goes.  In any case, it’s a thrill a minute and a wildly exhilarating reading experience, with frantic battles, moral dilemmas, and a steamy love story that never quite settles into a comfortable relationship.  As for the non-human characters, Violet’s huge dragon, Tairn, gets all the best lines.

THE WEDDING PEOPLE by Alison Espach

What a treat this fluffy but delightful crowd-pleaser of a book is.  It is so much fun, even though Phoebe, the protagonist, does not like the word “fun.”  It is also fun-ny.  My favorite line is on page 147, when a particularly acerbic character says, “Littering is a slippery slope.”  OK, you have to read this line in context for it to be funny, and it seems somehow disrespectful to describe a book as funny when the main character is initially planning her suicide.  Phoebe decides to do the deed in a swanky hotel where all the other rooms are occupied by a wedding party, and she soon gets swept up in their family dramas.  Lila, the uber-rich bride, is aghast that Phoebe might ruin her wedding by committing suicide, but obviously we would not have a book if Phoebe actually went through with it.  I didn’t even mind that the plot is totally predictable, because it’s so entertaining.  And, for a beach read, or for any read for that matter, the characters are exceptionally vivid.  I sometimes found it disconcerting that the author would paraphrase part of a conversation, but I was OK with that.  I just have one question:  What are side bangs?  We are talking about hair here.

SMALL MERCIES by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat is a feisty, white “Southie broad,” to use her words, in 1974.  She has lived her entire life in the projects of South Boston, which now face the eruption of a racially-motivated conflict stemming from a judge’s order to bus white students to a predominantly Black school.  Then Mary Pat’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules, goes missing on the same night that a 20-year-old Black man is found dead in a subway station near where Jules was last seen.  Mary Pat has already lost her first husband to organized crime and her son to drugs, and Jules’s disappearance is the last straw.  She goes on the warpath, seeking out anyone who might have information on Jules’s whereabouts and becoming a volatile vigilante in the process.  She makes a series of shocking discoveries about her neighbors and about Jules but also about herself and how she has fomented hate and bigotry in her own daughter.  This is a gritty, visceral, violent tale of vengeance, but the unabashed hostile racism is what makes it hard to digest at times.  Dennis Lehane, I do hope this is not your last novel, because it is one of your best.  It is full of really striking observations, and there are a few moments that lighten up the dark nature of this book.  On page 234, we have this reflection from a cop: “Damn, Bobby thinks, if I’d met Mary Pat five years ago and she worked the street like this?  I’d have made lieutenant by now.”  No doubt.

SINCE WE FELL by Dennis Lehane

Rachel is a TV journalist who wants to find out who her father is.  Her mother has died and has always refused to divulge his identity.  Then Rachel’s career and her marriage take a nosedive after she has an on-air panic attack in Haiti.  We know from the prologue that Rachel will shoot her husband but apparently not her first husband.  Her second husband is Brian, a former private detective whom Rachel had tried to hire to find her father.  After the Haiti fiasco, Rachel becomes increasingly reclusive and rarely ventures outside her home, but Brian encourages her to face her fears.  Except for the violent prologue, we would wonder if Lehane has moved from thrillers to character studies, and with a rare female protagonist to boot.  Then Rachel discovers that Brian may be leading a double life, and the real action begins, in more or less typical Lehane fashion, with lots of twists and turns.  One reviewer suggested that the author wrote this book with a movie deal in mind, but I can’t complain.  I will want to see the movie, too.

PRAYERS FOR RAIN by Dennis Lehane

Sometimes I just want to curl up with nothing but Dennis Lehane novels, especially the ones featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.  Patrick is the narrator, and, along with his daunting pal Bubba, deters a stalker from continuing to bother Karen Nichols.  Six months later Karen has done a swan dive from the top of a tall building, and Patrick is determined to find out why.  She seems to have run into a huge spate of very bad luck, including the death of her fiancé.  Although Patrick and Angie have gone their separate ways, Angie soon becomes involved in the case, and our two favorite gumshoes are casting looks of longing at one another—again.  I just can’t get enough of these characters, and, although the twisty plot is front and center, their relationship and their sparkling banter is enough to keep me turning the pages.  And let’s not forget Bubba, who can’t resist an opportunity to blow things up and make the bad guys wish they’d never been born.  When he’s involved in a conversation, he gets most of the funniest lines.  The adversary in this novel is an elusive baddie whose mission seems to be finding his target’s weaknesses and exploiting those until his victim basically self-destructs.  His true motive, however, remains a mystery until the very end.

FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon

A New England midwife in 1789, Martha Ballard is a woman ahead of her time.  A champion of women’s rights, she is a compassionate champion of the many women bearing children who were conceived out of wedlock.  When an evil man, Joshua Burgess, turns up dead in the river, she testifies against Joseph North, who along with Burgess raped the pastor’s wife.  North, however, is a formidable opponent, given his wealth and standing, who wields power through threats and intimidation.  Martha attends to so many women that I found it difficult to keep them all straight, but Martha herself is a force to be reckoned with and is surrounded by a (mostly) supportive family, including her saint of a husband.  She does not suffer fools gladly, especially those who refuse to help themselves.  Some aspects of this novel seemed superfluous, including the existence of a rare silver fox whom Martha views as an omen.  Also, the book occasionally veers into the past and the events surrounding Martha’s marriage, and I rushed through these unnecessary detours, which could have been handled succinctly via Martha’s first-person narration. The pace of the main storyline, however, is brisk, as Martha rushes from one emergency to another.  The murder of Burgess sort of hovers in the background, never totally out of the picture and propelling itself to center stage from time to time.  There are enough evil men here and maligned women to fill two books, but the author failed to tie off one loose end regarding the fate of an unwanted newborn.  Martha, however, is the main attraction here and shows us what a woman with gumption and a strong sense of justice looks like, in any era.

VIGIL HARBOR by Julia Glass

What a fascinating cast of characters Julia Glass has conjured up for this novel.  Most of them live in an affluent Massachusetts town, but not all of the residents know one another, and I sometimes forgot about that.  However, Mike, a marine biologist, and Margo, a retired English teacher, do know each other, and their respective spouses have run away together.  Celestino is an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant whose residency status is a constant source of anxiety that his wife and son cannot really fathom.  Several more denizens of this community have their own chapters in the book, but a couple of interlopers with nefarious objectives bring danger to a community where people are not accustomed to locking their doors.  Generally, Julia Glass’s novels exude a sense of calm, even when the circumstances are dire, but this novel has a section that I would describe as gripping.  Though not a thriller by any means, here the author proves that she can produce some nail-biting suspense as well as deliver characters that we wish we could spend more time with.  She also throws in a bit of semi-magical realism with a tangential character named Issa who may be a selkie, shape-shifting between a human without a belly button and a seal.  I’m not sure what’s the point of making this character’s origin a mystery, but I rolled with it anyway.  Two of Issa’s lovers are prominent characters in the book; one thinks Issa is mentally unstable, and one thinks she is a supernatural being.  Definitely a head-scratcher there, but I assumed mental illness until late in the book when the author seems to be steering us toward a different viewpoint.  My chief gripe is that some of the chapters are in italics, and I did not want to linger there, just because of the font.

A HOUSE AMONG THE TREES by Julia Glass

What do an Oscar-winning actor, a celebrated children’s book author/illustrator, and a man dying of AIDS have in common?  They are all characters in this wonderful book, along with the main character, Tomasina (Tommy for short), who is the long-time live-in assistant to Mort Lear, the aforementioned author, who has died suddenly in an accident when the novel opens.  Tommy, as Mort’s executor, has a lot on her plate, including setting up a foundation for boys and explaining to a museum curator what Mort’s wishes were for his collection of drawings and manuscripts.  Tommy has devoted decades of her life to Mort.  She has no regrets about living in his shadow, as she has enjoyed the company of Mort and his fellow authors, has traveled the world for his book tours, and has accompanied Mort to numerous awards shows. I would not say that she lives vicariously through Mort, but her life has been tightly entwined with his for decades.  My favorite side-plot, however, is that of Nick Greene, who is set to play Mort in a Hollywood biopic and who wants to absorb as much about Mort’s life as possible.  The fact that Nick is humble and kind may seem a bit unrealistic, but fame is a relatively new phenomenon for him, and it has not gone to his head yet.  One wonders how long this will last, as everyone who meets him is starstruck.  This book’s plot takes a backseat to its characters, not all of whom are lovable, as well as the characters in Mort’s most celebrated books.  I did not want to come to the end of this book and thus allow these characters to live the remainder of their lives in my imagination rather than in Julia Glass’s.

FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros

This book reached out and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, with its passion, partially fueled by magic dragons, igniting the page, along with a generous helping of the f word.  This is an R-rated, super-addictive romantasy, which has Harry Potter elements to it but is definitely not for children.  Think more along the lines of Game of Thrones.  Also, I’m not sure how much it would appeal to men, so that I’ve now narrowed the audience down to adult women.  Much of the plot is predictable, but it’s still a thrill ride of the first caliber.  Twenty-year-old Violet is the first-person narrator who has to choose a quadrant in which to train for service to Navarre, and she has spent her entire life preparing to become a scribe—keeper of the archives.  However, her mother, a high-ranking military leader, insists that Violet become a Rider—of dragons, that is.  Many don’t survive the first test, which involves walking across a narrow, high parapet, where one misstep means falling to one’s death.  Those who do survive this and many other daunting tasks will have the opportunity to bond with a dragon who will endow them with magical powers.  As for the romance angle, it will be steamy enough to raise your heart rate.

PROPERTIES OF THIRST by Marianne Wiggins

The heart of this story is Schiff, an American Jewish lawyer from the Department of the Interior.  He has been assigned the unpleasant task of setting up the Manzanar Internment Camp in California shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Members of the filthy rich Rhodes family, whose land near the camp is being appropriated for a landing strip, are the supporting characters.  The patriarch is Rocky Rhodes (!), who is in a constant battle with the Los Angeles Water Department, who have helped themselves to the snow runoff in his valley.  Sunny Rhodes, Rocky’s daughter, owns a restaurant in town, and sparks fly between her and Schiff, although she is engaged to someone else.  What really lights up the page, though, is the dialog between Schiff and anyone else, and scenes that don’t involve Schiff are somewhat dry.  Fortunately, such scenes are infrequent.  This book stretches to over 500 pages, but I would have gladly followed Schiff for 500 more, especially since we are left with loose ends galore.  There is so much to savor here, though.  It has love, conflict, oppression, compassion, heartbreak, suspense—all wrapped in splendid prose.  The Japanese internment camp may be the reason that all these characters come together, but it is not really the centerpiece of the novel.  That honor belongs to the landscape and the characters, who do everything they can to lessen the severe hardship of the people whose lives have been upended by an event that they neither invited nor condoned.

DINOSAURS by Lydia Millet

Gil is a filthy rich unmarried man in his mid-forties, and he feels guilty about the fact that he did nothing to earn the money he inherited.  When his long-term girlfriend abruptly moves out, he decides to walk from Manhattan to a home he has purchased sight unseen in Phoenix.  This book is about Gil’s journey, which has nothing to do with the walk and everything to do with the people he meets in Phoenix, particularly the nextdoor neighbors.  Ardis and Ted become close friends with Gil, who also bonds with their 10-year-old son, Tom.  Some bad things happen here, including some injurious bullying and illegal hunting of birds at night, but, by and large, this is a feel-good novel, because the bad guys generally are held accountable.  There are a few sad events, but the author does not dwell on those.  Gil’s parents were killed by a drunk driver when Gil was four, and that driver contacts Gil after completing his prison sentence.  Gil’s response is a bit of a head-scratcher but further reflects his discomfort with having too much money.  Gil’s new girlfriend, Sarah, notes that Gil is willing to go to bat for everyone but himself.  Again, his feeling of unworthiness is in play here, but when he draws his ex-girlfriend into admitting why she stayed with him as long as she did, she sets him free.  I read this book all in one day, and what a pleasant day it was.

EITHER/OR by Elif Batuman

Selin, a sophomore at Harvard, was born in the U.S. but is of Turkish descent, speaks some Hungarian, and is learning Russian.  She has never had sex, never been kissed, and never been asked out on a date.  Her shoe size is eleven and a half.  This novel reads like a year-long diary and may contain an excessive amount of navel-gazing, but it had me at the first page.  Selin has a wry sense of self-deprecating humor, which contradicts her obsession with death, and she over-analyzes almost everything.  This novel is funny in an erudite sort of way and would appeal to anyone who likes a heavy dose of philosophy (Kierkegaard) with their fiction.  It is all about a personal journey—destination unknown—and  culminates in a really wild actual summer trip, sponsored by a company that recruits college students to investigate and write about foreign travel “off the beaten path.”  This whirlwind final section is absolutely my favorite part of the book and sets us up for a sequel.  Sign me up!  Selin’s freshman year is the subject of Batuman’s other novel, The Idiot, which I have not read.  If I had read it, I might be able to keep up with her vast circle of friends, with names like Svetlana and Lakshmi.  At one point she meets a guy whose name even she has trouble pronouncing, so that she just refers to him throughout the book as the Count, like a character in an Iris Murdoch novel.  To say that Selin is well-read is an understatement.  I am afraid that she puts me to shame in that department.

HEAT 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

This crime thriller is a sequel to the 1995 movie Heat, which I think I saw but do not remember at all.  No matter.  I loved this book anyway, and I think it stands just fine on its own, although at times the multiple timelines confused me.  Also, there are two groups of bad guys.  One group of bad guys, led by Neil McCauley, although they are really bad, sometimes do good things, but the other group of bad guys, led by Otis Wardell, are psychopathically bad to their core.  Then we have the good guys, primarily Detective Vincent Hanna, who is no saint himself.  He has a drug problem and doesn’t think twice about pushing a bad guy off a roof.  The two groups of bad guys cross paths at one point, resulting in your typical bloodbath.  Years later, although earlier in the book, Chris Shiherlis, who thinks of McCauley as a brother by another mother, lands in Paraguay, ready to start a whole new chapter in his life.  Shiherlis, rather than Detective Hanna, attains main-character status in this book, as he takes sides in a business war between competing Chinese families in Paraguay.  He eventually becomes involved in business activities that I never fully understood, but I do know these activities generally involved less overt violence than some of the heists he and McCauley pulled off.  Otis Wardell, on the other hand, keeps turning up like a bad penny, leaving tortured and bludgeoned bodies in his wake.  He is one scary, evil dude.  If gory stories make you queasy, skip this one, but personally I would rather read this kind of stuff than see it in living color on the screen. All that said, I still hope there’s a movie.

LUCY BY THE SEA by Elizabeth Strout

This novel takes up where Oh William! left off, but it’s not imperative that you read Oh William! first.  In fact, Strout’s characters from previous novels appear flit from book to book.  This one, though, is narrated by Lucy Barton, who headlines several of Strout’s novels.  Lucy herself is a respected author, who clawed her way out of poverty but still thinks of herself as a coward.  It’s 2020, and we all know what happened, especially in New York.  Lucy is very much in disbelief about the pandemic, but her ex-husband, William, a retired parasitologist, whisks her off to Maine before things get bad.  This is very much a COVID novel, as this pair hunkers down for the duration, all the while trying to ensure that other family members are safe as well.  Adapting to life in lockdown, away from her two adult daughters, is at first a struggle for Lucy, and she doesn’t even feel like writing.  The aforementioned daughters are dealing with challenges of their own, unrelated to but certainly not lessened by the pandemic.  William definitely comes off as a more likeable character in this novel than in the previous one, since he becomes more of a take-charge individual whose mission is to keep Lucy safe.  He also has to fend off pandemic deniers who don’t think steering clear of their asthmatic son is necessary, even though they have continued socializing indoors.  Lucy and William ultimately have to figure out how to put up with each other again while sharing a living space and having limited interaction with other people.  Lucy sometimes narrates whatever comes into her head, such as the fact that William doesn’t like to watch her floss her teeth.  As always, Strout’s prose is rich but simple, and I just can’t get enough of it.