THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman

If I wanted to read short stories, I'd pick up a short story collection, and that's what this is. Each chapter offers a telling glimpse into the personal life of one of the staffers, plus a neurotic reader, at a Rome-based English-language newspaper. Unlike Olive Kitteridge, in which Olive appears in every story, this book has no binding character, except the newspaper itself, which is struggling, like most print media news organizations. It seemed to me that the lives of the characters mirrored the downhill slide of the paper. There is some overlap among the stories, which may be enough for some readers, but I felt puzzled at the end of each one. Several of the stories involve rather bizarre romantic relationships or encounters, particularly when the CFO finds herself attracted to the man seated next to her on a plane, whom she happened to have fired recently. A couple of the women are desperate types, allowing themselves to be manipulated or, in one case, repeatedly dialing a man who made the mistake of kissing her once. To be fair, I have to admit that a couple of the men are fairly desperate, too, and even manipulated, as is the wannabe stringer in Cairo who finds himself at the mercy of a blustery guy who may be his competitor for the job. I can certainly understand why Christopher Buckley read this book twice. Somehow I want to revisit and remember these stories, embarrassing and unpleasant as some of them are, and yet at the same time I'm not sure I want to relive the urge to yank these misfits up by the collar and tell them to get a grip.

ASYLUM by Patrick McGrath

The title has a double meaning. Most of the action takes place in a mental institution where the narrator, Peter Cleave, is a psychiatrist and administrator. Toward the end of the book he offers asylum, in the form of marriage, to Stella Raphael. Initially, Stella is the beautiful wife of Max, a deputy superintendent at the hospital, in line for the top job when the current chief steps down. Then Stella derails his career plans by running off with an escaped inmate, Edgar Stark. Though not exactly riveting, the plot moves along at a decent clip, and I was interested in finding out both Edgar's and Stella's fate. The tone of the narration, that of a mild-mannered, even-keel, but not quite objective psychiatrist, contrasts sharply with the lust and jealousy that absorb the two main characters.

DELIRIOUS by Daniel Palmer

Charlie Giles isn't sneaky. In fact, he's quite overt in his elimination of all obstacles in his path to the top of the high-tech world. He's ousted his business partner for using company money to fund his gambling habit, and he's fired his best quality engineer for leaking product security holes to the competition. Sounds like Mark Zuckerberg meets Julian Assange. As the flawed protagonist, Charlie isn't any more likeable than either of these two men. In fact, that would be my biggest complaint about the book is that I wasn't that concerned about Charlie's fate, but it's a thriller, after all, and character development is not the top priority. Since I'm a software developer myself, the subject matter also turned me off initially. I really prefer to read about a milieu that's not so mind-numbingly familiar, but this story is exotic in other ways. Charlie's brother, Joe, is a schizophrenic who struggles to maintain a semblance of normality. Their father, too, was schizophrenic, and now Charlie appears to be the victim either of a massive techno-conspiracy or the same mental health condition that plagues his brother, or, even more terrifying, a multiple-personality disorder. On some level, it reminded me of The Echo Maker by Richard Powers in which a man with a neurological disorder invents an outlandish conspiracy theory to explain his delusions. In this case, we assume that Charlie is ruthless but sane, and then doubt creeps in. The action is fast-paced, including a mental hospital breakout, a car submersion, and a wrong-way police chase. I may have guessed most aspects of the ending, but that just meant that I was racing to the end for confirmation.

WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson manages to keep a lot of balls in the air in this literary thriller full of preposterous coincidences. This is her third book featuring Jackson Brodie, a former policeman and PI, who notes that "a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." Thanks to the wreck of a train that he shouldn't have been on, Jackson is reunited with Inspector Louise Monroe, and although they have a barely suppressed hankering for each other, they're both married to someone else. Thrown into the mix is Reggie, a resourceful teenage girl who works as a mother's helper to Dr. Joanna Hunter, who has gone missing. Little does Reggie know that Dr. Hunter was the sole survivor of a killing spree 30 years ago in which Andrew Decker, recently released from prison, killed Joanna's mother, siblings, and dog. To top it off, Dr. Hunter's husband Neil has apparently gotten himself into some financial trouble and may have torched his own arcade for the insurance. Could he be in involved in his wife's disappearance? Toss in another murderer on the loose and Reggie's no-good brother, and you've got more than enough incentives to keep the pages turning. The real star of this show, though, is the witty, pitch-perfect swapping of barbs, especially between Jackson and the wonderfully sharp-tongued Louise, between Louise and her young sidekick, Marcus, and between Jackson and his nonplussed caregivers after the train wreck. Reggie has some pretty good lines, too, and employs her favorite word, "sweartogod," whenever applicable to prop up a true or false assertion. It's not all fun and games, though, and be warned that this book has more than one very dark moment.

ALICE I HAVE BEEN by Melanie Benjamin

Alice Liddell is the daughter of a dean at Oxford. Charles Dodgson, known to most of us as Lewis Carroll, is a professor there, who routinely takes Alice and her two sisters, Ina and Edith, out for picnics and boating excursions. Alice is clearly his favorite. She is not the prettiest—just the spunkiest. Mr. Dodgson dreams up a dream for Alice and tells the story during one of their outings. Alice loves being the star of the tale and begs him to write it down. The rest is history. Well, not exactly. I guess we'll never know if Mr. Dodgson was a pedophile or just a lonely man who enjoyed entertaining children. Of course, there are all those photographs that he made of young girls, including Alice, in somewhat provocative poses. On the other hand, Alice comes off as a bit of a Lolita, acting innocently coquettish without grasping the impact on poor Dodgson or the possible consequences. His relationship with the Liddell girls is broken off and Alice's reputation soiled for reasons she doesn't understand or perhaps remember. The book follows Alice into old age, and her life is full of tragedies, both related and unrelated, to the Dodgson business. As a child she had hoped never to grow up and ironically meets Peter Llewelyn-Davies, who was the inspiration for Peter Pan. Alice does live on as a child in the Lewis Carroll novels but hesitates to embrace the story or even read it, because she doesn't want to revisit what really happened with Dodgson. Benjamin uses suspense to keep our interest, as we, too, want to know what caused the sudden breach in their relationship. That and just the novelty of imagining Alice of Wonderland fame as a real person make this book an enjoyable read, but the author's frequent habit of burying sentences within sentences, set off by dashes, was annoying and prompted a lot of rereading. Although a minor theme of the book is that of accepting and embracing one's identity, even when it includes a modicum of celebrity, its more overriding message is that of facing and accepting one's mistakes, forgiving all the guilty parties, and hoping that they have returned the sentiment.

ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith

Wellington is a fictitious college somewhere near Boston. Howard is a white art history professor who cheated on his black wife, Kiki, with a white poetry professor, Claire. Howard is a staunch proponent of affirmative action and liberal politics in general, and Howard's nemesis, Monty, a black professor, is a stalwart of the religious right who wants to take the "liberal" out of liberal arts. There is a fair amount of contention among Howard's colleagues over Monty's right to espouse his right-wing opinions in a series of lectures and over Claire's right to include poor but talented students in her very exclusive poetry class, even though they are not enrolled at Wellington. These issues, however, are not as compelling as the more intimate ones facing Howard's family. The book opens with the very uncomfortable scene where Howard attempts to break off the engagement of his son Jeremy to Monty's daughter, Victoria, when the whole thing was a rather unfortunate misunderstanding. In fact, the book's most memorable events are all somewhat embarrassing, including Howard's youngest son Levi's attempt to rally his co-workers to refuse to work on Christmas Day. The irony is that Levi's family members are mostly atheists, and his coworkers are actually pumped about the opportunity to be paid double-time for the holiday. Howard and Kiki's daughter Zora's forte is argument, and she manages to blackmail her way into Claire's poetry class. The ten or so main characters become tangled in relationships with one another that are often surprising and usually regrettable. Although Kiki is the emotional and ethical conscience in the family, no one person is truly the central character; it's more of an ensemble cast. The finale happens in sort of a flourish that puts the finishing touches on this colorful canvas of a family with still a few challenges ahead.

THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE by Heather Gudenkauf

Sandwiched between a disturbing opening and a too-neat ending is a nail-biter of a story. At first I thought, oh, no, not another book about an abusive, alcoholic husband and father, but that impression quickly faded. Two 7-year-old girls, Petra and Calli (best friends) have gone missing. We know that Calli is with her drunken father, Griff, who has eschewed his fishing trip to drag his daughter barefoot through the woods at 4 a.m. His muddled purpose is to take her to the home of Deputy Sheriff Louis, who Griff thinks is Calli's real father. Petra coincidentally disappears at the same time, following someone into the woods, of her own accord. The anguish of these two families steers the plot, especially as they come under the suspicion of special agent Fitzgerald, who is brought in to help locate the girls. Certainly both families have significant flaws and secrets, and the parents have to re-evaluate where they went wrong. The only truly likeable characters are the children, and they're not faring very well. Calli hasn't spoken a word in 3 years, since her father pushed her mother down the stairs, causing a miscarriage. Petra is Calli's full-time interpreter at school, reading Calli's expressions and actions to ascertain her thoughts and intentions, and then conveying them to teachers and classmates. When the girls disappear, there's more than enough guilt and blame to spread around among the parents. Several narrators alternate in the telling of events, both past and present, and no single narrative is very long. If you find yourself exasperated with one character, have no fear, because a different narrator is just a few pages away. This approach also helps build suspense, as we frequently have to abandon Calli's account of her abduction to hear what her mother or Petra's father is going through. It's nifty and thoroughly spellbinding.