Archive for February, 2011

THE BORDER LORDS by T. Jefferson Parker

In his fourth Charlie Hood thriller, three-time Edgar winner Parker continues to mine the violent drug and arms trafficking over the Mexico/California border. Hood, 32, an L.A. Sheriff’s Department officer, has been on loan to the ATF for 15 months, assigned to drug operations in this “often infernal, often violent, often beautiful desert.” It’s a place Hood has come to love – and fear.

This time out the central plot concerns an undercover ATF agent, Sean Ozburn, who seems to have gone berserk. Early one morning, while his team (which includes Hood) is monitoring a trio of cartel-affiliated teen killers in a rented safe house, owned by the ATF, the cameras suddenly go dark and all three boys die in a hail of bullets.

February 5, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  · Posted in: California, Mexico, Sleuths Series, Wild West, y Award Winning Author

CHARLES JESSOLD, CONSIDERED AS A MURDERER by Wesley Stace

Wesley Stace’s ample new novel — half murder mystery, half music criticism — opens with a press report on the death of the talented young English composer Charles Jessold in 1923. He appears to have shot himself in his apartment after poisoning his wife and his wife’s lover and watching them die. The murder-suicide has not one but two ironic precedents. It reproduces the story of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who similarly killed his wife with her lover. It is also the subject of an English folk-ballad, “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave,” which Jessold had taken as the subject for his operatic magnum opus, due to premiere the following night.

February 4, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: Facing History, United Kingdom

THE ILLUMINATION by Kevin Brockmeier

Many believe that in today’s tortured times, humanity is mortally wounded. What if our pain manifested itself as visible light, and what if that pain was the most beautiful thing about us? What if the pain would cease and the light would radiate from us all?

In Kevin Brockmeier’s incandescent novel, his characters struggle to adapt to a new way of experiencing pain and loss and indeed, life itself. The author employs overlapping, fable-like narratives starting with Carol Ann whole life “seemed like one long litany of wounds.” Carol Ann had “known days of happiness and beauty, rate moments of motionless wonder, but trying to relive them was like looking out the window at night from a partially lit room.”

February 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags:  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Contemporary, Reading Guide, Speculative (Beyond Reality)

SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell

In her hotly-anticipated debut novel, SWAMPLANDIA!, Karen Russell returns to the mosquito-droves and muggy-haze of the Florida Everglades and the gator-themed amusement park featured in her short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” that opened her widely-praised 2006 collection, ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES. It was that collection, with its exuberant mix of satire and fabulism, that secured Russell’s reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-comers around and earned her a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s much buzzed about “20 under 40” list last fall. With her energetic prose, quirky settings, and fantastical plots, Russell is a writer’s whose style forces you to sit up and take notice, sometimes at the cost of emotional involvement with her work. However, Swamplandia!, with all its flashing-neon prose is an insightful (and surprisingly funny) exploration of the loss of innocence that inevitably follows the death of a parent.

February 2, 2011 · Judi Clark · 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Family Matters, Florida, Humorous, Unique Narrative

GHOST LIGHT by Joseph O’Connor

GHOST LIGHT by Joseph O’Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can’t skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.

February 1, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Facing History, Reading Guide, United Kingdom