Archive for the ‘New York City’ Category

THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS by Bill Loehfelm

Physically, 29 year-old Maureen Coughlin is a wisp of a woman, 5’ 4” tall and 100 pounds. Emotionally, she’s a powerhouse, a person with acumen, tenacity, and a wild streak just this side of the Serengeti. She works as a waitress, the same job for the last 10 years and she’s just sick of it. It’s a nowhere job and she’s going nowhere. She lives and works on Staten Island in a faux chic bar with the emphasis on ‘faux’. She’s started college and dropped out more than once but she knows that waitressing is not where she wants to find herself down the pike. She lives alone and has no one special in her life except her mother who gives her more trouble than solace.

June 11, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: New York City, Sleuths Series

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS by Eleanor Henderson

It’s 1987 and New York’s lower east side and alphabet city are places for the homeless, vagrants, the impoverished, hippies, some immigrants who have held out through the next generation and some younger folks who call themselves “straight edge.” Straight edge refers to teenagers who like hard rock and punk but live a straight and clean lifestyle – no meat, no sex, no booze and no drugs. Many shave their heads and are into tattoos. That’s what TEN THOUSAND SAINTS by Eleanor Henderson is about – a group of straight ddge teens and their parents trying to understand themselves and one another as they venture through life, a lot of it in alphabet city in Manhattan.

June 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Family Matters, NE & New York, New York City

A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF by Lawrence Block

A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF is the 17th and very likely final installment of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series of crime fiction novels. In fact, Block had not even envisioned writing another Scudder book. He figured that as Scudder was already in his mid-sixties, semi-retired and collecting social security in ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING, the immediately previous book six years ago, by now Scudder is in his 70’s and settled into a “comfortable retirement” and no longer up to the rigors of private investigating. In HARD STUFF Block finesses this by having Scudder relate events from the past.

May 14, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, New York City, Sleuths Series, y Award Winning Author

LIVE WIRE by Harlan Coben

Myron Bolitar is back in LIVE WIRE, the tenth book in this great series and the first since Long Lost (2009). Last time, Myron was in France but this time he’s back in New York and north Jersey where he works as an agent representing sports professionals and other celebrities. Myron is asked for help by one of his first clients, former tennis star Suzze T. (Trevantino) who is now eight months pregnant. She wants Myron to find her husband, Lex Rider who is missing after seeing the post of “Not His” about his wife’s pregnancy on her Facebook page.

May 7, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Family Matters, New York City, Sleuths Series, Thriller/Spy/Caper, y Award Winning Author

FUNERAL FOR A DOG by Thomas Pletzinger

Husbands and wives who work together either end up with their marriage in trouble or being the best of friends. In German author, Thomas Pletzinger’s novel, FUNERAL FOR A DOG, it’s the first scenario for journalist Daniel Mandelkern. Mandelkern is an ethnologist who is supposed to be writing “about anthropological concepts like matrilineality and male childbed,” but instead he’s been getting a series of shit assignments from his boss/wife Elisabeth. Mandelkern is beginning to wonder if there’s an underlying message to these assignments and then he’s told to interview the reclusive Dirk Svensson, the author of a wildly successful illustrated children’s book “The story of Leo and the Notmuch.” Mandelkern protests against the assignment, and with his marriage in crisis, he storms out of his apartment on the journey to interview Svensson.

May 4, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Germany, New York City, Unique Narrative, World Lit

MINDING BEN by Victoria Brown

MINDING BEN is a combination coming-of-age story and mainstream fiction novel. At 16, Grace Caton left her small village in Trinidad to live the American Dream in New York City. But nothing went according to plan once she set foot in the States. The cousin she expected to meet her and with whom she was to live never showed up, so Grace had to fend for herself from day one, and she learns that life in the big city is difficult, complicated, unfair and lonely. She gets a break when Sylvia, an overweight immigrant who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn offers her a place to stay, but that place to live comes with the strings of caring for kids, buying her cigarettes and lending her money.

May 2, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Posted in: Caribbean, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Debut Novel, New York City