March 2009
March 2009:
Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett – The year is 1471. Edward IV, who won the throne with the help of his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is restoring law and order after years of war. Under Edward IV, life in England begins to improve. Business is booming once more and the printing and silk industries prosper in London. When silk merchant John Lambert marries off his two beautiful daughters, their fortunes are forever changed. (March 2009) 
Singer by Ira Sher - In the early 1980s, Milton Menger, a wealthy art dealer living in New Jersey, is called by an estranged friend, Charles Trembleman, with whom he’s had no contact in years. Charley is a traveling salesman for the Singer Sewing Company and his hands have just been badly burned in a motel fire near Memphis. He needs a driver so he can continue traveling and selling. Milty rises to the occasion. Together they embark on a journey across the South, visiting showrooms and staying in locally owned motels. Is it a coincidence that these motels keep going up in flames? Gorgeously written yet elusive book. (March 2009)
A Man of No Moon by Jenny McPhee – A fictionalized retelling of the tragic post-WWII love affair between Italian writer Cesare Pavese and American noir starlet Constance Dowling. (March 2009)
Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames – James Fitzroy isn’t doing so well. Though his old friends in Buffalo believe his life in New York City is a success, in fact he writes ridiculous taglines for a greeting card company. Now he’s coming home on Thanksgiving to visit his aging father and dying mother, and unlike other holidays, he’s not sure how this one is going to end. Buffalo Lockjaw introduces a fresh new voice in American fiction. (March 2009)
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada – This never-before-translated masterpiece-by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party-is based on a true story. (March 2009)
Hand of Isis by Jo Graham – Set in Ancient Egypt, it is the story of Charmian, a handmaiden, and her two sisters. It is a novel of lovers who transcend death, of gods who meddle in mortal affairs, and of women who guide empires. (March 2009)
Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear – The sequel to New Amsterdam! The wampyr has walked the dark streets of the world’s great cities for a thousand years. In that time, he has worn out many names–and even more compatriots. Now, so that one of those companions may die where she once lived, he has come again to the City of London. (March 2009)
The Spy Game by Georgina Harding – On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna’s mother disappears into the fog. A kiss that barely touches Anna’s cheek, a rumble of exhaust and a blurred wave through an icy windshield, and her mother is gone. That same morning a spy case breaks in the news… (March 2009) 
Paths to Glory by Jeffrey Archer – Some people have dreams that are so magnificent that if they were to achieve them, their place in history would be guaranteed. Francis Drake, Robert Scott, Charles Lindbergh, Amy Johnson, Edmund Hilary, Neil Armstrong, and Lewis and Clark are among such individuals. But what if one man had such a dream, and once he’d fulfilled it, there was no proof that he had achieved his ambition? Paths of Glory, is the story of such a man—George Mallory. Based on a true story. (March 2009)
Long Lost by Harlan Coben – Myron Bolitar hasn’t heard from Terese Collins since their torrid affair ended ten years ago, so her desperate phone call from Paris catches him completely off guard. In a shattering admission, Terese reveals the tragic story behind her disappearance. Now a suspect in the murder of her ex-husband in Paris, Terese has nowhere else to turn for help. Myron heeds the call. But then a startling piece of evidence turns the entire case upside down. (March 2009)
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick – Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for “a reliable wife.” But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she’s not the “simple, honest woman” that Ralph is expecting. Â (March 2009)
Fault Line by Barry Eisler - So who would want an inventor, a patent attorney and a patent office official dead? What do they have in common? Fault Line centers on a conspiracy that has spun out of the shadows and onto the streets of America, a conspiracy that can be stopped by only three people– three people with different worldviews, different grievances, different motives. To survive the forces arrayed against them, they’ll first have to survive one another. (March 2009)
This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams - Once upon a time, there were four of them. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games… In this near-future thriller, Walter Jon Williams weaves a pulse-pounding tale of intrigue, murder, and games where you don’t get an extra life. (March 2009)
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell – A fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. (March 2009)
Honolulu by Alan Brennert – Richly imagined story of Jin, a young “picture bride” who leaves her native Korea – where girls are so little valued that she is known as Regret – and journeys to Hawaii in 1914 in search of a better life. (March 2009) 
The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint - On the Day of the Dead, the Solona Music Hall is jumping. That’s where Altagracia Quintero meets John Burns, just two weeks too late. (March 2009)
Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult - (March 2009)
Angels of Destruction by Keith Donohue – (March 2009)
Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek – Josy, a twelve year old girl, has an inexplicable illness and vanishes without trace from her doctor’s office during treatment. Four years later: Josy’s father, well-known psychiatrist Viktor Larenz, has withdrawn himself to an isolated North Sea island in order to deal with the tragedy. Until he’s paid a surprise visit from a beautiful stranger. Anna Glass is a novelist and she suffers from an unusual form of schizophrenia: all the characters she creates for her books become real to her. And in her last novel she has written about a young girl with an unknown illness who has vanished without a trace. (March 2009)
Loser’s Town by Daniel Depp – In this darkly comic thriller set in modern-day Hollywood, an aging private eye is hired by a rising young actor at the center of a scheme gone wrong. (March 2009)
The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer – Milo Weaver used to be a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity—but he’s since retired from the field to become a middle-level manager at the CIA’s New York headquarters. He’s tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind. However, when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo’s oldest colleagues and exposes new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover. (March 2009)
The Long Hill by Walter Mosley – A brand-new mystery series from one of the country’s best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley. (March 2009)
Off Street Parking by Bill James – DC Sharon Mayfield is on routine surveillance when she spots a dead man in a car. The cars locks are sealed with superglue and Claude Huddarts face has been mutilated. As with most murders, theres a puzzle to be solved, but the pieces dont fit. Why is informant Jeremy Dince if thats his real name being so helpful? And theres just something that doesnt feel right about the grieving Alice Huddart. (March 2009)
Through Black Spruce by Joe Boyden – Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, Ontario. His niece Annie Bird, beautiful and self-reliant, has returned from her own perilous journey to sit beside his bed. Broken in different ways, the two take silent communion in their unspoken kinship, and the story that unfolds is rife with heartbreak, fierce love, ancient blood feuds, mysterious disappearances, fires, plane crashes, murders, and the bonds that hold a family, and a people, together. (March 2009)
The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles – In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion—and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies. A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post–Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history. (March 2009)
Silent on the Moor by Deanna Raybourn – (March 2009)
The Convict and Other Stories by James Lee Burke -A superb collection of stories set in and around the American Deep South and its charismatic people. (March 2009)
Flipping Out by Marshall Karp – Nora Bannister is a bestselling mystery novelist who buys run-down houses in LA. While her business partners turn the house into a showpiece, Nora makes it the scene of a grisly murder in her House To Die For series. As soon as the new book goes on sale, so does the house — and the bidding frenzy begins. Just before Nora’s latest book hits the market, one of her house-flipping partners is murdered. LAPD Detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs are assigned the case, but this one is a hot potato – the dead woman is also the wife of one of their fellow cops. (March 2009)
Shatter by Michael Robotham – Joe O’Loughlin is on familiar territory—standing on a bridge high above a flooded gorge, trying to stop a distraught woman from jumping. She is naked, wearing only high-heel shoes, sobbing into a cell phone. Suddenly, she turns to him and whispers, “You don’t understand,” and lets go. Joe is shattered by the suicide and haunted by his failure to save the woman, until her teenage daughter finds him and reveals that her mother would never have committed suicide— not like that. She was terrified of heights. (March 2009)
Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor – If Philippa Penhow hadn’t gone to Bleeding Heart Square on that January day, you and perhaps everyone else might have lived happily ever after . . .(March 2009)
Dear Husband by Joyce Carol Oates - The family ties that bind (and choke) are the overarching theme of Oates’s grim but incisive story collection. (March 2009)
Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pionol – It is 1914 when Marcus Garvey, a bedraggled British manservant, emerges from the depths of the Belgian Congo. He is the sole survivor of an ill-fated mining expedition in which both his masters, William and Richard Craver, died and from which their African porters fled. Garvey returns to London carrying two diamonds of extraordinary size, spinning a story too unspeakably terrifying to be believed. He is promptly arrested. Tommy Thompson, a London ghostwriter for a ghostwriter for a ghostwriter (don’t ask!), is approached by his attorney to document Garvey’s unholy African odyssey.(March 2009)
The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton – The Intersolar Commonwealth is in turmoil as the Living Dream’s deadline for launching its Pilgrimage into the Void draws closer. Not only is the Ocisen Empire fleet fast approaching on a mission of genocide, but also an internecine war has broken out between the post-human factions over the destiny of humanity.Countering the various and increasingly desperate agents and factions is Paula Myo, a ruthlessly single-minded investigator, beset by foes from her distant past and colleagues of dubious allegiance…but she is fast losing a race against time. (March 2009)
The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction by Gene Wolf – From a literary perspective, this will certainly be the best collection of the year in science fiction and fantasy. (March 2009)
A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr – A Quiet Flame opens in 1950. Falsely fingered a war criminal, Bernie Gunther has booked passage to Buenos Aires, lured, like the Nazis whose company he has always despised, by promises of a new life and a clean passport from the PerĂłn government. But Bernie doesn’t have the luxury of settling into his new home and lying low. He is soon pressured by the local police into taking on a case in which a girl has turned up dead, gruesomely mutilated, and another—the daughter of a wealthy German banker—has gone missing.(March 2009)
Oh, Johnny by Jim Lehrer – PBS NewsHour anchor Lehrer mixes baseball, WWII and romance in his 19th novel . (March 2009)
Krapp’s Last Cassette by Anne Argula – Quinn, a sharp-tongued private investigator in Seattle who’s been busy waving goodbye to her philandering husband while fanning her hot flashes with her other hand, has just bumped into a case that threatens to expose the compassionate heart beneath her hard-boiled exterior. (March 2009)
A Date You Can’t Refuse by Harley Jane Kozak - Serial dater and greeting-card artist Wollie Shelley goes undercover in a media-training company suspected of video piracy, but when a dead body appears on the company’s property, she’s caught up in a conspiracy that goes way beyond some stolen DVDs. (March 2009)
Until It’s Over by Nikki French – Astrid Bell has known most of her housemates for years, but while they have a tangled history together—romantic pairings, one-night stands, friendships—each of them also has a past. Astrid is on her way home one day when her neighbor accidentally knocks her off her bike. Bruised but not broken, her roommates help her home. The next day, they learn that same neighbor was beaten to death only hours after the accident. Each of them tells the police what little they know and are dismissed—until Astrid stumbles over another body. Two brutal murders in less than a week is more than just bad luck. (March 2009)
Black Noir edited by Otto Penzler The best mystery and crime fiction ever produced by African-American writers. (March 2009)
The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano - When Melody Grace McCartney was six years old, she and her parents witnessed an act of violence so brutal that it changed their lives forever. The federal government lured them into the Witness Protection Program with the promise of safety, and they went gratefully. But the program took Melody’s name, her home, her innocence, and, ultimately, her family. She’s been May Adams, Karen Smith, Anne Johnson, and countless others–everyone but the one person she longs to be: herself. So when the feds spirit her off to begin yet another new life in another town, she’s stunned when a man confronts her and calls her by her real name. (March 2009)
Shadow and Light by Jonathan Rabb – Berlin, between the two world wars. When an executive at the renowned Ufa film studios is found dead floating in his office bathtub, it falls to Nikolai Hoffner, a chief inspector in the Kriminalpolizei, to investigate. With the help of Fritz Lang (the German director) and Alby Pimm (leader of the most powerful crime syndicate in Berlin), Hoffner finds his case taking him beyond the world of film and into the far more treacherous landscape of Berlin’s sex and drug trade, the rise of Hitler’s Brownshirts (the SA), and the even more astonishing attempts by onetime monarchists to rearm a post-Versailles Germany. (March 2009)Â
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