The Given Day/Live by Night by Dennis Lehane

   While you may not have read a Dennis Lehane book yet, I bet you've seen one of the movies based on them...Gone Baby Gone or Mystic River (admittedly, two of my favorites).  Lehane usually writes of Boston, of gritty detectives, of the 'seamier' side of life.  I love his style which is tautly written, with surprising bits of humor in turn.
   His trilogy of books, however, takes a bit of a different turn.  Lehane begins with The Given Day, a thick, meaty book on an Irish-Catholic family of Boston policemen at the turn of the century.  The main character of that book is Aidan (Danny) Coughlin, the golden-haired child and son of a Boston police detective, followed by one brother who is a city attorney and the youngest boy who is merely the neglected baby of the family.  That book includes a union riot, the great molasses explosion in Boston, as well as a new young Red Sox player by the name of Babe Ruth.  I listened to it while I cleaned a newly remodeled house a few years ago and believe me, the time sped by with Lehane's wonderful story-telling and a great Irish narrator.
   His second in the series is Live by Night.  The main character this time around is Joe Coughlin, the youngest brother who grew from a teenage hooligan to a young man of rather questionable character.  The story moves from Prohibitionist and mob-ridden Boston, to the 1930's in Tampa, Florida, covering much of the history of the rise of the underworld.   Joseph is an intriguing dichotomy of a man, one who is capable of murder, but who reads every book he can get his hands on. One who can blackmail a policeman, run a brothel, and orchestrate a jail-house coup, yet also feel empathy for a religious evangelist and share a deep love with his father.  He is an intriguing, complex, and rather compelling character, who you want to strangle sometimes, yet continue to cheer for regardless of his behavior.  Lehane once agains creates a riveting historical book of family drama, crime, and passion.  While I would recommend reading The Given Day first, it is only because it is such a great book - it's not necessary whatsoever to the understanding of Live by Night.  Both are long novels, but well worth the effort.  I also appreciate the fact that the second in this series took a few years to follow the first, and is easy to see in the finely-researched and extremely well-written prose.  I look forward to the third in the years to come.

The Things That Keep Us Here by Carla Buckley

   If I hadn't had to eat, sleep, and grade essays, this book would have been finished in one day.  Due to those daily and job-related necessities, it actually took me two days to read this book.  In other words, it's a humdinger. It's also one of those books that has burned itself a bit into my memory, not because of any pretty writing, complex characters, or poetic settings, but because of the waaaay too-real possibility of its plot line.  You see, I remember the avian flu scare back about ten years ago, walking into New York city's Chinatown, seeing deserted streets and empty restaurants.  I remember the following scare of 'pig' flu in 2009, as my daughter got on a plane headed to Hong Kong, with every face covered in a surgical mask.  I also remember H1N1 back in the fall of 2009, as it decimated college campuses and schools.  I usually ignore the stories, figuring it's the media attempting to scare the public into getting their flu shots.  However, after reading The Things That Keep Us Here, I doubt I will ever hear a 'flu' report quite the same way again.
  The main character, Ann, is just like many of us busy moms, having put her life and marriage on hold to parent the two children she has left, after losing a son to SIDS, dealing with marital as well as financial problems, a bratty teenager, and a cranky neighbor.   Her soon-to-be- ex-husband is a research veterinarian (never knew there was such a job) who comes across a pond filled with thousands of dead birds.  Creepy enough, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.  As the story unfolds, we watch not just our country, but the world fall apart in the most massive pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Influenza killed over 5% of the world's population.  However, it is not just a story of disease, but a story that asks the question over and over again, what would you do if...?  Thought-provoking and well-written, it is a story of family, of loss, of hardship, of love, but mostly of choices to be made.  It would be an intriguing book club choice that would appeal to a variety of ages as well as both genders.  I highly recommend it.

The Fifth Assassin by Brad Meltzer

While in the airport, after a long weekend away, I just wanted a thriller to read on the airplane so...I quickly downloaded The Fifth Assassin by Brad Meltzer.  It looked like my type of book, filled with assassination plots, tidbits of American history, and of course, a mystery.  I was pleasantly surprised that it was a bit more than just a "Number One Best-Seller" (geez, so was Shades of Grey and I am SO never going there with a self-published book!)  Meltzer, though,  has created an intriguing character, Beecher White, who is an archivist in Washington, D.C.  He is also a member of a special lil group of people called the Culper Ring who are supposed to protect the president.  However, what if the president is rather unlikeable, unethical, and all-around unpleasant?  Aah, there's the rub.  The story throws in all kinds of historical trivia that I admittedly get a kick out of, along with background into Beecher's childhood (the typical nerdy kid with the other square pegs that don't fit).  At times, I wished I had read his first book, The Inner Circle, as they repeatedly referred to the story prior to this one which was a bit frustrating.  I will also admit, Meltzer isn't an exceptionally pretty writer - he obviously writes to have a #1 best-seller (in other words...quickly).  However, it's a decent story and if you're a fan of American history, you'll like the trivia.  Good vacation book, but poor book club choice - not enough 'meat' on the bone.

The Phantom by Jo Nesbo

Per my previous post, I am a HUGE Jo Nesbo fan (think Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and you get the general drift of his mysteries - in other words, not for the faint-hearted).  His favorite Oslo detective, Harry Hole (not 'hole' - Hoo-lay) is, for once, in a rather decent spot in life.  Working as a debt-collector for a Hong Kong gambler (think mafioso and the strong men who collect the 'dues' and that's Harry's job), no longer using opium or alcohol to dull his pain, he has made a semblance of a life in China.  However, Oleg, the son of his ex-love, finds himself in an Oslo prison for a drug murder and it's up to Harry to get him out.  Sounds pretty straight forward and simple, doesn't it, like every other tradebook mystery ever written?  However, Nesbo is never a cookie-cutter writer; he's always got twists and turns that a reader never sees coming and The Phantom is no exception.  I've read three of his Harry Hole books now, and I must say, this one is my favorite.  More than any other book, it explores Harry's many demons, his inability to form relationships, his desire to be 'normal,' and the implicit yet completely atypical heroism of this uniquely intriguing detective.  I'm still wondering about the ending, hoping and praying for yet another book in this series.  If you like a gritty, well-written mystery series, I would highly recommend Jo Nesbo (but not if you live alone and read at night...creepy at times).

Once We Were Brothers by Ronald Balson

   Besides being a murder mystery junkie, I am also a dedicated lover of Holocaust literature.  I find the stories of human nature both disturbing and redemptive, giving me glimpses into the human heart and soul (both good and evil) that remind me of what is needed, and not, in the world today.  I constantly tell my students "the more you read, the smarter you get;" I find books about WWII and the victims of this terrible time period to be not only instructive, but typically unforgettable.

   In Once We Were Brothers, I found absolutely everything necessary to a page-turning, deliciously good book.  We meet the main character, an elderly Jewish man named Ben Solomon, who is accused of the attempted murder of Chicago's most respected, and financially generous philanthropist, Eliot Rosenzweig.  Of course, Ben needs a good lawyer, and who better but a down-on-her luck, doer-of-good-deeds woman like Catherine Lockhart?  Before she defends him, however, Ben insists on telling her his story, every familial, heart-breaking, historical detail. Catherine wonders...is this long story necessary?  However, Ben is a mesmerizing story teller, and as he relates his life story, we, like Catherine, are pulled into his world of a small Jewish town in Poland, into the lives of the Solomon family and the 'son' they foster and we too begin to wonder...is Eliot Rosenzweig who he says he is?  Neither my daughter nor I could put this book down, reading it in just two days.  If you like history, if you like love, redemption, victory against all odds, evil doings, and seekers of justice, you will love Once We Were Brothers.  I did.