Gone Girl / Gillian Flynn

Amazing and seemingly perfect Amy goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary. The police quickly find evidence that suggests her husband, Nick, may be implicated in her disappearance. The story is first told in Nick’s voice and subsequent chapters suggest an alternative history made up of entries from Amy’s diary, describing a disintegrating marriage and a wife increasingly fearful of her husband. The diary makes Nick look like an unbalanced husband capable of murder until halfway through the book when the narrative does a complete turnaround and we find out that Amy may not be the victim we were led to believe after all.

It’s a gripping story, one that’s not easy to put down, and has overtones of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent or the movie Fatal Attraction. Amy and Nick, two unreliable narrators, make this a guessing game until the finish, and the novel’s resolution will probably be a surprise to everyone. With the right cast, this will surely make a blockbuster movie.

Before I read Gone Girl I tried to read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, but since I found it was like plodding through a literary swamp, I abandoned it after 200 pages. Two hundred pages is giving the book a fair shake, right? I felt there was so little narrative tension halfway through the novel that I just couldn’t keep with it. There was so much talk about color schemes, I swear it could have been sponsored by Sherwin Williams or HGTV. For a book about magic, I wish it had had just a little of the written magic of another circus book like Water for Elephants. It's been awhile since I've abandoned a book, but I just had to change the channel. I know people have loved this title, but for some reason it just wasn't for me.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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