Death of Kings / Bernard Cornwell

This is the sixth novel in the Saxon Tales series, and I’ve read them all. I suppose the danger with writing a series of historical novels pegged to real historical events is that not every volume can have a significant tide-turning, earth-shaking battle. After all, Napoleon just had the one Waterloo. Sometimes there is détente, an uneasy peace reigns for whatever reason, and great warriors like Uhtred of Bebbanburg sit around waiting for war to be called once again so they can do what they do best. These quiet times are just not very interesting to read about.

In Death of Kings Alfred the Great dies and his passing leads to a struggle for succession. The Danes are still a force to be reckoned with, but there are those Kentish men as well who aren’t necessarily keen on a single royal head of a unified England. There is a lot of hemming and hawing and riding back and forth on horseback, and a little distracting story about “angels” foretelling the future. Things don’t really start to move until the last fifty or so pages, and it is with some relief that the story ends and Uhtred lives to fight another day. I really hope that he can recapture his ancestral home of Bebbanburg, which has been his life’s ambition. Maybe in the next book? I hope it’s soon.

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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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