The Midas Murders / Pieter Aspe

I wanted to return to Bruges with Inspector Pieter van In after enjoying the first installment in this Flemish detective series, The Square of Revenge. Bruges really is the most captivating character in this novel, providing a wonderful backdrop to the police action, its streets frosted with a magical covering of powdery snow, its gothic and neogothic towers and facades transformed into so much iced gingerbread.

The plot, however, is a bit overcomplicated-- involving murders, Nazi gold, a conspiracy involving a forged copy of Michelangelo’s Madonna, and a terrorist plot to blow up cultural monuments in Bruges in order to drive out its middle class citizens to a proposed garden suburb built on the neighboring polder... need I go on? It really didn’t hold together and when I said that the city of Bruges is the best character in The Midas Murders, it’s because Van In is so ugly and unlikable, at least in this installment. The series has had a long run in Flanders, so I’m thinking things may improve if the books continue to be released to the US market in translation. I will most likely give Van In another try, if only to luxuriate in the surroundings that make up his police beat, but if the characters and plot don't improve markedly I will have to get my European crime fix elsewhere.

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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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