Swamplandia! / Karen Russell

Oversized billboards on Florida’s byways beckon tourists to Swamplandia!, an Everglades sideshow that features the Bigtree family wrestling and swimming with ‘gators (they call them Seths) in a nostalgic tourist trap that most readers will recognize. After opening with a hugely engaging first chapter that introduces the quirky members of the Bigtree Family and their unusual business, it all goes quickly to pieces—Hilola Bigtree, the show’s headliner and family matriarch, succumbs to cancer, the “chief” disappears to the mainland, and the home-schooled children are left more or less to their own devices to fend for themselves. Ossie starts dabbling in the occult and hooks up with a ghostly paramour (whose backstory is somewhat superfluously told in significant detail), Kiwi defects to the rival amusement park, and Ava hooks up with an unsavory swamp character she employs in an attempt to bring her sister back from the “other side.”

This novel was noted as one of the ten best books of 2011 by the New York Times, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and named one of the best southern reads for 2011. I was really looking forward to something special, but it just didn’t connect. There were moments of greatness, but mostly it didn’t work and I really had to slog through the swampy plot to get to the end of it. I found myself wanting to read the prequel to Swamplandia! (a book that hasn’t been written) about Swamplandia! when it was thriving with its quirky and still unblemished denizens, the Bigtree Family.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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 Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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