One Summer: America, 1927 / Bill Bryson

The summer of 1927 was a momentous one in America. It was a year that saw the United States on the cusp of greatness. Charles Lindbergh’s historic trans Atlantic flight helped to make the US the undisputed leader in aviation (whereas previously it was just trying to play catch-up with Europe). Movie palaces were being built with a luxury to rival Versailles, newspapers boasted record subscriptions, but radio was quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with, and the earliest primitive experiments with television were being conducted. Babe Ruth was creating a legend in the sports world, and Al Capone was becoming a legend of a different kind in prohibition-era crime-fueled Chicago. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in a controversial case, highlighting anarchist and anti-immigrant tendencies in the country at large. Henry Ford abruptly ceased production of the Model T without having another replacement model in production, almost bankrupting the Ford Motor Company with this ill-advised changeover plan. It was a pretty amazing summer in United States history.

Bill Bryson has the knack for collecting facts and delivering them with his folksy and humorous delivery. He may not be a historian, but this snapshot of American history is a fascinating one.

Downloaded this one from the library!

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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.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

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...

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