Over the Plain Houses / Julia Franks

It becomes clear that Irenie needs to save herself and her son from an emotionally and physically abusive relationship. A representative from the USDA offers a solution, first for her son, and soon for Irenie as well. Brodis, her husband, farmer and fundamentalist preacher, looks askance at any kind of assistance from the government outsiders and comes to see the intervention as part of a diabolical plot… quite literally.

Set in the Appalachians of western North Carolina in the late 1930s, the author creates a wonderful sense of place and of history. This was a time when the virgin forests were still being violently scraped off the mountainsides, and farmers were encouraged to turn their fields over to a crop they could not eat-- tobacco. A way of life families had followed for generations was suddenly upended. The reader is immersed in the world of the novel-- the description of the tortured hills and mountain peaks is exquisite, revealing an insider's knowledge of the local nature and a deep appreciation for the domestic tradition and farm life of that time.

The conclusion of the novel takes on a scale of rather Biblical proportions with at least a couple horses of the apocalypse making a cameo. A strong story with strong characters, this novel by a debut novelist will not disappoint.

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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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