Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion   Amazon   I've lived most of my life in or around New Haven, Connecticut, which means that the names Dixwell, Whalley, and Goffe are etched in my brain (alongside the locations of the best pizza places). They're the names of three main thoroughfares linking downtown New Haven with its suburbs. I've always been aware that the streets were named after the three regicides who fled here from England and hung out for a time in Judges Cave on West Rock. But that's about all I knew. Robert Harris's fictionalized account of the regicides—mostl ..read more

Lee Goldberg, Calico   Amazon   I don't particularly like police procedurals, and I don't particularly like westerns, but it turns out that I really like police procedural-westerns that are blended with a dash of science fiction—at least this one. Lee Goldberg's stand-alone Calico is named after a town in the Mojave Desert. In the 1880s, it was a squalid mining town. Nowadays—in real life and in the book—it's a restored ghost town with attractions like gunfights and gold panning and a trading post. The area surrounding Calico (at least as Goldberg describes it) is th ..read more

Dean Koontz, Bad Weather Friend   Amazon   Benny, as we keep being told, is a really nice guy, and this despite having experienced a string of awful situations during his childhood and adolescence. But at 23, he's got money and a fiancée and a nice house and a good job—until one day, a lot of that inexplicably disappears. Enter a weird, casket-like box sent by a mysterious distant relative, and suddenly Benny's on a road trip with some new friends to figure out why his life has imploded. The story is told in two threads: Benny's present and past play out in alternati ..read more

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone   Amazon   On June 25, 2003 (less than a month after my first blog post here), I ordered three books from Amazon. I read and reviewed two of them pretty quickly, Greg Iles' 24 Hours and Paul Hoffman's Wings of Madness. The third book was Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, which I was interested in because it's one of the first detective novels ever published. But my interest in its subject didn't lead to action on my part, and the book sat on my shelves for twenty years. I measure the enormity of that time mostly by the yardstick of my chil ..read more

Blake Crouch, Upgrade   Amazon   Logan Ramsay lives with the guilt of having been involved in his brilliant mother's accidental destruction of the world as we know it. Now, in a post-apocalyptic world in which lower Manhattan is under water and dark gene labs are producing exotic new species to sell to Russian oligarchs, Logan—who only ever wanted to follow in his mother's scientific footsteps—is doing his penance as a federal officer tracking down rogue geneticists. At least until he's attacked at a cellular level and transforms into a kind of superman. And then he ..read more

Patricia Highsmith, Mermaids on the Golf Course   Amazon   I enjoyed this batch of eleven short stories by Patricia Highsmith more than I did the last collection of hers that I read (The Black House), though I can't offhand say exactly why. These stories, not surprisingly, feature mostly unhappy—or soon to be unhappy—people. They are driven to murder or suicide, or they realize that their ostensibly happy relationships were a mirage. They seek an escape from loneliness in imaginary dates, imaginary (?) friends, and nearly imaginary penpals. "Life was nothing but tryi ..read more

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone   Amazon   Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and columnist, and I guess a podcaster too, though I haven't listened to her podcast yet. She has a background in writing, which may go some way toward explaining why this memoir is so very good. In it, she weaves together stories about her therapy clients (disguised versions thereof) with an account of her own struggles, principally the breakup that led her to seek therapy herself. So it's a book about a therapist giving and getting therapy and about the process of therapy itself ..read more

Douglas E. Richards, Time Frame   Amazon   Not too long ago, I accidentally reread a book I'd read and reviewed already in 2016, Douglas E. Richards' time travel novel Split Second. It wasn't until I was halfway through that things started to seem familiar, and I finished the book again anyway because I couldn't remember what happened. I had a similar reaction to the book as I did the first time through. (My consistency was heartening.) And this time, too, I said to myself, yeah, I'd read another book by this author. Turns out, the sequel to Split Second was publishe ..read more

Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster   Amazon   This short book is written in the first person and purports to be a letter written by the unnamed narrator to his boss, the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem, explaining "what happened there." We don't find out what event he's alluding to until the very end of the book. In seeking to explain it, the narrator provides an account of pretty much his whole adult working life, and in quite a lot of detail. He is trained as a historian and wrote the book, literally, on the Nazis' methods of execution in the Polish camps. He als ..read more

Tivadar Soros, Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary   Amazon   In his memoir Masquerade, Tivadar Soros (the father of George Soros) writes about his experiences during the ten-month period between March 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary, and January 1945, when the Russians arrived in Soros's neighborhood in Budapest. Soros determined early on that his and his family's best chance for surviving the war would be to try to pass themselves off as Christians and live apart from one another, a plan that involved a lot of back-and-forthing with doc ..read more