October 2010

Ford County

John Grisham

John Grisham returns to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his immensely popular first novel, A Time to Kill.  This wholly surprising collection of stories reminds us once again why Grisham is America's favorite storyteller.

In the years since his first novel, John Grisham said he has often returned to the people and places of that book: "I've had dozens of ideas for Ford County novels, almost all of which peter out for one reason or another...The good stories stick, but they're not always long enough to become novels."  His first collection of short fiction, Ford County, collects seven of those tales set in the titular Mississippi region where his characters are "always in the vicinity of the trouble."  While none of the stories are out-and-out courtroom dramas, most of them are populated with felons, ex-felons, and the kind of lawyers of who are one bad decision away from a jail sentence.  In one story, three good ol' boys start driving to Memphis to donate blood for an injured friend, but they're distracted by beer joints and strip clubs along the way.  In another, a down-and-out divorce lawyer gets a second chance to make some big money on an old class-action lawsuit.  Grisham knows how southerners tick.  The characters in Ford County are rendered with great humor and tenderness; even the worst rapscallion and the slimiest scallywag can be loved here in these pages.  Ford County may just be Grisham's best book to date. 

September 2010

A Soft Place to Land

Susan Rebecca White

For more than ten years, Naomi and Phil Harrison enjoyed a marriage of heady romance, tempered only by the needs of their children.  Bun on a vacation alone, the couple perishes in a flight over the Grand Canyon.  After the funeral, their daughters, Ruthie and Julia, are shocked by the provisions in their will.

Spanning nearly two decades, the sisters' journeys take them from their familiar home in Atlanta to sophisticated bohemian San Francisco, a mountain town in Virginia, the campus of Berkeley, and lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  As they heal from loss, search for love, and begin careers, their sisterhood, once an oasis, becomes complicated by resentment, andger, and jealousy.  It seems as though the echoes of their parent's deaths will never stop reverberating--until another shocking accident changes everything once again.

Summer 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson



Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back.  this debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page turner.  Mikael Blomkvist, a once respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him.  Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry.  The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomvkist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades.  With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues.  Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. --Dave Callanan

May 2010

Boneman's Daughters

Ted Dekker

The BoneMan, a serial killer, who murders his victims by breaking their bones, but not their skin, re-emerges after a two-year hiatus and abducts 16-year-old Bethany Evans, the estranged daughter of military intelligence officer Ryan Evans.  Having recently returned from Iraq, where he was captured and psychologically tortured by insurgents, Ryan is an emotional wreck.  His mental state not only impedes his efforts to find Bethany, but also gives the authorities reason to suspect him of being the BoneMan himself.