"Thanksgiving" by Janet Evanovich

As we move into a holiday season that is filled with a lot of gloom and doom on the economic front, it is refreshing to read something that is just light and happy fun, the romance by Janet Evanovich, "Thanksgiving."

The setting is beautiful and historic Williamsburg where a young pediatrician, Patrick Hunter, has come to set up his practice. He meets a potter and part-time Williamsburg tour ticket-taker, Megan Murphy, who is house sitting at a relative's farmhouse near Williamsburg. They suddenly are given charge of an infant named, Timmy, who is left by one of the doctor's patients for a couple of weeks. The romance evolves over the unlikely activity of mutually taking care of this infant, an activity that most parents recognize as a romance killer.

To make matters even more precarious for the romance, both sets of parents and his siblings show up for Thanksgiving dinner. Fortunately, both sides give their blessing to the couple, and, after a few ups and downs, fights and angst, the two make their final plans to get married at Christmas.

It's a fun read and I recommend the book to those who like Evanovich's breezy style, lovers of the Williamsburg setting, and romance readers.

Liz Nichols

"A Long Way Gone," by Ishmael Beah

Beah's book is a memoir of this young African's years as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone. It is a brutal, sad tale of how children are exploited and dehumanized in order to become canon fodder for adults who have political or greed-related ambitions in so many third world countries today. It is also an inspiring tale of redemption for a fraction of the more fortunate children who are able to be rehabilitated.

Beah's tale starts out in the gold mining region of Sierra Leone where he and his brother grew up living with his father. At the age of 12 rebel forces attacked his town, burned down all the homes and attacked the people. Many were killed, while a few boys were pressed into service. Ishmael, his brother and several friends managed to escape and started a very long journey walking towards the coast and away from the fighting.

Everywhere they went they were treated with suspicion, since so many boys had been recruited to be rebels. They were just stray refugees trying to get away from the fighting. A couple of times they were brought before tribal chiefs and were very nearly executed as spies.

After months of travel by foot and occasional stops in friendly villages, they reached what they hoped was a peaceful community when they were captured by army forces and pressed into service. The process of brutalizing the boys, plying them with drugs so they would act in robotic fashion, and the unspeakable acts of violence that they were forced to commit make this book a difficult, but very powerful read.

Eventually, Ishmael and several other boys are mustered out of the military by a UNICEF inspector, and given a second chance to be children at a school for rehabilitated war orphans in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Eventually, Ishmael is repatriated with his uncle's family on the outskirts of the city. Ishmael is chosen to go to New York City to attend a conference on child soldiers and meets the woman who will eventually bring him to the U.S. permanently and adopt him.

Before the happy ending, though, is more fighting, this time, within Freetown, which sets the boy to fleeing again several months after he returns to Sierra Leone. A harrowing journey to Guinea leads eventually to a chance to contact his benefactress in New York City and a new life.

The memoir is a remarkable piece of writing for someone who spoke primarily Krio, an old slave version of English brought to Sierra Leone by the black colonists from America who settled the land in the late 1700s. Ishmael was able to complete his high school education in New York once he emigrated, and then attended Oberlin College in Ohio.

He is still a very young man, in his late 20s, and is working in the field of humanitarian relief.

This book was chosen as the One Community, One Book selection for this year in Iowa City, and it has been a very inspirational, and thought-provoking choice.

Liz Nichols

"The Black Dove" by Steve Hockensmith

For those who like mysteries with an American wild west twist, "The Black Dove" may be just your read. The author incorporates some important historical insights about the Asian slave trade in the United States and the way young Chinese girls were sold by their families or tricked into coming to the U.S. and then made to work in Chinatown brothels or sold into marriage in San Francisco and other big cities.

The story takes place in San Francisco in the 1890s where cowpokes turned PIs, Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer, team up with former Union Pacific PI, Diana Corvus, to figure out who killed Gee Woo Chan and where the brothel slave, Hok Gup (the Black Dove) has gone.

At times the plot feels like a Keystone Cops chase. At times it reminds me of a Chinese version of the movie "The Streets of New York." At times it feels like a melodrama. That is probably intentional, since the narrator, Otto Amlingmeyer is a budding dime novelist and gets good news about the publication of one of his stories toward the end of the book.

I look forward to reading more about the Amlingmeyer brothers and hope they team up again with the intrepid Diana.

Liz Nichols

"River Ghosts" by B.R. Robb

B. R. Robb is the pseudonym for attorney, Bruce Steinberg of Chicago. He has one previous novel, "The Widow's Son," which won a first novel grand prize in Milwaukee in 2000.

"River Ghosts," is a masterpiece. It should be receiving critical acclaim for its author, whom I hope will write again much sooner than in eight more years. It has the same kind of psychological impact that "Lovely Bones" had and it should be getting the same kind of attention.

This is a police thriller and a commentary on racial prejudice in America, which is portrayed as still very much alive and well.

We are confronted with the release of a supposedly reformed Neo-Nazi who had been convicted of the murder of a racially mixed couple sixteen years prior in a smallish Midwestern city. He was convicted on the eye-witness testimony of the young son of the couple, who grew up to become a police officer in his home town. Understandably, the cop, Richard's sleep is regularly disturbed by images of his parents' murders and the man who committed the crime, whom he saw from his hiding place under a table.

This taught and beautifully written story uncovers how DNA evidence could have been manipulated to acquit a guilty man and how the young police officer and his partner managed to prove it.

Hopefully, that's not giving away too much of the plot. I believe anyone who reads this book will find it refreshingly literary. I know I did after a summer of reading good, but mostly formulaic mysteries by well known authors.

Yes, there is still a literary muse at work in new fiction!

Liz Nichols

Susan Wittig Albert's "Nightshade"

At first it was difficult to get in to the China Bayles mystery, "Nightshade," because this is the third of a trilogy. It continues "Bleeding Hearts" and "Spanish Dagger," both of which were about the death of China's father. The third book tracks the way China and her husband, Mike McQuaid, sleuth out her dad's killer.

China is a former assistant DA, who has become a shop owner in the hill country outlying Austin, TX. China's character has always bothered me a bit because I personally do not know any shop owner or restauranteer who can break away from the business long enough to solve a murder mystery. One has to suspend reality long enough to appreciate the plot.

While I found the information about the Nightshade family of plants-- including the tomato, tomatillo, chili pepper, potato, eggplant, petunia and tobacco, not to mention the other deadly varieties, I didn't really get how it tied in with the plot. Well, there is one character crucial to solving the case who raises tomatillos. I kept expecting someone to get poisoned.

No such luck. People got blown up, run over and shot in this one.

Still, it's a fast read and it kept my attention throughout, even though I never quite got into the characters or the plot.

I've read other China Bayles mysteries before, and I'm sure I'll pick them up again. I just don't think I'll go out of my way to go back to the two previous titles in the trilogy. I got the picture from the third one.

One thumb up.

Liz Nichols

"The Box" by Marc Levinson

In doing a group of articles on containerization for a client, I had the pleasure to read Marc Levinson's "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger."

For a very dry topic this is a very exciting book. It is one of those non-fiction creations that tells a story in a dramatic way. It's a page turner. You want to keep reading in order to find out how the heck the world could come together on standardizing something as complex as international, intermodal shipping.

The book brings to life some mid-20th century innovators whose achievements serve as powerful examples for us and for our children. "The Box" documents a recipe for creating large-scale change.

Great piece of social history.

Liz Nichols

Susan Conant's "All Shots, A Dog Lover's Mystery"

This was not the best read of the summer. I do appreciate all the information I did not previously know about malamutes, and learning that that breed and Alaskan huskies are not the same thing was of some interest.

There is lots of non-fiction information in this book for dog lovers.

As mysteries go, however, I found this one confusing. There were just too many Holly Winters in the book. That's all part of the plot. The heroine's name is Holly Winter, and there are two more Holly Winter characters involved. It seems like someone is trying to steal the heroine's identity until she finds out there are others with her name. I haven't gone back to verify this, but with all the Holly Winter characters running around (or lying in the morgue) it felt like the author was changing voices all the time. Perhaps that's what led to the confusion.

At any rate, I just couldn't get into this one, unlike some of her previous Dog Lover's Mystery titles. Perhaps the series is growing stale.

Conant also has a new series for cat lovers and another mystery series for "gourmet girls."

Liz Nichols