Smokin' Seventeen, by Janet Evanovich ***

Dead bodies are showing up in shallow graves on the empty construction lot of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds. No one is sure who the killer is, or why the victims have been offed, but what is clear is that Stephanie’s name is on the killer’s list. Short on time to find the murderer, Stephanie is also under pressure from family and friends to choose between her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Trenton cop Joe Morelli, and the bad boy in her life, security expert Ranger. Stephanie’s mom wants her to dump them both for a former high school football star who’s just returned to town. Stephanie’s sidekick, Lula, suggests a red-hot boudoir “bake-off.” And Joe’s old-world grandmother gives Stephanie “the eye,” which may mean that it’s time to get out of town.
With a cold-blooded killer after her, a handful of hot men, and a capture list that includes a dancing bear and a senior citizen vampire, Stephanie’s life looks like it’s about to go up in smoke

Let's call these books what they are:  The 'By the Numbers' series by Janet Evanovich is purely bubble gum escapism.  There's little to no substance to the books, but they're fun to read.  This one was exactly what I expected after reading the others - a little bit of male fantasy (Will she pick with Joe or Ranger?  Would I pick Joe or Ranger?) and a fair bit of funny.

The Reversal, by Michael Connelly ****

Longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change stripes and prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. 

Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defense attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years. With the odds and the evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer once and for all. If Bosch is sure of anything, it is that Jason Jessup plans to kill again.

I think I've got a new author on my list of favourites.  I've known about Michael Connelly for some time, but hadn't read his books until this year.  While I enjoyed 'The Lincoln Lawyer', I think The Reversal was even better.

It's a mystery and a legal thriller, all wrapped into one. It was maybe a little bit procedural, but I think court stories have to be by nature.  I thought it was a highly entertaining, easy read, and I'm definitely going to go looking for the next in the series.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer **

Book Description:

Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. 

I decided to throw in the towel on this book last night, after a second failed attempt to get through it. The dialogue was hard to follow - whole converstations would occur in one paragraph, and I'd have to jump back and forth to try to figure out who was saying what.  And, I found the characters to be weird... if I encountered them on the street, I'd probably cross the road.  It's too bad, because I thought this one had potential.

The Next Accident, by Lisa Gardner ***

This thriller has just the right mix of suspense, intrigue, and murder, topped off with a little romance to make it sizzle. Pierce Quincy, hard-boiled FBI agent, and Rainie Conner, ex-cop turned P.I., team up to catch the perpetrator of several ingenious murders. The psychopath staged the death of Quincy's daughter Amanda, then his ex-wife, and is now going after Quincy's remaining daughter, Kimberly.

I picked up this book because I'd read a few from Gardner's Det. DD Warren series and liked them. This one wasn't part of that series, but it was pretty good - it was an original storyline, I thought. I don't think the mystery was a great shock when it was solved, but the story kept me interested.

The one complaint that I have was the references to a dream that the one character (Raine) was having about a baby elephant... I can't tell you specifics because I flipped past it, but suffice to say that the baby suffered. I don't think that it added anything to the storyline, and I wish it had been left out.

The Surgeon, by Tess Gerritsen ****

A serial killer is on the loose in Boston. The victims are killed in a particularly nasty way: cut with a scalpel on the stomach, the intestines and uterus removed, and then the throat slashed. The killer obviously has medical knowledge and has been dubbed "the Surgeon" by the media. Detective Thomas Moore and his partner Rizzoli of the Boston Homicide Unit have discovered something that makes this case even more chilling. Years ago in Savannah a serial killer murdered in exactly the same way. He was finally stopped by his last victim who shot him as he tried to cut her. That last victim is Dr Catherine Cordell, who now works as a cardiac surgeon at one of Boston's prestigious hospitals. As the murders continue, it becomes obvious that the killer is drawing closer and closer to Dr Cordell, who is becoming so frightened that she is virtually unable to function. But she is the only person who can help the police catch this copycat killer. Or is it a copycat? To complicate matters even further, Detective Moore, often referred to as Saint Thomas as he continues to mourn the loss of his wife, is getting emotionally involved with the doctor.

This book has languished at the back of my closet, unread for months.  I thought that it was a mystery-romance, heavier on the romance, so I was in no rush to read it.  The reason why I picked it up is because I just saw the show "Rizzolli and Isles" for the first time and quite liked it - and apparently the show is based on the series of books that started with this one.

This was a good, somewhat procedural, mystery novel.  I whipped through it in a couple of hours.  There were no big surprises, and I felt almost no connection to the main characters.  However, it was an easy, entertaining read.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ***

Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures.

The above description, which I had to do some searching for, is neither the one I read before I bought this book, nor the one on the back of the book.  It is, however, an accurate description of the story.  Maybe it was because I was expecting something else, but wasn't as impressed by it as I expected to be.  The Thirteenth Tale is a fairly good book, but I found it to be very dark and somewhat depressing.  

More than one person told me that they read it in a sitting, because they couldn't put it down.  While I didn't dislike it, it didn't hold my attention for very long.  I rarely read more than 20-30 pages before my mind started to wander, which is why it took me over two weeks to complete.  It wasn't a bad book, just not as good as I'd hoped.

Book of Negros, by Lawrence Hill ****

This novel is published as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and appears in Canada as The Book of Negroes in Canada.

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle - a string of slaves - Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic "Book of Negroes". This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata's eventual return to Sierra Leone - passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America - is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.

This one took me a couple of weeks to work through.  It was a good story, though, telling the life story of a woman (girl) who is stolen from her African village at 11 and taken to the States to be a slave.  It held my attention throughout  - at time disturbing, but never too graphic.  The first half reminded me quite a bit of the book "Sacajawea" by A Waldo, which I read many, many years ago.