Authors I Like from Claire M. Johnson

This is from
Claire M. Johnson's blog. She is the author of Beat Until Stiff and Roux Mourgue. Claire is Smart and Funny and I love her. You should give her a try. I bet you will love her too.

"I'm going to start a new "series" here, listing authors that I like and why. Reading is on the decline in the United States, and while I'm assuming that most people who read this blog love books, there's always the chance that I might snag someone who was here for the recipe(s).

My favorite mystery author is James Lee Burke. There is a lyricism, a poetry, about his writing that is unusual in crime fiction. On the negative side, his women tend to be one-dimensional (except for the prostitutes and lowlifes), and he also has one plot: one man (with a little help from his friends) fighting internal and external demons. But I never let that stop me. Burke has a tremendous amount to say about institutionalized racism in the south, corruption so widespread it's almost genetic, the raping of the environment. His latest book, The Tin Roofblow Down another in the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Detective Dave Robicheaux series, deals with the corruption and destruction in the wake of Katrina; it is a stunning read, a love letter to Louisiana and its citizens.

My favorite book of his has kind of a woo-woo factor. I don't know how well it sold, but I imagine it's probably not one of his best sellers because of the ghost aspect to it. His publishers probably pulled him aside and said, "Jim, cut the supernatural shit." I recommend it highly: In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. If you're an American reading this, it says so much about the Civil War, the people who fought it, the guilt of the survivors (us), the honorable men who fought an dishonorable war, the stupidity, and the slaughter.

Writer envy meter: five stars"

Don't miss Swan Peak. Robicheaux and his partner, Clete Purcel, head off for the mountains of Montana for some much-needed healing. But while Montana might seem an unspoilt paradise, Dave and Clete soon find that there is evil luring in the wilds too.

Stephen King calls Meg Gardiner "the next suspense superstar"

Recently Stephen King devoted an entire Entertainment Weekly
column to Meg Gardiner, proclaiming her "as good as Michael Connelly and far better than Janet Evanovich." How is it possible, he wondered, that this Californian was published only in Britain? Starting now, suspense fans on this side of the pond can get their fix right here: Dutton is proud to introduce Gardiner's brand-new series heroine, Jo Beckett, in The Dirty Secrets Club.

An ongoing string of high-profile and very public murder-suicides has San Francisco even more rattled than a string of recent earthquakes: A flamboyant fashion designer burns to death, clutching the body of his murdered lover. A superstar 49er jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. And most shocking of all, a U.S. attorney launches her BMW off a highway overpass, killing herself and three others.

Enter forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett, hired by the SFPD to cut open not the victim's body but the victim's life. Jo's job is to complete the psychological autopsy, shedding light on the circumstances of any equivocal death. Soon she makes a shocking discovery: All the suicides belonged to something called the Dirty Secrets Club, a group of A-listers with nothing but money and plenty to hide. As the deaths continue, Jo delves into the disturbing motives behind this shadowy group—until she receives a letter containing a dark secret Jo thought she'd left deep in her past, and ending with the most chilling words of all: "Welcome to the Dirty Secrets Club."
Stephen King - If you read Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, or Nelson DeMille, you're going to think Meg Gardiner is a gift from heaven....the next suspense superstar. Last November I had to do a book tour in England, which I looked forward to with the enthusiasm I have for emergency root canals. For an airplane read, I pulled China Lake, the first of Meg Gardiner's Evan Delaney series, from the Someday Bookcase. It was the first book I saw by my own U.K. publisher there (yes, Uncle Stevie can brown-nose with the best of them). And the type was big. That was the true deciding factor.

I barely noticed the plane ride (save that one patch of turbulence when I was convinced, as always, that death was approximately three minutes away). China Lake had me from page 1, on which a vicious religious cult called the Remnant pickets a funeral with charming signs reading ''God Hates Sluts'' and ''AIDS Cures Whores.'' Seven hours and 470 pages later I landed in England, convinced I had found the next suspense superstar. This book had everything. It came complete with an ultra-tough SoCal heroine (think Kinsey Millhone, only punk rock and in combat boots) and a climax which involves defusing a ticking time bomb and a stampeding brush fire. Entertainment Weekly

The Pop of King: The Secret Gardiner
Learn More About Meg

You can meet Author Meg Gardiner June 18 at 7 PM at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

From Kim Harrison

Kim Harrison's favorite book of ALL time: Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Can’t wait to read the sequel – Farewell Summer!

"Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

Come and savor Ray Bradbury's priceless distillation of all that is eternal about boyhood and summer."

To read an excerpt Click Here

The Book That Made Me a Reader

Michael Connelly’s favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960.
“Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.”

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out."

Stephen King's Pick

Stephen is reading: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (By David Wroblewski) A meaty family melodrama forthcoming from Ecco Press this fall. It's got that Thousand Acres/Jane Smiley vibe.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle explores the deep and ancient alliance between humans and dogs, and the power of fate through one boy’s epic journey into the wild.

Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar’s lifelong companion. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar’s uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelle’s once-peaceful home. When Edgar’s father dies suddenly, Claude insinuates himself into the life of the farm–and into Edgar’s mother’s affections.
Grief-stricken and bewildered, Edgar tries to prove Claude played a role in his father’s death, but his plan backfires, spectacularly. Edgar flees into the vast wilderness lying beyond the farm. He comes of age in the wild, fighting for his survival and that of the three yearling dogs who follow him. But his need to face his father’s murderer, and his devotion to the Sawtelle dogs, turn Edgar ever homeward.

Wroblewski is a master storyteller, and his breathtaking scenes–the elemental north woods, the sweep of seasons, an iconic American barn, a ghost made of falling rain–create a family saga that is at once a brilliantly inventive retelling of Hamlet, an exploration of the limits of language, and a compulsively readable modern classic.

Charlaine Harris reviews Charlie Huston

Charlie Huston’s Already Dead: A NOVEL is a hard-boiled detective book that happens to be about a vampire. This tough-guy novel is reminiscent of Andrew Vachhs’s Burke novels and Jon Merz’s Enforcer books, though it’s Huston’s own unique creation. Joe Pitt, trying hard not to be affiliated with any of New York’s very territorial vampire gangs, is treading a fine line between them; employed by at least two gangs for strong-arm work, he is protected by neither.

What are some of Joe Pitt’s activities? Well, he tracks and kills zombies, finds missing heiresses, and admires a bartender named Evie, who is infected with the HIV virus. Evie doesn’t know Joe Pitt’s true nature, and naturally assumes she can infect him with the virus if they have sex. So it’s not your regular hard-boiled detective novel relationship.

Usually, novels written in the present tense really irritate me, and unconventional punctuation does, too. Charlie Huston is such a good writer that I don’t mind the way he constructed this book. HALF PAST DEAD would be a special treat for readers who specialize in books about New York, because it draws completely on the city for its ambience. There’s even a vampire street gang map of Manhattan, which is just a great idea; I wish I had it in poster form. I’d like to point out that I visit New York as seldom as possible, and I loved this book, anyway. It’s well worth a walk on the hard-boiled side.

It's a Hard-Knock Medieval Life by Diana Gabaldon

AND A LAST WORD ON FALCONES

It's a Hard-Knock Medieval Life By Diana Gabaldon,
Washington Post Wednesday, May 7, 2008; Page C04
CATHEDRAL OF THE SEA By Ildefonso Falcones Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor Dutton. 611 pp. $26.95
Mark Twain's description of the art of storytelling consisted of a laconic "Oh, I chase the characters up a tree and then throw rocks at them." Ildefonso Falcones has evidently taken Twain's correspondence course.
Life for Arnau Estanyol, Catalan hero of Falcones's international bestseller, starts out rocky: The local lord rapes Arnau's mother on her wedding night and then, not wanting his wife to accuse him of fathering yet another bastard, forces the young woman's husband to have sex with her immediately -- with witnesses -- to confuse the issue.
A fortuitous birthmark establishes the husband as Arnau's father, but now the noble lord is infuriated because he thinks his manhood has been impugned. He forces mother and child into his castle, leaving the husband bereft. From there things go downhill for the Estanyols.
"Cathedral of the Sea" could be subtitled "Nobles Behaving Badly." Whenever an aristocrat enters a scene, expect Big Trouble. Arrogant knights, debt-ridden barons, conniving wives, greedy kings -- it's soap opera on a grand scale, made believable and enthralling by the inclusion of the commonplace brutalities and small compassions of life in medieval Barcelona. Watching Arnau's rise from literal rags to riches is frequently like watching a series of train wrecks; you're horrified but can't look away.
Between disasters, we're treated to exegeses regarding the political affairs of Pedro the Cruel, Pedro the Ceremonious and Pedro the Third, with Phillippe the Bold, two or three Infantes and King Jaime of Mallorca thrown in for comic relief. We also get descriptions of the financial and legal complexities of money-lending and Mediterranean trade, and occasional lessons in the history of Barcelona and Catalonia. Readers who don't read historical novels for educational purposes might be tempted to skip these passages. Don't: All of them have something to do with the plot, which is so beautifully structured that the last 60 pages detonate like a string of firecrackers.
Stylistically, Falcones is a minimalist. He rarely describes what characters look like, and here is virtually his entire description of an important sea battle: "At dawn, Pedro the Cruel ordered the attack. His fleet approached the sandbanks, and his men began to fire their crossbows and to shoot stones from catapults and bricolas. From the other side of the banks, the Catalan fleet did the same. Many men died from the crossbow bolts fired from both armies."
Though uncomplicated, the prose is powerful, no doubt due in part to the skill of the translator, Nick Caistor; the simplicity allows us to appreciate the riveting story without the distraction of ornamental language. Falcones has an eye for the singular, telling detail, and if his characters are simply drawn, they're believable.
Arnau is not quite your stereotypical hero. He's not all that bright, and most of his successes are the result of sheer luck or of falling in with people who are much smarter than he is. But he is good-hearted and stubborn about the few things he believes in.
Falcones's women really are all madonnas or whores and sometimes both at once, with the odd scheming harpy thrown in. Oddly, while most of the men in the book, other than the horny nobles, are celibate, many of the women are seething masses of molten desire. This was, of course, exactly the view of women promulgated by the Catholic Church at the time. Falcones's women eloquently make the point that for much of human history, women had no value other than sex and thus no power aside from it. And sex, as anyone -- especially Arnau -- can tell you, is a double-edged weapon.
Given Arnau's involvement with the ongoing construction of the cathedral of the title (a real one, Santa Maria del Mar) throughout the book, comparisons with Ken Follett's architectural historical novels, "The Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End," are inescapable, but aside from length and the central concept of architecture as metaphor, Falcones and Follett are entirely different in style, structure and theme. Follett merely describes the medieval mind-set to a modern audience; Falcones enters it, complete with its acceptance of brutality and embrace of religious sensibility.
"Cathedral" deals with the right of an individual -- a serf, a slave, a Jew or a woman -- to be recognized as a human being. This wasn't a popular concept in medieval Catalonia, but Arnau stands by it. While his principles frequently get him beaned with an authorial rock or arrested by the Inquisition, they also see him through. Arnau is the common man, and his eventual victory is one that every reader will celebrate.