Redwall by Brian Jacques

A Saga about the attack of a madman on an Abbey in England.  The characters are represented by animanls.  Mice run an Abbey that helps the community and takes-in the sick to help them get well.  A Rat, Cluny the Scourge, travels with his horde of rats, weasels and ferrets in search of plunder.  But when he sees the Abbey, he decides he wants it for his castle.  The Abbey had a hero in its past, Martin of Redwall.  Now they had another, Matthias.  The scenes shift from Cluny to Matthias and the mouse goes on adventures to find Martin’s sword so he can return to Redwall and defeat Cluny.

The book is rather long and even though written for British children, it might not have been quite as popular in the U.S. because of colloquialisms and the violence in the scenes.  Cluny has a poison barb on his tale, there is a military Rabbit, the sparrows, who seem to hate everything, shrews who constantly fight, a barn cat, a snowy owl and a viper.  Matthias has to either defeat or turn all of them.

Absolute Power by David Baldacci

This was Baldacci’s first novel.  It centers around corruption of the worst kind at the highest office in the land.  A rich old man, who was responsible for putting the president in office, goes on vacation to Jamaica.  At the last minute, his wife decides to stay behind.  Her real reason is to bed the president, who is all too willing to cooperate.

A thief, who knows a maid at the rich man’s house, enters, quiets the alarm system and proceeds to the master bedroom where behind a mirror, is a room sized safe filled with money, jewels and collections.  But before he can leave, the president and the rich man’s wife enter the bedroom.  The thief is trapped in the safe and discovers that the mirror is a one-way window and watches the scene develop.

Both the woman and the president are drunk.  When he slaps the woman too hard, she hits back, this enrages the president and he begins to beat the woman.  She grabs a letter opener and slices his arm.  He yells and his secret service men burst into the room in time to see her on top with the letter opener poised to plunge into the man.  The secret service men kill the woman.

The president’s chief of staff enters the scene, gets the secret service men and the president out of the room.  She finds the letter opener and bags it and puts it in the top of her purse.  When the secret service men come back, she has them sanitize the room, removing all evidence that the president had been there.  While doing that, they knock over the purse, and the letter opener falls behind a table to the floor.

When they leave, the thief leaves the safe, grabs the bagged letter opener for future insurance and climbs out the window.  The chief of staff realizes she left her purse behind and the secret service men go back for it.  Only once they’re in the room, they see the open window and the rope the thief used to climb down.

They give chase but fail to catch the thief before he gets away.

The local homicide detective called-in when the local patrol sees the open window, notices impossible aspects of the case.  No fingerprints anywhere, not even of the victim or her husband.  The floor has been vacuumed, the woman checked for having had sex, and a blood spatter pattern that shows something or someone was near when she was shot – and two bullet holes in her head from different directions, one still inside her head and the other already dug out of the wall.

A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas

The second volume in the Lady Sherlock Series wherein our heroine, Charlotte Holmes, who masquerades as her ‘sick brother’, Sherlock, solves cases both important and mundane with her superior wit, observation, and deduction.  In this case, Lady Ingram, the wife of a man that Charlotte secretly loves, comes to consult with the detective about her own lost love.  A man whom she was unable to marry because he was unsuitable to her parents.  Once a year, they pass each other by at a specific place in the park.  But this year, he did not appear.

Ingram’s brother, also a Lord, proposes to Charlotte and gifts her with a set of mysteries to solve.  She solves all but one upon reading them.  The extra one takes days of working ciphers.  She runs into a detective from Scotland Yard who has a corpse to examine and find the murderer.  The corpse’s coat has a braille message in the back of it.

These cases entwine in unexpected ways that lead to extreme changes in people’s lives.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Judith Ashton, a journalist and successful author of a series of comedic, light-hearted books on World War II written under a pseudonym, wants to write about something different and under her own name.  She receives a letter from Guernsey from a farmer who has acquired a book she once owned.  He tells how it led to the society on the island.  She is intrigued and writes back asking questions about the name of the society.  He writes back, telling her the story of how, on the spot, when confronted by German soldiers, a resident spun up the story, creating the society on the spot.  Back in London, Judith is pursued by a rich American publisher.  Her publisher and life-long friend, is both jealous and worried that the American will steal her away from his publishing company.

The book is written as a series of letters and tells the history of the German occupation of Guernsey without apology or lack of exposure of the tribulations of both sides.

It is definitely one of the best books I've read this year