The Score by Richard Stark

Adapted and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke – where Parker lets himself get talked into a robbery of a mining town by an amateur against his better judgement.  It takes too many men, it’s too close to a state cop station, it’s too risky.  But he agrees when three other thieves he knows are in on it.  They rent a panel truck to haul the men and the loot.  They buy guns, food, cots, and clothes with masks.  The amateur has a girl with him.  That almost gets the job called off.  She gets parked at a motel in another State.  They wait until the company town’s curfew and hit the police department, the fire department, and the phone company first to control the town.  At each place, they leave one of the crew to watch over the place.  Then they hit the three banks, the jewelry stores and finally, the mine.  But the amateur, left to guard the police station turns out to be the ex-police chief who was expelled from the town after one scandal too many.  He kills the policemen and proceeds to set the town on fire.  At the mine, his last grenade causes a wall to fall over on him.  The rest of the crew get away as fast as they can and manage to miss being caught by the cops.  They had found an abandoned part of the mine a few miles away and hid their cars in sheds and the truck at the bottom of a ravine.  One of Parker’s top men brought a girl from the phone company.  She’s seen their faces and can identify them.  Parker tells the man he will have to kill her and bury her deep.  The man refuses, so Parker interviews the girl.  He decides it’s the other guy’s problem.  They lay low for four days.  One of the guys goes stir crazy and demands to get his share so he can leave.  Parker doesn’t let him.  The guy runs his car backwards, too fast down the road to the bottom of the ravine and falls off the road, crashing and burning up in the bottom of the ravine.  The crew has to bury the car, with him in it.  When the waiting period if over, the split the money evenly amongst the remaining men, less the expenses that were financed up from plus the vig.  Parker drives into the other State and visits the amateur’s girl.  She has no where to go, so she settles for Parker.

Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs

Where our favorite werewolves owned some property for the last 200 years.  Some people were squatting on it.  The FBI approached the Cornick family because a resident’s daughter reported it as suddenly abandoned.  The Marrock’s mate, Leah, owns the property.  Something horrible happened to her back then and she was rescued, changed, and mated without her consent.  When Charles, Anna and Tag, an old berserker werewolf, go out to check on the place, something traps Anna, mentally, back into her own worst experience.  Charles pulls her out and when they go to a storage facility owned by one of the residents, they find magic grimoires.  She is a white witch, and notes in her storage leads them to her father in a rest-home.  Only it’s no ordinary place.  It’s a place for black witches and they’re draining the man, an ancient enemy of the werewolves, of his magical energy.  They meet in a garden, which itself exerts a magical influence.  Leah has been summoned by the malign influence and travels in wolf form from Montana to the site.  Bran, the Marrok, is flying in by helicopter with a fey sword to try to kill the entity.  Leah had a surviving son from before and he has become a walker for the entity.  He confuses Anna with magic and kidnaps her.  Charles and Tag discover this an hour later and follow to Wild Sign.  Leah gets there first and before her son can do anything else to Anna, Leah grabs her and tries to pull her from the cave system.  The son confronts them before they can escape, and Anna shoots him in the eye and chest.  They leave the cave and run into Charles and Tag.  But the entity is not dome with them yet and a battle ensues with the entity having taken on aspects of Cthulhu, tentacles included.  Bran appears with the sword, but Tag is so close to dying, he tosses the sword to Charles who delivers a disabling blow.  Leah reenters the cave and finds her son is not dead and regenerating.  She kills him again and returns to the entity with her son’s heart, which she buries in a tentacle and then pierces both with the sword.  That seems to be the mortal blow.  Coyote appears and cheers them on from the sidelines.  He tells them that all of the women, currently pregnant with potential walkers of the entity have miscarried.  Bran takes Leah back to Montana.  When the others are out of sight, Coyote saunters over to one of the tentacles and slices it open.  Inside, the entity is in the form of a small white slug.  Coyote eats it.  Tastes like squid.  Later, coyote visits the rest home and walks into the garden.  He tells it they need to talk.

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Arkady Renko is the son of a famous Russian General that he cannot stand.  He is the Chief Investigator of Homicides in Moscow.  But there are no murders in the USSR.  Except he is called out to a scene of discovered corpses in Gorky Park, two men and a woman, who have bullet wounds to the heart.  The two men were also shot through the mouth.  All three are missing their fingertips and their faces.  Major Plibludin, of the KGB barges into the scene and roughly frisks the bodies, contaminating the scene.  Renko wants him to take the case, but the KGB does not see any crime against the state, so they don’t want it.  Back home, Arkady’s marriage to a Russian celebrity is falling apart.   He can’t concentrate on anything other than the case.  One of the detectives assigned to him is a KGB informer.  He sends daily reports to the prosecutor.  He takes the skull of the woman and has her face reconstructed.  Every step of the way he is foiled in his attempts to either get the case transferred or the freedom to solve it.  The deeper he digs, the more he finds involvement from Siberians who have come to Moscow illegally, escaping the law, from an American deluded into believing he can rescue the Siberians, and a visious businessman with ties in Russia that go back to WWII.  Ultimately this becomes a tale of greed vs an honest man.

Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger

The former Sheriff of Iron Lake, Cork O’Conner, is caught-up solving a murder in the midst of corruption and greed of the white residents and the native residents of the local Anishinaabe reservation.  Even though he is no longer the sheriff, he has a better understanding and cannot let the mystery of a missing paper boy and a dead former judge.

The One and Only Bob by Kathrine Applegate

A sequel to The One and Only Ivan, we follow Bob in his new home with Julie, who adopted him when Ivan and his friends were rescued from the Mall and now live in an animal park with others of their own species.  But the story centers around a Hurricane and the destruction and rescue of animals.  Bob even finds his sister, who he did not know survived their being thrown away.  And he has a nephew to rescue.

Nightmare in Pink by John D MacDonald

Travis McGee looks up the sister of an old war buddy.  Her fiancé has been killed and Travis is set to find out who did it and why.  The sister is convinced he was embezzling money from the investment bank where he worked.  She even has $10,000 that was hidden in his apartment.  But it looks too slick to McGee and yet missing obvious evidence.  The man who was supposed to be embezzled from recently had a breakdown and spent a month in a hospital, then when he was released, he moved out of his home and started living in an apartment with his secretary and his lawyer.  When McGee meets with the secretary for a drink, she slips him a rufee and when he comes-to he is in a hospital, hallucinating.  McGee figures out that the same thing must have happened to the banker.  He causes a ruckus at the hospital and escapes.  The lawyer, the mastermind behind the real embezzling, marries the secretary to prevent her from testifying against him and the banker is not able to testify to anything because he was lobotomized in the hospital.

The Cleaners by Ken Liu

This is an interesting take on removing bad memories.  The hero is a very ordinary looking guy who cleans bad memories from stuff.  He is incapable of holding onto memories himself, so he is immune to the emotions from other people’s memories.

The Wickeds by Gayle Forman

Two women, the wicked witch who fed the poisoned apple to Snow White and the wicked step-mother of Cinderella join forces to ruin the wedding of one of their grandchildren.  They join forces with the dwarves, who didn’t like Snow White barging in on their operation.  At the wedding they find that their granddaughters are spoiled brats and switch sides to make sure everything turns out all right in the end.

The Princess Game by Soman Chainani

This story is done in Film Noir style as a spoof on 21 Jump Street.  Two detectives are sent undercover to a school where young women, princesses, are murdered.  One is sent in as a chemistry teacher, a really poor teacher who doesn’t know as much about the subject as his students.  The other, a rookie, because he looks young enough to be a student.  He joins the princes, a clique of rich boys who like to steal the princesses virginity.  More keep dying and the undercover operation unravels.  Who done it?  And will we find out before everything spins out of control?

Hazel and Grey by Nic Stone

An updated version of Hansel and Gretel – wherein the children are teenagers in love.  Grey is a guy who’s always been seen as just another black kid, destined for the big house.  But he wants to do better.  He wants to use his street smarts to keep himself, and his love, Hazel safe.  He hates the man who ran out on his mother.  Hazel hates her stepfather.  They try to run away to spend one night together.  But they get lost in the woods and when they find a house, there’s a big party going on there.  Hazel is drugged and trapped in a room, so Grey acts like he was there to sell her.  In the end the find the proprietor is none other than the same man who abused Grey and has had his eye on his step-daughter.  They manage to cause a ruckus and attract the cops, who arrest the pedophile and free up the kids they were pimping.

The Prince and the Troll by Rainbow Rowell

This is how fairy tales really should be told.  In this case a man, who lives by a road and loves his job, crosses a bridge every day.  The problem is that building the road has caused the river under the bridge to silt-up and instead of clear water, there is just a lot of mud.  One day, when he has stopped to look at the river, he drops his phone.  But it is caught by the bridge troll.  She manages to toss the phone back up to him.  Over time, he builds up a friendly relationship with her, finding a way to get down near her and bring a cup of coffee each day from her from Starbucks.  He falls in love with her, but she is wiser than he is and knows nothing good can come from such a relationship.  Eventually it rains a lot and the river flows once again, sweeping everything in its path away, including the troll.  But in spite of this the man continues to stop each day at the bridge, waiting for her return.

 Robert Parker's Wonderland by Ace Atkins

This is a story about Spenser, the hero of the series of books by Robert Parker.  Mr. Atkins does a fine job of keeping the characters true to Parker’s work.  In this one, the State of Massachusetts has decided to legalize gambling.  So there is a license up for grabs and the competition is fierce.  But the story starts from Spenser’s gym coach, Henry Cimoli, when one of the competitors is trying to get the people in his building to sell out so they can control all the land around the old Wonderland dog track, where they want to build a casino.  And thugs are sent to try to encourage this to happen quickly.  Spenser and his apprentice, a Native American, Zebulon Sixkill provide the opposition to this until they meet with the man responsible.  And when he is killed, they have to try to reign-in the real crooks.

The Secret Stealers by Jane Healey

Another book about the contributions of women in World War II.  In this one, an American widow with connections goes to work for the forerunner of the OSS.  At first, simply as a secretary to the General who is running the operation, then as a spy.  She is trained in how to operate and encode messaging equipment and sent to France to help the underground, where she is reunited with childhood friends.  Since she is fluent in both French and German, she works as a waitress in restaurant where she can overhear SS officers.  This is much like the heroine in The Alice Network.

The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin 

On a planet, much like Earth, maybe it is Earth, where the continents have drifted back into one giant land, there are still changes that occur.  The people on this planet call the times that last after a change, anywhere from months to years, seasons.  Most settlements last only through one season.  The capital of the empire has lasted through four such seasons.  People with special abilities are shunned and recruited by the capital and trained to use their abilities to try to stave off earthquakes.  The main heroine is one such person.  We follow her in three different timelines: as a child, as a four-ring practitioner, and as a refugee.  In the middle timeline, she is paired with a ten-ring practitioner, almost unheard-of, as her mentor and is ordered to bear his child.  He is less than cooperative.  They are sent to a city on the coast to clear coral from a harbor.  She finds an artifact blocking the harbor.  Trying to move it, she raises it and doing so destroys the city.  She and her mentor find themselves transported to an island where life seems idyllic, and they can raise their child.  But the empire finds them.  In the third timeline, our heroine feels the start of another season and escapes as a refugee.  She is reunited with her mentor on his deathbed.  He has started the fifth season and wants her to finish what he started and destroy the empire.

The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern 

This is an urban low fantasy.  There are no elves, no trolls, no orcs, no hobbits.  But there is magic and illusion.  Two very old magicians have an ongoing game they play with other people’s lives.  Each finds a special child with inherent abilities.  They adopt the child and train them.  Once the bet is placed, each child receives a ring, which burns itself into their finger.  Neither will be introduced to the other.  In this case, the venue becomes a circus which opens at night.  Those people who are involved with the circus find that they have become virtually frozen at the age they were when they first agreed to conceive and build the circus.  But they are not immortal.  One of the contestants enhances his own looks to make himself seem ordinary and serves as the assistant to the circus proprietor, who is not one of the magicians.  The other, a superb illusionist has her own act in one tent of the circus.  Each think that it is their work that sustains the circus.  Little by little they recognize that the other contestant is making changes and additions to the circus.  For years, this is how they compete.  Eventually they find each other and go beyond mere introduction to becoming lovers.  The problem is that there is only one way for a contestant to win.  The other must die.