The Huntress by Kate Quinn 

A gripping thriller about the hunt for a woman, who as a Nazi killer hunted children.  The tale is told in two timelines; one about a Russian girl who wanted to fly airplanes and the other, after World War II where she and her ‘husband’ look for the Nazi killer.  The story exposes the bravery of Russian women who flew planes and bombed the enemy Germans to defend and then to drive back the invaders.  And the dangerous escape of one such woman after the government chose to imprison her over something her father said in a drunken brawl.  She then rescues an escaped British soldier, only for him to get killed by the huntress, who tried to kill them both.  But the Russian woman escaped and survived.  Later, the soldier’s brother, a journalist, finds her in a field hospital and to save her, he marries her in the field and has her sent to England.  A few years later, after the war is over, he has been chasing down Nazi criminals to bring them to justice and she appears to help him find the Huntress (who has gone to America).

The Buried World by Jeff Wheeler 

The second book in his series about the Grave Kingdom, wherein Bingmei is taken by the evil Emperor Echion and forced to release his dead queen Xisi.  Together they plan to rule the world.  So it is Bingmei’s obligation to escape and travel into the Grave Kingdom to find the one thing that will defeat evil.

 The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

Edward Tulane is a rabbit.  A figurine and a toy.  He is the companion of a very rich little girl.  And he has the dignity his position affords him.  But his position is not as secure as he thinks.  While on a trip with his little girl on the RMS Queen Mary, he falls overboard into the Atlantic.  He rests on the ocean floor for quite a while.  After most of a year, a storm tosses him into a fishing net.  The fisherman takes him home to his wife, who dresses him as a girl rabbit and sings to him everyday.  The Woman’s daughter thinks the situation is ridiculous and tosses him in the garbage, which leads to him being put in a dump.  From there he finds himself the property of a hobo, who tells stories at night to other hobos. Then he lives with a little boy and his tubercular sister until she dies.  In anger at this sister’s death, he damages the rabbit.  He tries to get him fixed-up, but cannot afford the repairs and lets the toymaker keep him for sale.  A woman comes in the store to look around and spies the rabbit.  She is the little girl, grown up now with her own daughter, who originally owned the toy.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie 

A collection of two dozen interlinked short stories starring his usual cast of characters on the reservation. It was the basis for his movie, Smoke Signals.

Each story can stand on its own, but together they draw a canvas of stories that could only be found on the reservation. Victor Joseph, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Junior Polatkin and others live through these stories and go on to stories in other books. Sherman Alixie has a pattern of ordinariness that frequently delivers a hard punch to the gut.

"Often the stories contain people who never existed before our collective imaginations created them."

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancy

First Wave: “Lights Out” During the first wave, the Others release an EMP wave that takes out all electronic technology and kills half a million people by shorting out all moving vehicles, including planes in mid-flight. 

Second wave: “Surf's Up” The Others, realizing that roughly 40 percent of Earth's population lives within 60 miles of the coastline, drop enormous rods "twice as tall as the Empire State Building and three times as heavy" onto the Earth's fault lines, causing massive tsunamis that wipe out three billion people. 

Third wave: “Pestilence” The Others launch a scheme to infect as many remaining survivors as possible with a deadly virus. Using the Earth's birds as carriers (via falling excrement), the plague claims 97 per cent of remaining survivors. The virus, which resembles an advanced form of Ebola, causes victims to slowly bleed to death until eventually "you've become a viral bomb. And when you explode, you blast everyone around you with the virus". 

Fourth wave: “Silencers” After the 3rd wave, the remaining human population tries desperately to survive off whatever resources remain by looting, all the while clinging to the hope that "the people in charge", wherever they may be, are working toward a solution. Eventually, this belief seems legitimate when an impressive battalion of soldiers (with functioning vehicles) arrives at the makeshift camp where Cassie, Sam, and her father are staying. The soldiers and commander, however, only appear interested in the children and promptly load them onto waiting buses before ordering all the adults into the camp barracks.  Once the humans are surrounded, Commander Vosch orders a massacre and kills everyone at the camp.  Cassie, however, narrowly escapes and witnesses her father's death by Vosch's hand. At this moment, the 4th wave becomes clear: not all "humans" are actually humans.

Cassie goes on a mission to rescue her little brother.  She finds herself trapped and wounded by a sniper.  But eventually, he walks away.  A couple of days later, she discovers another survivor, delirious, she faints and wakes up in his farmhouse.  Her little brother and her fellow survivor are trained in weapons and then sent on a raid to root out the Others.  Only it turns out that their Sergeant is really an Other and the exercise is a trap to remove the best defenders of humanity left alive.

Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo 

Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.

Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.

No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.

Get Real by Donald Westlake

John Dortmunder and his friends are hired, against their better judgement, to do a reality show about a gang of crooks who meet at their favorite bar in the back room.  Only they really want to rob the building where the filming is taking place in a mock-up of their favorite bar.  The real target is on the floor below the filming.  But it appears that it is used infrequently by visitors from out of the country.  When the gang breaks-in to find out where the real money is hidden, they discover that the real crooks are the people that own the company filming the show.  The gang doesn’t take all of the money, but the company isn’t going to go to the cops, because then they’d have to admit that they’re skimming the budgets of the shows they’re making and sending the money overseas.  All they can do is cancel the show.

 The Darwin Affair by Tim Mason

A library book club recommendation.  We have a police detective in London who has unwittingly been labeled as being the model for Dicken’s Inspector Bucket in his serial novel, Bleak House.  It’s made him popular with a lot of people, even the Queen.  He is given the responsibility to make sure she is safe on her way across London.  But a witless man waves a gun and screams anarchist slogans.  He gets away but is slain only a block from the scene.  A butcher’s apprentice sees a man fleeing the scene, but doesn’t think much about it.  The next day he is abducted.  The detective tracks people with no real success and is eventually let go for insubordination.  He accepts a job at a pub that is next to a funeral home.  One that is switching bodies from the coffins to sell as cadavers to the medical school across the way.  But then our detective recognizes one of the bodies.  And the race is on.  He is reassigned into the police and set to accompany the Queen and Prince Albert on their visit to Germany.  And the original assassin, along with his new ‘apprentice’, the butcher boy, follow to try to kill the Prince.

 The One and only Ivan by K.A. Applegate

Ivan is a gorilla who lives in a tourist trap mall off I95.  He has friends, Stella, an elephant, Bob a dog, and Julia, the janitor’s daughter, who brings him materials to do art.  Maurice, who owns the mall and the animals in it, raised Ivan after hunters killed his family.  But Stella is sick and Maurice doesn’t take care of her as he should.  A baby elephant, Ruby, captured as Ivan was, comes to the mall.  She’s scared.  Stella gives her some comfort and pointers, but Stella dies and just before she does, she asks Ivan to take care of the baby.  Ivan has to think for a long while, but he starts painting pieces of paper and makes enough to cover the billboard.  Julia talks her father into putting the pieces together on the billboard and suddenly the mall is the center of attraction again.  Maurice is happy at first to be making so much money.  But eventually the zoo learns of the animals and comes to inspect their cages.  In the end, Ivan and Ruby get to move to an open-air zoo.

Topaz by Leon Uris 

An original thriller about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The name of the French President is a thinly veiled characterization of De Gaulle, but he was not the President in charge during the time of the story.  It boasts a medium sized cast of a Soviet defector and his wife and daughter, a French secret-service agent, his wife and daughter and his lover in Cuba, high-ranking Cuban officials and American agents interviewing the defector and using the French secret serviceman to get confirmation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.  The story delves deeply into the pressures on family life in these roles.

The book was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin 

Mengele is alive and well in South America and he’s been busy.  There is a plan afoot to create the fourth Reich.  But someone found him and recorded a secret dinner meeting wherein he has assigned 94 names of older men he needs killed in order for his plan to go forward.  These men must be around 65, have a much younger wife, and a teenage son.  The must be killed in a specific order and on or near specific dates.  Just as the recorder has managed to get a famous Nazi hunter, Yakov Liberman, on the phone, but before he can relay the details, Mengele and his men burst into the hotel room and kill the young man.  Yakov can’t get it off his mind and asks a reporter friend to let him know about men fitting the description dying, either in suspicious accidents or outright murder.  The clippings start coming in with far more volume that Liberman expected.  He poses a hypothetical question while giving a lecture at a university.  This leads him to talking to a geneticist.  The conclusion involves a pattern that matches the growth of the most evil man in history.  It seems that Mengele, using some of Hitler’s hair, has created 94 clones and had them delivered to families that were turned down because of the difference in the age of the father and the mother.  When Hitler was a teenager, his father was killed.  Mengele has 94 chances to create a new Hitler from the boys from Brazil.

The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley

In which two orphaned sisters, of the family Grimm, after being shunted from one foster family to another are finally claimed by a woman who says she is their grandmother.  The problem, as far as the older sister is concerned, is that their father told them their grandmother is dead.  The grandmother’s driver is a gaunt old man and her car seems even older.  In the town, which also looks very old, the girls get a lot of odd looks.  The mayor is Mr. Charming, there are other people with names of characters from fairy tales.  In their grandmother’s house, there is a room they can’t go into.  The older sister is waiting for the chance for her and her sister to escape yet another crazy foster home.  But then a giant steps on a farmhouse and the story really gets wild from there.  All the while, the older sister refuses to believe in fairy tales, until the giant steals their care with their grandmother and her driver right in front of them.  The grandmother’s keys come flying out and onto the ground.  They have no choice but to go back to their grandmother’s house and see what is in the forbidden room.  And it’s the magic mirror, hiding all kinds of magical artifacts in a warehouse behind the mirror.  Jack, from the beanstalk tale is the only one in town who knows how to kill a giant, and he’s in jail.  The girls have to rescue their grandmother and figure out who is causing all the trouble.

One Good Deed by David Baldacci 8/10)

A new character for Baldacci, a man Aloysius Archer, a WWII vet who found himself on the wrong side of helping a young lady escape her family.  She said she was 21 but she lied.  As a result, her father had Archer put in prison for kidnapping a minor.  He’s out, on parole, and sent to a city he’s never heard of before.  There, he immediately runs into a man who hires him to collect on a debt or repossess the collateral.  He then meets his parole officer, get a list of what he’s not allowed to do (including going to bars, where he was hired).  It becomes obvious fairly soon in the story that there are two rich and opposed men in the town, one is the man who hired Archer and the other is the man Archer is supposed to collect the debt from.  Archer’s boss is keeping the daughter of the other man.  That man refuses to pay the debt.  For some reason the wife of Archer’s boss knows about the affair and does nothing about it.  Then Archer’s boss is killed.  Then the other man is killed.  There are multiple players with axes to grind in both directions.  The story revolves around Archer’s parole not being violated while he tries to figure out who the real killer is to clear his own name.

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

The film version of this followed the beginning of the book very closely.  But the book devolves into constant angst on the part of the title character. The story itself follows closely in both mediums.  A man falls overboard, fighting for his life.  He’s picked-up by fishermen, who take him to shore on a small isle, where he is nursed back to health by an alcoholic doctor.  But he is an amnesiac.  He had something embedded under his skin.  He remembers something about a bank.  Once he goes there, he becomes a target.  He abducts a woman as a shield to get away, but then when he leaves her, someone tries to rape and kill her.  He returns and saves her only to faint.  When he awakes, she is taking care of him.  In the meantime, his arch enemy, whom he does not remember, attacks the secret headquarters where Bourne got his instructions to trap or kill, and leaves Bourne’s fingerprints.

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

Past Tense by Lee Child

Reacher is on his way across the country from Maine.  He happens to see a sign for the town that his father grew-up in.  So he decides to investigate.  While there, he stops a young punk from raping a waitress that works for the boy’s father.  He’s the local spoiled rich-kid.  Reacher intervenes and the kid ends-up with a broken arm and jaw.  The local cops include a former Army MP and out of courtesy, she asks Reacher to leave.  But he isn’t finished looking for his roots. 

At the same time, a young couple from Canada have car trouble and find an out of the way motel in the woods about 20 miles north of where Reacher is staying.  What they’ve stumbled upon is a version of the Most Dangerous Game where a group of rich older men have been willing to pay a lot of money to hunt people.  The motel is run by three young me who have been planning this for a long time. 

Reacher discovers that a Tin Mill, run during the war effort was managed by his grandfather.  At the time, all the little groups of buildings had a local area name, but the post office was in the nearest city.  Reacher finds that the neighboring farm has encroached on the Mill area and fenced it in as their own, untaxed land.  This leads to complications since there aren’t enough men to challenge Reacher.  More people get injured.  The Mob, at the restaurant owner’s request come in from Boston looking for Reacher.  This causes problems for the local police who still want Reacher to leave. 

So finally, Reacher goes north and finds the same motel.  Only they don’t want another person there, so they make poor excuses for why they can’t rent him a room when it’s obvious that there are quite a few people there.  Reacher doubles back and interrupts the ‘game’.

The Rise of Magicks by Nora Roberts (6/9)

The final volume in the Of Blood and Bone series – in which our heroine, Fallon, raises her armies and attacks Evil.  She begins by taking outposts of the Purity Warriors.  Then she attacks a government base in Atlanta that is targeted to destroy magicals.  Then Washington DC where a self-proclaimed president presides over horrible experiments on magicals, searching for a vaccine to inoculate a super-army.  Then she attacks New York, and restores broadcasting.  Finally, she and her mate and his sister, blood of the Danniah confront and trap Evil, ridding the world of it for another thousand years.

There are a lot of biblical parallels in the story.  But it was a fun read.