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.

Thoreau, A Life Sublime by Maximilien Le Roy \

A brief take on the life of Henry David Thoreau, a philosopher, an anti-slave activist, and as a result an anti-government activist.  He was a graduate of Harvard.  Known for Walden, or Life in the Woods, and Civil Disobedience, he spoke for John Brown’s release and then at his funeral and then memorialized the man in The Last Days of John Brown.  He spent his time living as natural a life as he could find.  He spent time with Native Americans to learn how they lived with nature instead of working against it.  He worked as a conductor on the underground railroad.  He refused to pay his taxes because he did not want to fund a government that approved of slavery and passed the fugitive slave act.  He spoke against this when a runaway slave was found and captured in Massachusetts.  He was a friend of John Brown and spoke with him for many years against the idea of a slave uprising.  But once Brown was captured, he came to his defense.  He was frugal to a fault, refusing to travel to get better treatment for his tuberculosis.  It finally killed him at the age of 44 in 1862.  His life, though brief has had lasting effect upon American and the world. 

 Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

Angie Armstrong is an ex-con (she fed a poacher’s hand to an alligator – feels bad that they euthanized the alligator) who discreetly captures animals who are terrorizing people (at least in their minds).  She’s called to remove a python in a tree at a ritzy club in Palm Beach, where a rich, old woman has gone missing.   She was a leading member of the Potussies (don’t ask).  The python is lethargic because it ate a big meal, obvious because it’s bloated.  Angie decapitates it and puts it on ice in her truck.  She will deliver it to the State to be dissected.  When she gets home, her apartment’s been ransacked.  Then she checks on her storage, where the snake had been placed in a freezer, and it is missing.  The thieves are less than intelligent and having kidnapped the frozen snake, stop at a stripper club long enough for it to defrost and stink-up their stolen car.  They cut-open the snake, steal the jewelry and toss the woman’s corpse into a building’s freshly poured cement footing, then drive, drunk over a set of railroad tracks too fast, bouncing the trunk open and depositing the snake in the middle of the road.  Just before the secret service escort the First Lady home.  That night a boat with illegals lands on the island and on the way to find a job, one young man, Diego, crosses the same tracks and notices an unusual pink pearl and pockets it.  Then we meet POTUS, nicknamed by the secret service as Mastodon (he asked to see on in the National Zoo and was told it was on loan to another zoo), his overpriced club, Casa Bellecosa, becomes a central stage for the story. The First Lady starts an affair with a secret service agent, Kieth (really Youseff, but since POTUS doesn’t like people from ‘muslim’ countries has to use an alias ‘American’ sounding name.  Of course, POTUS is having his own affair with a stripper, who is writing a tell-all book about him.  Word that Diego has a piece of the rich woman’s jewelry, he is arrested for her murder.  POTUS uses this to stir up his base with a chant of No More Diegos. It’s up to Angie to solve the mysteries and get Diego freed.  She is visiteYhed by a retired state policeman, who gives her the coordinates in the swamp to a man she needs to meet.  Skink, the ex-governor whom Hiaasen has used in other books turns out to be letting Pythons loose all over palm beach, but swears he didn’t have anything to do with the first one, who ate the missing woman.

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci 

In which the main characters of the Memory Man series, Amos Decker and Alex Jamison, team up with the main characters from another series, Will Robie and Jessica Reel.  Decker and his partner get sent to London, North Dakota to look into the death of a woman, without any background information about her or why they are being asked to solve the crime.  She was found by a man hunting a wolf.  The town is embroiled in a fracking boom.  Then the man who found the corpse comes-up missing.  Decker discovers a clue relegated to a minor section of the autopsy report.  Then another woman goes missing and when Decker returns to the house of the missing man, he finds the woman dead in a shed.  When he confronts the part-time coroner, the man commits suicide.  Then one of the two richest men in town buys the other out and is found dead in his car, an apparent suicide.  Then the other rich man is found in his office, an apparent suicide.  Decker doesn’t like coincidences.  He is followed into an alley and is tackled, by Robie, which saves his life.  They team up to run down what looks like the real motive for the murders, busting up an attempt to poison everyone in a hundred-mile radius.  Only they didn’t kill the people Decker is investigating.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn 

The predecessor novel to The Huntress about a group of British and French women who spied on the Kaiser’s German troops in conquered parts of France.  Alice, or Lil as she is called in most of the story is a former princess and governess who can get through any checkpoint and runs the largest network of spies in France and Belgium.  The story takes place in two timelines, one during World War I and the other after World War II.  I’ll separate them here, though they are masterfully woven in the novel as Eve’s story being told to Charlie.   In the first timeline, a young woman, Eve Gardiner, is recruited to serve her country.  She jumps at the chance and after a short training period is sent into Alsace-Lorraine to work in a little town near the front on the German side.  She poses as a waitress and says nothing as she overhears plans and dates and locations being discussed by German officers who frequent the restaurant.  There is a complication, the Frenchman, Rene, who owns the café, takes an interest in her and she is faced with leaving the service or sleeping with him.  She chooses the latter and pillow talk becomes even more worthwhile to the Allies.  But one bit of information is so important that Lil talks her protégé into going with her to Belgium to deliver the news.  But this time, Lil’s luck at crossings runs out and they are arrested.  Their story that Eve has nothing to do with Lil works and the Germans release Eve, who goes on to meet their contact and deliver the information.  But when Eve returns to her employment, the restauranteur points her own gun at her.  He knocks her out and ties her up and tries to interrogate her.  He tortures her, breaking every joint in her fingers.  When that doesn’t work, he drugs her with opium.  When she comes to, he has the information he was trying to get.  Eve is sent to prison and considers herself a betrayer of Lil.  Lil eventually dies in prison, but Eve survives.  When she returns to England, she refuses to accept medals bestowed upon her and takes to living in a flat in London, trying to drink herself to death. At which point we come to the other timeline.  Charlie is young, unmarried, a sophomore in college and pregnant.  Her brother fought in WWII and upon returning, tried to let his family know he preferred men.  But they would not accept it and between the horrors he saw in the war and their rejection, he could not take it and killed himself.  Charlie wishes she could have done something to help.  She also has not her from her beloved cousin, Rose, since the war and has decided to look for her.  The only clue she has is Eve Gardiner’s address and a name, Rene.  Charlie’s mother is taking her to Switzerland to rid her of the ‘little problem’.  Charlie escapes in London and goes to the address.  Eve, drunk, does not want to help, but since Charlie has no money left and cannot get back to her mother easily, Eve tells her to sleep on the couch, but be gone by morning or she’ll be shot.  When Charlie wakes-up, a man is in the kitchen preparing breakfast and tells Charlie not to worry.  Eve hired the man to do things around the house that her mangled hands prevent her from doing, and he prepares breakfast for her every day.  The name Rene resonates with Eve and the trio set off to France to find out what happened to Rose.  The answer is not what Charlie wanted to hear.  But the connection is that Rene reported Rose to the Nazis as a possible connection to the resistance.  Their response was to try to kill everyone in the village.  One woman survived and tells the story of how Rose died.  Eve then takes over and they hunt Rene down.= The book is extremely well written, the language precise and worth studying.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

A Jonathon Livingston Seagull for this generation.  A simple feel-good book that could not have had better timing than to come out at the beginning of the pandemic.  It encourages self-worth, and a feeling that no matter what we face, we can go on.

False Positive by Mike Walton 

A collection of short web comics in the horror genre.  There is a thread based on a man and his daughter who are immortal and humble, living from before civilization throughout the stories.  They deal mostly with magic and simply want to be left alone.

Threads by Jim Jameson

A novelette about a set of triplets whose mother died in childbirth and were given up for adoption.  Their father has passed away, a billionaire, and now they’ve inherited his business empire and his private island.  But all is not perfect in paradise.  Unbeknown to the triplets, they have already met before during a spring break.  The brother met one sister at a beach party with a promise to meet again at a nightclub.  He met the other at a strip club in between, and mistaking a stripper for his potential date, he gets her alone.  She gives him a lap dance he’ll never forget, but her voice is different.  He goes to the party and meets the first girl.  They end up spending the night together.  When she leaves the next day, he kicks himself for not finding out how to contact her again.  Now, they’ve been united upon their father’s death with the guilt of incest once they find out they’re siblings.  But that’s not all folks.  It turns out the island’s architect and manager has been using secret cameras all over the island to gather secret tapes of the various island’s visitors and their picadilloes.  Now he has tapes of the siblings talking about what happened three years earlier.

Monet Itinerant of Light by Salva Rubio and EFA (Richard Fernandez) 

A graphic novel about Claude Monet’s lifelong pursuit of using light in painting.  It is well done, both as a summary of his life and in artwork by Mr. Fernansez.  Included in the back are comparisons of Monet’s paintings and panels in the biography.  There are other biographies published by nbm graphic novels that would be interesting to see.

Eternal Journey by Alex Archer 

Wherein our heroine, Annja Creed, in the 17^th episode (of 57), is covering a dig in Australia that is finding Egyptian artifacts.  She and her cameraman stay overnight when the rest of the crew have returned home.  Only in the morning, the cameraman doesn’t get up in time to prepare for their flight.  Annja discovers his room has been ransacked, and then she is attacked.  She fights off her assailants with her charmed sword from Joan of Arc and flees.  She goes into the worst neighborhood of Sydney and is recognized by a young man with a motorcycle, who gives her a ride back to the dig site.  She is worried that whomever attacked her a abducted and/or killed her cameraman may go there and harm the university students working on the site.  She learns that the professor who is sponsoring the dig is actually stealing artifacts to sent back to Egypt.  He is also using terrorists to poison water, first in Sydney, then in Cairo, in an attempt as an offering to Hathor in hopes of gaining eternal life.  This is the first volume to not have an appearance by Roux or Garin.  The series, published by Harlequin, is written by various people.  This is the first written by Jean Rabe.

The Left Handed Booksellers by Garth Nix 

An interesting take on urban fantasy and mystery.  The story takes place in London where a young art student goes to visit her 'uncle' only to find herself thrust into a war of sorts where left-handed booksellers are authorized to kill fantastical creatures posing as humans.  Only it turns out that the young woman has some fantastical connections of her own.

1602 by Neil Gaiman 

Gaiman imagines a world where the Marvel universe of characters is placed back in the year 1602.  He deftly makes them fit in with the times.  Dr. Doom still has fantastic plans to rule the world, the Fantastik Four sail a ship named The Fantastic, Spiderman is a loyal scribe to Nick Fury, and Doctor Strange is the Queen's physician who is pulled out of time by the Watcher.