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.

The Perilous Sea by Sherry Thomas

The second volume in the Elemental series – the boys at Eton take a holiday at one boy’s uncle’s estate on the Scottish coast.  One boy, Wintervale, was not able to attend as his mother was not well.  But suddenly, Fairfax and Titus see the boy in a skiff trying desperately to escape from an Atlantis frigate.  When all seems lost, the boy, looks back at the frigate and it is caught in a maelstrom, sucked under by the whirlpool.  He seems completely out of it when he reaches shore and when the prince administers a remedy, he goes into a seizure.  From then on, he has a terrible time walking and has to be helped everywhere.  But worse, Titus now thinks his vision of Iolanthe being the one who will help him succeed in his quest to overthrow Atlantis was wrong and it’s Wintervale instead.

The book is written in two timelines.  In the other timeline, Iolanthe and Titus are in the Sahara desert and don’t remember anything.  However, they’re attacked by agents of Atlantis and fight their way across the desert until allies rescue them.  The book does tie both together at the end.  Which apparently the real showdown that will be explained in book three.

The Burning Sky by Sherry Thomas - (5/23)

The same author as A Study in Scarlet Women.  This is a fantasy set in an Earth where Atlantis and The Domain are populated by mages of differing abilities.  Our main characters are Iolanthe Seabourne, a young woman who suddenly is able to call down lightning, a great feat for an elemental mage,  and Prince Titus, Master of The Domain.  Opposed to the pair is Atlantis, ruled by the Bane.  In order to hide Iolanthe, Titus disguises her as a boy and she spends the next year at Eton with a magical spell that makes everyone think ‘he’ is Fairfax, a great cricket player.  Titus also lays a spell to keep any image of Fairfax from being recognized.  Through training in the Crucible, a magic book with tests, Titus trains Fairfax to get better with the one element she has no control over; air.  And he falls in love with her, but struggles to keep his eye on the goal; the overthrow of Atlantis.

Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire

A masterpiece that creeps up on you.  Two young girls in Russia – one, a peasant, Elena, whose father died trying to save a bunch of girls from a flood, her mother is dying, her brothers have been ripped from their home and there’s no food, no medicine and almost no one left in her village.  The other, Ekaterina, comes in a train that stops for a bridge to be repaired.  This one is a near-princess, part of the nobility, who has a rich Aunt, a governess, and a butler trying to rein her in, though she is bored.  The two girls become somewhat friends.  Ekaterina shows Elena a gift, a Fabergé egg, they’re taking to the Tsar, who wants to show-off his godson, Anton.  The egg has three mythical scenes: Baba Yaga’s chicken house, the ice dragon, and the firebird.  But the train lurches into motion and Ekaterina falls out of the train with the egg, while Elena falls into the train.

While Elena girl finds herself forced to hide, she ends-up having to impersonate Ekaterina in order to try to keep the butler and the governess from getting in trouble.  Meanwhile, Ekaterina is cornered by a snow tiger and herded to a bridge.  On the other side, she finds Baba Yaga’s house, but instead of eating the offered, poisonous, soup, she gives the egg to Baba Yaga.  Meanwhile, Elena, at a stop of the train, tries to escape.  She sights the Firebird and reaches to take a tail feather so she could get a magical wish granted.  But a hen, chased by a fox enters from the other side just as the Firebird becomes aware of the peasant girl and turns on her.  The hen crashes into the Firebird, grabs a feather and the fox runs off.  An explosion occurs and there is an egg left behind.  Elena grabs the egg as a possible replacement of the Tsar’s gift.

The story is narrated by a monk, who had the favor of the Tsar, then lost it by helping the girls.  All three of the children go off on an adventure with Baba Yaga, meet the ice dragon, who is causing floods and an almost non-existent winter to happen.  His teeth are used to make a fence, they turn into an army, matryoshka dolls, extra large in size come along and marry the soldiers, everyone goes home happy.

Years later, under communism, the children have grown and take care of others in a kitchen.  The monk wanders the country, still observing and bringing the end of the story to a brilliant conclusion.

Hades by Candice Fox

Fox’s first novel is dark and probing.  Hades is a man who fixes things for criminals.  But when he’s brought a car with two battered and wounded children inside, he cannot dispose of them.  Instead he takes them in and raises them.  But Eden and Ethan can’t forget what happened to them and who the men were who killed their parents.  When they grow-up, they’re brilliant, they become cops, then detectives in the police department, and they’re sociopaths when it comes to their enemies.  And they’ve been using their resources to hunt down and kill the men who killed their parents.  There’s only one left.  Enter our narrator, the new partner to Eden.  The last one died in action.  Our narrator has his own problems, with alcohol and with women.  He becomes suspicious of the brother and sister detectives, but he’s busy dealing with a surviving victim of a serial killer.  The ending is both inevitable and a surprise.

Get Real - Donald Westlake

A Dortmunder novel – John and his occasional cohorts are asked to talk to a reality show producer about filming them while they do a real job.  No one in the gang wants to go to jail, but the producer offers them a cash bonus and per diem.  It sounds sketchy, but they agree to rehearsals while looking in the building for something worth stealing.  It has Westlake’s usual flare for comedic scenes of misunderstandings and an ending that make the book worth reading.