The Animal Under the Fur by E.J. Mellow 

In which we have an assassin working for a secret government agency who has long red hair and lives with her best friend.  Then we have another assassin working for a sister agency.  They are sent to eliminate the same foul underworld boss.  Then they are told they must work together on an assignment to kill a drug lord in Mexico who is selling bioweapons to the highest bidder, since his original customer was killed in the prior assignment.  Only this drug kingpin turns out to be our redhead’s father.

Robert Parker's Cheap Shot by Ace Atkins

Another finished book of Robert Parker's Spenser series.  Kinjo Haywood is an NFL linebacker with people who want a piece of him.  He hires Spenser to find out who has been following him.  Spenser thinks it has something to do with an altercation his client was in years ago.  Whoever is behind the harassment kidnaps his daughter.  He hires Spenser to find her and get her back.  The local FBI agent doesn’t want Spenser involved.  Kinjo does and it’s his girl and his money.  The girl’s mother is Kinjo’s first wife, the woman he is married to now is way out of her depth.  Spenser and his buddies track down an attempt to get ransom, only to find it was a scam.  They still don’t have the kid.  Spenser keeps following leads that all go to dead-ends.  Then Kinjo gets on the radio and announces he isn’t going to pay to get his kid back, he’s going to offer the reward money to anyone who kills her kidnappers.  That doesn’t make anyone happy.  Spenser tracks down the brother and a woman who were at the earlier altercation and finds the girl.  Then he figures out the real reason it all happened.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara is an Artificial Friend who longs to be picked by a young girl.  She resides in a store where the manager tells her how to do her best to represent the store and other artificial friends.  She receives nourishment from the sun (she is solar powered) and while in a storefront window, watches a homeless man sit each day with his dog across the street.  One day, neither the homeless man nor his dog rise and Klara is afraid they are dead.  But when the sun comes out the next day, they  rise and seem to be better than before.  A machine is parked in front of the store that produces terrible pollution.  When  it is moved, Klara sees the homeless man become reunited with a woman as they embrace.

When Klara is picked, the girl who asked for her, Josie, is a 'lifted' youngster (genetically edited) who has trouble with her health.  From Josie's room, Klara observes the sun sets, goes to rest, on the far side of the field in a barn.  Josie has a  friend, Rick, who is not lifted, but is brilliant with drones.  They play and squabble.  But Josie's health gets worse.  Klara comes up with a plan to ask the sun to heal Josie with his special restorative nutrition.  So she travels to the barn with Rick's help.  She offers to destroy the pollution machine in exchange for Josie's improved health. 

The family, including Klara go into the city for Josie's 'portrait' where Klara discovers it is a replacement artificial friend body that upon Josie's death is to become a new body for Klara.  Klara is convinced that her bargain with the sun will result in a healthy Josie.  She finds the pollution machine and with the help of Josie's father, takes some of her own lubricant and pours it into the exhaust of the machine, disabling it.  Now Klara plans to watch the sun restore Josie.  But Josie does not get better.

While the family surround Josie, expecting her to die at any moment, odd weather comes through the area where the family lives.  Klara suddenly gets everyone to go into Josie's room and she open's the blinds so that the sun floods the room.  Josie sits up and says she is feeling better.  Klara's sacrifice has not been in vain.

Josie eventually gets well enough to go off to college.

The book ends with the manager finding Klara in a storage yard, discarded, but spending her time reminiscing her time with Josie.

Song of the Forever Rains by E.J. Mellow

In which three sisters born 2 years apart from the middle sister on the same day, wield magic with music: Arabessa, with her violin, Niya, with dance and Lark, with voice.  The story opens with Lark, the youngest at four years, having never uttered a sound since her birth, when her mother died, are exploring a part of a castle where they should not be.  An immensely powerful guardian creature traps them in a dead-end while an all-powerful creature, Achak, who has two souls trapped in a single body, brother and sister, looks on.  At the last second, Lark turns around, looks the approaching monster in the eye and screams NO at the top of her lungs, shattering the creature.

Achak takes over the teaching of the children, helping them learn how to control their magic, and how to use swords, knives, and other deadly arts so they don’t have to always use their magic.

We skip forward in time to Lark, at almost 19, disguised as a street urchin, having stolen a ring and getting her finger cut off.  She refuses to let any sound out, because that would kill everyone around and make it obvious that she has magic.  She meets a well-dressed man who seems to be lost and leads him to safety, but not until having to use a knife to defeat a group of thugs with swords.  Once back to the part of the city that she is really from, she gets cleaned-up and is presented to her father.  He tells her she is to be pseudo-engaged to a Duke so they can find out what is going wrong in his part of the kingdom and steal his treasure.  Her father is also the King of Thieves.

World Without End by Ken Follet 

The second book in the Pillars of the Earth that takes place four generations later and pits descendants of Tom Builder on two sides.  A group of children, Merthin, Caris, Gwenda and Ralph are exploring the forest, where they should not be, stumble upon a scene where two men-at-arms are attacking a knight. Ralph grabs a bow from his brother, Merthin, and sends an arrow into the eye of one of the men.  The knight dispatches the other but is wounded.  All but one of the children run away.  The knight gets the remaining child to help him dig a hole and bury a secret.

The knight becomes a monk, saving his life, but not his arm.   Merthin grows up to become a carpenter and a builder.  Ralph grows up a bully and a squire.  Ralph gets in trouble for raping a serf girl, is sentenced to death and runs from the court to become an outlaw.  When he is caught, the local Earl commutes his sentence in order fulfill the King's demand on men for his war on France.

Merthin is entrapped by the pregnant daughter of the man he is apprenticed to.  Because he refuses to marry the girl, he is fired, just two months short of becoming a journeyman.  But he is a better builder and eventually becomes richer than his former master.  He is also in love with Caris, but she won't marry him.

All this is against a backdrop of the plague and Caris, because she has a mole at her groin is accused of being a witch.  To save her self, she has to agree to become a nun - even though she does not really believe in God - mostly because she can see the corruption in the local priory.  Caris studies what happens when different methods are tried on the sick.  She does not agree with the centuries old methods of bleeding patients.  She wants to use masks and keep the sick away from the healthy to try to keep the plague from spreading.

Eventually, her methods are used, a more trustworthy man is made prior, Merthin succeeds in Florence and England with his dreams as a builder, replacing a crumbling tower on the cathedral with the tallest tower of the time, Caris is released from her vows and they marry and run a hospital.

The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya by Reimend Yee

A graphic novel about a man, our hero of the story, who was intended to become an Imam, but fell in love with a woman whose family made carpets.  He was fascinated and helped her realize her dream of becoming a merchant.  He also became a merchant of carpets.  On one of his excursions away from Constantinople, he came across a man who seemed in distress.  Only the man was a ghul, a djinn, a vampire.  He died, but woke as a man with an uncontrollable urge to consume blood.  He fought against this and returned home.  He could not go out in the daylight.  He confessed to his wife, but she insisted on taking care of him.  When the urge was too strong, he left her in tears and went away for her safety.  Years later, when he felt more in control of himself, he returned and took care of her in her final years.  Now, he lives in a town in England and entertains friends and sells carpets only from his home.

The man who made him into a vampire tracked him down and becomes a houseguest, mainly because our hero tries to follow the teachings of the Koran and be kind to his fellow beings.  The visitor secretly plots to kill our hero, believing that the blood of another vampire is better than any other kind.  But our hero teaches kindness and humility and eventually persuades his visitor to try it.  They are invited to a masquerade ball.  Once there, the visitor finds himself uncomfortable and goes outside.  There is a scream and a scuffle and someone tried to kill the host of the party.  The visitor follows a woman in black and knocks her down.  Everyone thinks the visitor is the murderer.  Even our hero is of that opinion at first.  He confronts the visitor who flees.  When our hero gets ready to go back into the party, the host has recovered and accuses the woman as his attempted assassin.  Our hero realizes his mistake and finds the visitor in the forest.  The visitor is crazed with fear and threatens to kill our hero, who bares his neck.  The visitor is humbled, cries and is comforted by our hero.  The visitor finds himself dying and blowing away.  The hero returns home and resumes his quiet life.

Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint

Using his favorite location, this is a story about a magical limner who brings the characters in her paintings to life through her talent.  Only there is a sinister side to bringing these magical beings across and it has to do with the man who taught the painter the secret of her paintings.

The Vanished Man by Jeffery Deaver 

A trained Magician, Malerik, is killing people by performing escape tricks with them in the title role.  He does the Lazy Hangman, where the victim strangles herself.  Two policemen happen upon the scene, but the magician escapes using illusion and quick change.  Lincoln Rhyme is asked to help solve the case and he recruits an aspiring magician, Kara, who can explain how it was done.  The next victim is involved in Sawing the Woman in Half trick.  Trace evidence leads from one crime to the next.  The real target is a circus in town which is where Malerik was scarred from a trick gone horribly wrong.  Lincoln and Kara manage to trick the magician and capture him.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

A woman tries to commit suicide and finds herself in a library where an old friend who was her librarian at school offers her a chance to have a different life.  The woman goes through several of these lives, always finding that for every good difference, there are those differences she just cannot live with and goes back to the library.  But she only has so much time before she won’t get another chance.

A Purple Place for Dying by John D Macdonald

A Travis McGee story about finding a missing person who was committed to a hospital for the mentally ill, then disappeared.  The hospital is experimenting on its ‘patients’ all with their consent, even though they do not have the mental capacity to give the consent.  McGee ends-up as an unwilling patient himself and has to cause all kinds of problems to get free.

Interworld by Neil Gaiman

An average high-school student, Joey,  who is shunned by his school mates finds himself at the center of an inter-dimensional attempt to take over every instance of Earth.  Turns out that he has some talent for foiling these beings using a simple formula of omega over infinity.  With his capabilities he does more than just stop the beings and rescues not only the Earth, but the people trying to save all the Earths.

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

The third book by Ms. Quinn set in or around World War II.  This one involves three heroines from different backgrounds working at Bletchley Park, the famous location of codebreaking in England during the war.  Mab is a girl from Southwitch who lives with her mother and sister (actually her daughter).  Osla is a welathy debutante who falls in love with Prince Phillip (before Elizabeth).  Beth is a shy, downtrodden, genius with math.  The three of them end-up in the same home while working at Bletchly park as code breakers. 

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

The third and final volume of the Broken Earth.   Essun awakes from a coma caused by her use of the obelisk to discover that the comm is on the road to where the attackers came from.  Her arm is partially stone.  The real problem is that the moon, which had been pushed out of it's orbit much farther away from Earth ages ago, is now on a collision course back to the planet it once circled.  Nassun is seeking a way to get to an island on the other side of the planet where she hopes to convert everyone left on Earth into stone people so they can survive the collision.  Essun eventually also realizes she must go to that same island to try to divert the course of the moon.

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

The second volume of the Broken Earth.  Nassun finds her father standing over her dead brother.  He killed his son because he discovered the boy was an orogene - someone who can control the power of the earth to make changes around themselves to defend or to kill.  But Nassun's talents allow her to calm her father and they set out to find a safe place.  Essun, the mother, finds herself outed as an orogene in their village just after a massive earthquake.  The villagers agree to let her go, but at the gate, the village men try to kill her, unsuccessfully - she kills the entire village instead.  She sets out to find her daughter and husband.  On the way she acquires a couple of followers, one who turns out to be a girl Essun knew and went with to discover a secret.  The other turns out to be a being of stone who can travel through the earth.  They end-up in an underground comm.  The comm is attacked, and Essun uses an obelisk to kill almost all of the attackers.  Even though they survive and eliminate the attackers, the comm is so damaged that the survivors must set out for another place.  Meanwhile, Nassun, who has been learning about how to control her powers at a camp, eventually is forced to kill her father in self-defence using an obelisk.

Tears of Amber by Sofia Segovia        

About a group of people thrown together during World War II in East Prussia, what is now the far-western Russian oblast of Kalingrad.  A Polish man and a Polish woman are sent as slaves to help on a German farm.  A second German family is torn apart by the enforced enlistment of the father.  The history of the war works out its tragedy amongst these innocent bystanders just trying to survive a terrible time in history.

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.