A Dance In Deep WaterDoug Allyn
Families are never what they seem, either from the inside or the outside. Michelle 'Mitch' Mitchell, a café owner, deep-water diver, and sometime detective, is slowly pulling her life together on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where she grew up. Her mother died in childbirth, and she and her late father were emotional strangers. She senses it's now or never with her precocious teenage son, Corey, who's been away at boarding school while mom worked offshore oil rigs in the Gulf. A chance meeting at an isolated gas station leads Mitch and Corey to relatives of Mitch's late mother. They're unpleasant folks and obviously have something to hide. Mitch senses it may have to do with her mother's death. Suddenly obsessed with her family history, she plunges deeper into her past, meeting a man who was a foxhole buddy of her father in Vietnam and who now runs a school for the Amerasian descendants of that war. She also runs afoul of a nasty militia group, attracts the attention of the FBI, and learns an awful secret that is contained in an abandoned mine on the school's property. But those are just bumps in the road in Mitch's journey to understand her past.
Booklist Review; December 1997.
The Glass LakeMaeve Binchy
Bestselling novelist Binchy again explores the passions and priorities of Irish women in a seductively written tale that's a bona fide page-turner. She sets this story in the small village of Lough Glass, the 'glass lake' of the title, in Dublin and in London, animating each place more by the robust characterization of the people who live there than by the use of descriptive detail. When Kit McMahon is 12, her sad and distant mother disappears while walking along the lake. Authorities find the family's boat overturned, and, when Kit discovers a sealed letter addressed to her father, she fears that the suicide confession will keep her mother from a consecrated burial. She burns the letter, adding another burden to her misery. Helen is not dead, however. She has run off to London for great and compelling reasons, where she adopts the name Lena Gray and eventually becomes the director of an important employment agency. When Kit discovers her there years later, the anguish of both women is intensified by the complex situation, and the secret they now share eventually explodes in a way neither could have foreseen. If some aspects of the plot are contrived and the narrative overtold, the richness of Binchy's characters makes these drawbacks easy to forgive.
Publishers Weekly Review; January 1995.
Lake NewsBarbara Delinsky
Falsely implicated in a scandal by an unscrupulous reporter, Lily Blake returns to Lake Henry, her small New England hometown. She is devastated by the loss of her job, privacy, and reputation and struggles to regain control of her life. Although distrustful of the media, she is drawn to John Kipling, the editor of the local Lake News. A wounded soul himself, Kip has also returned home to exorcise personal demons. Together they find justice for Lily and healing for themselves. Prolific novelist Delinsky (Coast Road, LJ 7/98) spins another engrossing story of strength in the face of cataclysmic life changes. Her picture of the ease with which one can lose all privacy and the damage caused by an irresponsible and out-of-control media, while perhaps exaggerated, is nevertheless chilling.
Missing persons particularly pique the interest of Reykjavik police inspector Erlendur, still haunted by the loss of his younger brother in a blizzard that he survived as a child. When the mysteriously draining Lake Kleifarvatn reveals a skeleton tied to an old Russian radio transmitter, Erlendur and colleagues Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli delve into the cold war era, when promising young Icelandic socialists were sent to Leipzig to study, and one of them lost the woman he loved in the atmosphere of 'interactive surveillance.' Considering himself a failure in family relationships, the introspective and dogged Erlendur is motivated to bring closure to a 70-year-old woman still waiting for her long-vanished lover; even a missing hubcap is a key to this case. Erlendur's developing relationship with a married woman, Elinborg's newfound success as a cookbook author, and Sigurdur Oli's phone calls from a troubled man add depth and texture to the fourth in Indridason's award-winning Nordic series (after Voices).
Library Journal Review; September 2008.
Your Oasis On Flame LakeLorna Landvik
Landvik was a stand-up comic, and she writes like one: her characters are clever and offbeat, like Garrison Keillor's or Fannie Flagg's. In a small Minnesota town, two friends chafe at being voted 'Least Changed' at their twentieth high-school reunion. Timid Devera has an affair with her night-school teacher; BiDi, known for her still-perfect figure, gets pregnant by Sergio, her second husband. Devera's husband, Dick, a car salesman who dreams of performing his joke songs in a cabaret, opens 'Your Oasis' in their basement and provides a town gathering place. When opposing hockey players ambush BiDi's daughter, Frannie, the hulking product of her first marriage and the town mascot for making the varsity team as a freshman and a girl, the families and town must make peace with the fragility of loved ones. The most captivating narrator is Devera's precocious daughter Darcy, a hat aficionado and self-appointed defender of justice. She and this book should delight most readers.
Booklist Review; June 1997.
Crow LakeMary Lawson
Kate Morrison, the quietly complicated narrator of this lovely first novel of tangled tragedies, relives childhood events in the small Canadian farming community of Crow Lake, Ont., during a family reunion. When Kate is only seven, her parents are killed in a car accident, and her 19-year-old brother, Luke, relinquishes academic success to keep the siblings together. Instead, it is Matt, 17 and brilliant, who reluctantly and guiltily agrees to finish high school and go on to college, all the while sharing in the care of Kate and her baby sister, the hilarious, scene-stealing Bo. The violent, secretive history of the neighboring Pye family intrudes into the Morrisons' fragile system, detonating Matt's plans, and it is ultimately Kate who escapes into an academic career of challenge and respectability. Elegant, beautifully paced, and deeply resonant of the fears of children too young to have a vocabulary to express such feelings, this is a terrific debut. Nine countries were wise enough to buy the rights.
Library Journal Review; February 2002.
The World BelowSue Miller
Miller (While I Was Gone) has a remarkable talent for paying scrupulous attention to the details of domestic life and nuances of personal relationships and then, with such seeming ease, relating them both truthfully and lovingly. Here she also shows the timelessness of the courses that human lives can take and the events that shape them. At 52, twice-divorced Cath Hubbard takes a sabbatical from her San Francisco teaching job to take possession of her grandparents' home. Contemplating starting a new life there in small-town Vermont, she uncovers truths about her beloved grandmother, Georgia Rice, on whom much of the story centers. Confined to a tuberculosis sanatorium before she was 20, Georgia found a different world with rules of its own where people behaved 'scandalously,' and her life was irrevocably changed. Cath finds parallels between her life and that of her Gran and insight into her grandparents' marriage that sheds light on her own failed ones, as events take the path of her own life out of her hands. A beautifully crafted and supremely satisfying work of fiction.
Library Journal Review; September 2001.
Lost Girls Andrew Pyper
In a small Canadian town, two 14-year-old girls are missing and presumed drowned. Toronto attorney Bartholomew Crane arrives to defend Thom Tripp, the girls' English teacher, who is accused of first-degree murder. At first the egocentric, caustic Crane doesn't care about the truth he just wants to get the job done. The more he probes, however, the more he comes across the legend of the Lady in the Lake, who drags her victims down to the watery depths. Disturbing visions and voices unnerve him. Once he faces his own grief-stricken past, he emerges as a likable human being. Debut novelist and lawyer Pyper writes his murder mystery in a Tom Wolfe style of luxuriant hyperbole, portraying outrageous yet believable characters. His fast-paced present tense is well suited to the antic, first-person narrative of the coke-addicted Crane.
Library Journal Review; May 2000.
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