You meet this wonderful man and marry him.  You then move to a very small town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York where he grew up but you just don’t ever seem to fit in.  You start a business where you are fixing up older houses and it is starting to really pick up.  You have a wonderfully romantic evening with you husband  and drink a little too much wine.  You sleep late the next morning, wake up, and feel something is wrong.  You find your wonderful husband has hung himself but left no note. What do you do next?  You start asking questions.

Why would Brendan, who loved his job as a police officer, loved his hometown, and loved his wife and their future plans suddenly decide to end it all?

Nora decides to try and reconstruct her husband’s final days but has to contend with much resistance from his best friend and partner, his fellow police officers and other family members, mainly Brendan’s mother.  It soon becomes very clear that she is asking questions that no one wants to answer and will do whatever it takes to keep the answers hidden.

Check out this great debut mystery, Cover of Snow, and meet  Jenny Milchman at Lemuria on Tuesday, April 23.  Jenny will be signing at 5:00 and reading at 5:30.

Karin Slaughter and I have been in the book biz for about the same amount of time.  Her first novel, Blindsighted, came out the first year I worked at Lemuria so I like to say I discovered her!  I have read all of her novels and experienced some wild murders and miss the characters that she has killed off but I will say I really do like Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who has a past he would really like to keep quiet.  We all know that one can never keep secrets for long. In Criminal, we are allowed to see just how Will became a GBI agent and while he was raised in the orphanage that he had people looking out for him all his life.

A female co-ed goes missing and Amanda Wagner, Will’s boss and mentor, purposely keeps him off the case and he doesn’t understand why.  Amanda, on the other hand, sees a connection to the first case she worked on as a member of the Atlanta Police Department 40 years ago.  She has her reasons and Will soon comes to realize them when Will, Sara and Amanda coincidentally end up at the abandoned boys home where Will grew up.  Will was telling Sara some about his past but why was Amanda there?

Flashback 40 years, and Amanda and her partner, Evelyn, are working a case that no one else seems to care if it is solved and as you read it becomes clear that these two cases are connected and that Will Trent is at the center of the mystery.  I loved reading how these women came up in the justice system while Atlanta was a city in transition (the office politics are amazing) and many character back stories are filled in here in Criminal.

Don’t you want to read a thriller series where the murders, highway chases, place names, etc. are right here in Mississippi?

Don’t you want to read about Mississippi small town Sheriff that can’t be bought by the local politicians?

Don’t you want to read about pick-up trucks and cigars and whiskey?

I loved The Ranger, but the new Ace Atkins book in The Ranger series – The Lost Ones – proves that Quinn Colson is a force to be reckoned with in Summer reading man-fiction. I’m telling you I couldn’t put this book down. We’ve got gun running and baby saving and woman kissing. It’s all here, for example:

A couple roustabouts had been asking about guns at the Tibbehah County Fair, but by the time the word had gotten back to Donnie Varner, they’d long since packed up their Ferris wheel , corn dog stands and shit, and boogie on down the highway. He’d tried for them at a rodeo up in Eupora and the fall festival over in Hernando, but it wasn’t until he pulled off the highway into a roadside carnival in Byhalia, Mississippi, that he knew he had the right spot.

I don’t usually say this kind of thing, but I can’t wait to see who plays The Ranger in the movie.

Come see Ace today at 5:00 for a signing and reading to follow at 5:30!

Many of you know my friend, Jay Sones.  He is from Jackson but now lives in New York City and works for Random House. We were talking around the first of year while he was home visiting and he told me about Gillian Flynn’s new book, Gone Girl.  His exact words were “You have to read this book!” my answer “Oh yeah, Gillian Flynn. I have read her other two. Sure, I’ll take a look at it.”  A few weeks go by…I receive a message on my Facebook timeline from Jay: “Have you read it yet?”  I message back and let him know that I will read it but closer to the pub date.  As the months go by various messages on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads start appearing from Jay all asking if I have read Gone Girl yet.  I am beginning to realize that Jay is cyber stalking me! Luckily, I have known him for years and didn’t feel threatened but it was apparent that if I didn’t read this book soon he might just disown me as a friend!

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is going to be one of my hottest thrillers of the summer! I will be hand selling this book to every customer that walks through the doors of Lemuria Bookstore.   Not only will I be selling it but Kelly, Emily, Pat, Joe and Anna will also be on top of it.  The ARC is steadily moving it’s way around the store.

I can tell you only a small part of the what this book is about.  The less you know the better the book is because every page that you turn lets you know a little more about the characters but you will continue to think: “What in the hell is going on?”  Amy and Nick are married and living in New York but they have both recently lost their jobs working for magazines.  After realizing that nothing is coming their way anytime soon, they move to Nick’s hometown near Hannibal, Missourri, to be near his ailing parents.  Nick and his sister, Margo, decide to buy a bar together but Amy is still unemployed.  On the afternoon of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing.  The house looks like there was quite a struggle so the police are treating this as a kidnapping and Nick is the prime “person of interest”.

Gillian Flynn does a brilliant job in laying out this tale for the reader.  As the story goes on we hear from Nick during ‘real time’ of the investigation but also from Amy in the form of her journal entries that date back to the day that Nick and Amy met.  It all seems very clear and just as you begin to wonder if he is going to get away with it . . . KABOOM!  That is all I can say because this one is so twisty and turny I’m not even sure how I could do Gone Girl justice.

I want to thank Toni Hetzel for putting this book in my hands and then Jay Sones for staying on me until I read it!  Random House I hope you know how lucky you are to have them on your team! (Liz Sullivan is pretty dang good, too!)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Random House, June 2012)

My last blog was a debut author and this one is too and if you need a good beach book here it is.  Chris Pavone has written spy novel with a slight twist.  The Expats is the story of Kate Moore, a working mother who struggles with keeping the balance between raising a family, a marriage and her secret.  Kate’s secret is that she works for the CIA.  She was recruited in college and never thought she would have a family until she met Dexter and fell in love but so far she has been able to keep everything straight and separate.

Dexter comes home one day and announces he has been offered a job with a bank in Luxembourg.  It is a dream job for him and Kate decides that she will leave the CIA and reinvent herself as a ‘stay at home mom’.  They move to Luxembourg and become expats but Kate is continually concerned that her past life will follow her.   After awhile, she begins to relax and make new friends and settle into life in a country where she doesn’t speak the language but her family is happy even if Dexter is constantly working.  Kate and Dexter make friends with another couple from the U.S. and the more time they spend with each other Kate begins to notice that things just are not right.  Her “spy sense” just won’t turn off and she wonders if they are who they say they are.  She begins to dig around a little and soon finds out that Dexter has some secrets of his own.

This is a super fun read and the descriptions of the European cities and wonderful.  I will definitely be looking the Chris Pavone’s next book.

I love reading debut authors and Kieran Shields does not disappoint with his novel, The Truth of all Things.  He has written a fantastic historical thriller that combines the best of both worlds at least for me, a ‘Sherlock Holmes like’ detective and a serial killer.  Y’all know I love a good MURDER or two or three!!

Deputy Marshal Archie Lean is called to the scene of what is assumed to be another killing of a prostitute until he arrives and sees that the victim”s body has been place in a very stylized way.  The body has been placed in the shape of a pentagram and the murder weapon is a pitchfork which has pinned the body to the ground.  After doing some investigating Archie learns that death by “sticking” is an old traditional way to kill a witch.  When he learns this and being that it is 1892 in Portland, Maine, 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials and the mayor really putting the pressure on to sweep this crime under the carpet,  Archie secretly calls in some help, Dr. Virgil Steig, Helen Prescott, a historian, and Perceval Grey, a criminalist and Pinkerton detective.

I don’t want to tell too much because I found this book extremely fun to read.  There were a few times that I thought I had figured it and would turn the page to realize I was completely wrong.  Also this was the first book I have read in a while that I found myself extremely drawn to every character.  I was worried about them when “danger was lurking around the corner” and I loved the fact that the characters were unsure of each other.  They all have very distinct personalities and are skeptical of each others methods of crime solving which added to the tension especially while following the killers trail through “opium dens, the spiritualist societies and lunatic asylums of Gothic New England”.

If you are looking for a good read for vacation travel time or just sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea this is it!!

You are the 911 call operator for small town, Bulls Mouth, Tx. You are a policeman but since being shot this is what you do.  All day you sit at the desk and take calls ranging from domestic violence to the cat is in the tree and won’t come down.  Coffee is your best friend.  You look at the clock-one hour left-then home, a few beers, sleep, and start again.  The phone rings and you see it’s from a pay phone, probably some kids playing a trick.  “911 May I help you?”  A girls voice, “Help Me. He’s coming after me!” You tell the girl to calm down and ask her name.  “My name is Sarah, NO it’s Maggie, Maggie Hunt.  Help!”  You cannot believe what your hearing…”Maggie?!?  It’s me, Daddy!”

Just a normal day at the office except for the fact that your daughter who has been missing for seven years and was declared legally dead four months ago just called your 911 line begging you to help her.

I really liked what Ryan David Jahn did with The Dispatcher.  As a reader, you are plunged right into the story about what and why this is happening to Maggie and how it has affected all those involved the past seven years.  One could almost feel bad for the kidnappers.  There are really no questions left unanswered.  I really think that if you are looking for a book to spend the afternoon with or need something to pass the time on a airplane ride that The Dispatcher is the perfect book for it.  Not only is this book a thriller but it asks the question What will you do for someone you love?

I have been reading some great thrillers so far in 2012.  I really enjoyed this one from Penguin,  Dark Revelations by Anthony E. Zuiker, the conclusion of the Level 26 Trilogy.

I became interested in this trilogy because I love CSI and Anthony E. Zuiker is the creator of the television series.  I was introduced to Steve Dark when I read Dark Origins and thought and still think he is a total bad ass and I was introduced to Sqweegel, who is one of my favorite ‘bad guys’ of all time.  I absolutely loved that book.  I was equally excited when Dark Prophecy came out and then couldn’t wait for Dark Revelations.  Dark is still chasing bad guys and has somewhat figured out how to balance that with being a father because he works from home with state of the art equipment in his basement.   Steve Dark has been asked to join an elite special force that come together to capture Level 26 killers.  This group has been able to capture killers that government agencies and even Special Circs have been unable to solve in the past.  The killer on the loose now is known as “Labyrinth” and he uses riddles, puzzles and wordplay to announce who his next victims will be.  With the use of social media he has created a media sensation and has followers from all around the world.  People are almost seeing him as a modern day Robin Hood because of the political and social messages that are behind his killings. Can Steve Dark and his elite team of crime fighters stay a step ahead of “Labyrinth” and stop him before he kills again?

If you are interested in a really good fast paced thriller then I would recommend this entire trilogy.  What is really cool is that this is a digi-novel.  As you read these books books will you will come across codes to access a cyber bridge that will allow you to watch a mini-movie on your computer to give you a little more of Steve Dark’s story.  I have enjoyed watching those as much as reading the books!