Westport Public Library BOOK blog

I was recently up in Madison at R.J. Julia’s, one of the few remaining independent bookstores in the state, for a launch party for the fourth Billy Boyle mystery by Connecticut author and master blender of fact and fiction James R. Benn. Worth the ride ... a remarkable place.

Evil for Evil finds Billy in late 1943 in Northern Ireland investigating the theft of 50 automatic rifles and 200,000 rounds of ammunition from a U.S. Army depot. The body of a slain IRA man is found a few miles away and Billy's military superiors fear the stolen weapons will be used in a Nazi engineered IRA uprising.

Billy, a former Boston cop and a nephew by marriage to General Eisenhower, on whose staff he serves, is part of a proud Irish-American family supportive of the Republican cause.

As Publishers Weekly explains, “Billy struggles to remain impartial as he investigates the various factions on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. Benn offers no easy answers in this rich mix of Irish history and wartime intrigue.”

Booklist says "Benn continues to create fascinating behind-the-scenes mysteries from little-known facets of World War II history … A solid series that keeps getting better."

Benn will be joining us at the Westport Library on Sunday, October 25 at 2:00 pm along with Peter Lovesey, the award-winning author of over thirty-five crime novels, including the contemporary Peter Diamond series and the Victorian era Sergeant Cribb mysteries. They will be interviewed by Joe Meyers of the Connecticut Post.

Looking for tales of the war on the home front or World War II mysteries from a woman’s POV? Kathryn Miller Haines puts a delightful spin on Rosie the Riveter with her character, Rosie Winter, a desperate out of work actress who grabs a part-time job at a steamy, lowbrow detective agency. Her acting skills come in handy when her boss turns up dead and Rosie carries on alone.

In the third book of the series, the recently released Winter in June, it is 1943, and Rosie joins the USO in the hope of an opportunity to search for Jack, her missing soldier boyfriend, last scene somewhere in the Solomon Islands. Before the USO ship pulls out of San Francisco, the body of a former WAC is found floating in the water and the mystery surrounding the woman’s death follows Rosie all the way to her destination where it is compounded by a second murder, perhaps related to Jack’s disappearance.

Publishers Weekly finds Winter in June "Full of evocative period detail … this entry, for all its humorous and lighthearted moments, builds to a dramatic and sobering conclusion.”

Time to trot out some old Glenn Miller recordings and get into a few good reads!

Matthew Dicks’ debut novel Something Missing introduces Martin Railsback, a professional criminal with OCD tendencies. He’s been able to steal from the same people for years on end virtually undetected because he only takes items that will go unnoticed: toilet paper, a half-used bottle of maple syrup, rarely used china.

The system works beautifully until the day Martin drops a client's toothbrush into the toilet and feels compelled to replace it. This simple act of decency changes his perspective entirely, and now he finds himself driven to break into houses to improve the lives of their occupants.

Booklist’s review asks “A loopier Bernie Rhodenbarr? A less lethal Dexter?” and concludes that “… he could be the next big thing.”

Connecticut author Dicks will be appearing at the Library on Monday evening, September 21st at 7:30, along with Margaret Berwin, another new author. Come learn more about their writing and first-time publishing experiences.

And speaking of Dexter, Jeffry P. Lindsay’s latest, Dexter by Design, was recently released.

After his surprisingly glorious honeymoon in Paris, life is almost normal for Dexter Morgan, but once back in Miami -- where his Dark Passenger has been waiting for him -- the discovery of a corpse artfully displayed as a sunbather relaxing on a beach chair catapults Dexter back into action.

The Kirkus review calls it “The best of Dexter's four adventures to date.”

The Season 4 premiere of the television series Dexter, which is based on the novels, airs on September 27th.

Denver author Margaret Coel returns to the Wind River Reservation of Wyoming in The Silent Spirit, a new mystery featuring John Aloysius O’Malley, a Jesuit missionary, and Vicky Holden, an Arapaho attorney. Father John and Vicky delve into the reservation's past when an Arapaho and his great-grandson are murdered nearly a century apart.

Kiki Wallowingbull is found dead on the frozen banks of the Little Wind River and the murder appears to be the result of a drug deal gone bad. However, Kiki had recently returned from Hollywood where he was trying to uncover the mystery of his great-grandfather's disappearance while filming a 1923 Western. Many Arapahos and Shoshones went to Hollywood to find work in silent movies but Kiki's great-grandfather never returned to his wife and child. Are the two events somehow connected?

Kirkus gave the book an excellent review, calling it “Another of Coel's engaging blends of history, mystery, sexual tension and present-day life on the reservation.”

Originally an historian by trade, Coel is considered an expert on the Arapaho Indians. You can read about the Reservation, which is a real place -- spanning 2.2 million acres and home to 2,500 Eastern Shoshone and more than 5,000 Northern Arapaho Indians -- and find out a bit of background information about the Arapaho culture on her website.

The author says “The story connects with the audience that loves mystery novels, novels about the West, its history and people, and novels about contemporary Native Americans. The Silent Spirit will also appeal to film buffs, since it moves back and forth between the present and 1920s Hollywood when the Arapahos appeared in many of the silent Westerns.”

She adds “The Silent Spirit is the 14th novel in my New York Times bestselling series, but readers can jump in at any time. They do not have to have read the earlier novels to enjoy the latest.”

For a complete list, visit Stop,You’re Killing Me!

You can see the author in a series of clips on YouTube in an interview with Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore taped last November.

The cover art for The Silent Spirit is magnificent and I, for one, am glad to be back on the Rez with Father John, who was sent off on a sabbatical to Rome at the end of The Girl with Braided Hair, the previous book in the series published back in 2007. Glad they let him come home.

A few weeks ago an old friend who now lives in California was in town for a few days and we got together for a girl’s night out with a group of our friends. Although we hadn’t seen each other in a few years, it seemed like it was just yesterday. It was hard to say goodbye at the end of the evening, having caught up on all the little things we miss talking about on a daily basis. Over the years we’ve shared a lot together –both the good times and the bad. Good friends have always played an important part in women’s lives. Women’s friendships have also figured prominently in many of our favorite books.

Songs Without Words by Ann Packer is the story of a lifelong friendship between two women. Beautifully written, Ms. Packer shows how life events can challenge and strain the bonds of friendship. In Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett delves into the true story of her relationship with fellow author Lucy Grealy. They met in college and shared their writing experiences as well as Grealy’s struggle with drugs and addiction. Patchett’s devotion and love for her friend will resonate with many who have tried to help a friend through troubled times.

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton follows the lives of five women who are going through many personal changes as the world around them is also undergoing change. Set in 1968 at the beginning of the women’s movement, they form a weekly writing group sharing their lives, hopes and dreams through their writing. In Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, four college friends struggle to find their place in the world after graduating from a woman’s college where the ideals of feminism have been strongly embraced. Set in 2007, they have many opportunities available to them, but the choices they make are not always easy. The strength of their friendship is a source of comfort as they each follow their own path to adulthood.

The enduring nature of female friendships is the subject of The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow. This true story follows eleven childhood friends from Ames, Iowa and the bonds that still connect them forty years later. Over the years they have been a support system for each other and a source of strength in times of need.

Do you have a close friend that you may have lost touch with recently? Technology has made it pretty easy for us to keep in touch if we are willing to make the effort. Perhaps one of these books will inspire you to reconnect with some of those friends. You may find that there’s something very special about those relationships that you don’t want to lose.

Raymond Chandler’s Edgar Award winning 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, was the sixth of his Philip Marlowe mysteries.

While some consider The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely to be Chandler’s finest works, The Long Goodbye is ranked as his best by many critics.

Mystery great Anthony Boucher reviewed the book for the New York Times and described it as “rather off the hard-beaten path of Chandler-tana … both Marlowe and his creator seem to have mellowed somewhat ...”

“On the whole, despite occasional outbursts of violence, it's a moody, brooding book, in which Marlowe is less a detective than a disturbed man of 42 on a quest for some evidence of truth and humanity. The dialogue is as vividly overheated as ever, the plot is clearly constructed and surprisingly resolved, and the book is rich in many sharp glimpses of minor characters and scenes. Perhaps the longest private-eye novel ever written (over 125,000 words!). It is also one of the best -- and may well attract readers who normally shun even the leaders in the field.”

It has been said that the self-pitying author Roger Wade, whom Marlowe has been hired to save from alcohol-fueled self destruction, is an autobiographical character. This is just one of the topics that the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will discuss next Sunday, September 13th, at 2 pm.

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

Paul Tremlay has written a Chandler parody called The Little Sleep which features Mark Genevich, a South Boston PI who suffers from narcolepsy. The disease’s most severe symptoms include hypnogogic hallucinations, which wreak havoc for a guy who depends on real-life clues to make his living.

A high-profile case comes his way when Jennifer Times—daughter of the powerful local D.A. and a contestant on American Star— walks into his office with an outlandish story about a man who stole her fingers. He later thinks this may have been a hallucination, but then finds a manila envelope on his desk containing risqué photos of Jennifer.

Kirkus called it “a wacky new take on the genre” and Library Journal said “Tremblay's debut is part noir throwback, part medical mystery, part comedy, and thoroughly, wonderfully entertaining. Highly recommended.”