WickedGirl's Book Notes

Joel C. Rosenberg's second J.B. Collins thriller picks up seconds after the Amman peace-summit massacre that ended The Third Target: the King of Jordan is wounded, the leaders of Israel and Palestine are critically hurt, and the President of the United States is missing and presumed captured by ISIS. New York Times correspondent J.B. Collins, the only Western journalist on the ground when the wave hit, spends the next four hundred and sixty pages helping the Jordanians, the Mossad, and the Secret Service try to find Harrison Taylor before Abu Khalif puts him on camera with a sword.

Liane Moriarty's 2014 novel about three mothers at a Sydney kindergarten - Madeline, Celeste, and Jane - whose first school year together is structured around the countdown to a Trivia Night that ends with somebody dead on the pavement, and around the much smaller and much larger lies the rest of the parent community has been telling itself the whole time. Domestic-suspense with actual satire and an actual position on what it is taking on.

Julian Barnes' Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Tony Webster, a retired Londoner who receives an unexpected bequest from the mother of a long-ago girlfriend and is forced to revisit the friendship, the breakup, and the suicide he thought he understood. A 163-page meditation on memory, documentation, and the way the stories we tell about ourselves quietly do us the favor of leaving things out.

Willa Cather's American masterpiece about Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, told through the nostalgic memories of childhood friend Jim Burden. Luminous prose, elegiac tone, and one of literature's most enduring portraits of pioneer life and immigrant experience.

The second Kendra Michaels thriller from Iris and Roy Johansen opens with a multi-car pile-up on San Diego's Cabrillo Bridge that Kendra - a music therapist who was blind from birth until experimental surgery gave her sight in her twenties - sees instantly is no accident, and the case turns personal fast when the new killings start mirroring her own most famous past cases. Fast-paced commercial suspense with a strong premise undercut by formula and an obligatory romance beat.

The fifth installment of Alexander McCall Smith's beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series finds Mma Ramotswe investigating suitors, solving mysteries, and contemplating life's complexities with wisdom, humor, and her traditional build. Gentle, charming, and surprisingly profound.