She Reads

Kent Krueger is finally getting the attention he deserves for Blood Hollow. Seeing this book get an Anthony nomination fills me with glee. Read my gushing about the book here.

I've loved Kent's work since Iron Lake broke a long standing reading dry spell. Picking it up at one in the morning, I devoured it by five. Consumed it. Loooooved it.

Krueger writes characters readers become deeply involved with and the town of Aurora, Minnesota is itself one of the most compelling players. Krueger has managed to write what is in essence a police procedural that reads as continually fresh and engaging.

I'm lucky enough to have read Krueger's latest, Mercy Falls. Anyone who's followed the series and feels he took a chance with Blood Hollow will be blown away by Mercy Falls. And, damn, now I've got to wait for the next one.

Another one just finished and very much enjoyed was Rick Mofina's The Dying Hour. It's the first in a new series and, I'll be up front: there is a serial killer.

For many, the serial killer motif has been done to death, pun intended. What sucked me into the story and held my interest despite a warm, sunny day and the arrival of new music (the ultimate distraction) was the protagonist, Jason Wade.

A rookie reporter at the Seattle Mirror, with the proverbial chip on his shoulder, Wade by sheer determination and instinct happens upon a missing persons case that no one else has even looked over and dismissed. It's something only a rookie doing a night shift trying to make his bones would notice. But Wade makes a few calls, checks a few facts and has a story that is a made reporters wet dream.

This opens up a compelling array of journalistic mores - the strongest being what's more important, the story or the people in the story? Wade is forced to make decision that could have real impact on whether a woman lives or dies as the police struggle to track the killer.

I'll be writing a full review and fell any quick overview would make what for was an exceptional book sound less than that as I type past the midnight hour. This another author taking a chance that pays off when what could be so typical goes so far beyond mundane crime fiction.

I've just laid my hand son Ian McEwan's Saturday. His worked has served me well before by satisfactorily stuffing my brain and Atonement was used just days ago to kill a wasp that crawled on the wall perilously close to your hapless writer.

Last night, I was entranced with a sentence from Saturday that I'll share with you here:

In the lifeless cold, they pass through the night, hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their invisible glow of consciousness - these engines devise their own tracks.

I was verily giggling with pleasure as I read it and read it aloud to myself in order to more fully enjoy it's sustained majesty. Neurosurgery, crime imminent war and the state of the world make excellent literary bedfellows.

And now, to bed, to read and eventually to sleep.