Happy New Year!
It's almost 2007. Here is my last book review for 2006.

Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman

No Good Deeds
By A Spider's Thread
Last Place
In a Strange City
Sugar House
Book 4:
In Big Trouble ~ When Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan receives an envelope postmarked Boerne, Tex., containing a photo of Crow, her former musician boyfriend, and a scrap of newspaper headline reading "in big trouble," a day's outing to visit Crow's parents in Charlottesville which turns into a road trip to Texas. Tough and street savvy in her hometown, the former reporter feels lost in the land of the Alamo. Crow seems to have disappeared with a mysterious blonde singer, and as Tess searches for them, she encounters a wall of family secrets behind which may lie the reason for the body count rising around her.

Lippman does an excellent job at making you feel that you are in San Antonio and other Texas areas. As someone who lived in Houston for a few years I always feel rather nostalgic when it comes to books set in Texas. While feeling lost and lonely in Texas as nothing is familiar Tess quickly finds her niche there. She is a likeable character who I always enjoy reading her latest adventure

Book 3:
Butchers Hill ~ Tess Monaghan has finally made the move and hung out the shingle as a P.I.-for-hire, complete with an office in Butchers Hill. Her first client is Luther Beale, the notorious vigilante who five years ago shot a boy for vandalizing his car, just sprung from jail. He wants to make reparations to the kids who witnessed his crime for his own peace of mind, so he needs Tess to find them. But once she starts snooping, the witnesses she locates start dying. Is the "Butcher of Butchers Hill" as it again? Or is there another, even more sinister force at work?

She reluctantly accepts a 2nd case of a woman looking for her sister. Tess quickly finds out that there is no sister and the woman she is looking for is the woman's real idenity. Passing the test she is then assigned to find out what happened to a daughter she gave up for adoption 13 years before. Both cases overlap as Tess tries to discover the truth buried under all the lies.

This novel was inspired by a real-life Baltimore homicide, the story of a man who shot and killed a 13-year-old boy who had thrown rocks at his car. I find myself really liking this character with each book. We see how she is developing into herself. Lots of plot twists and I found myself wondering who was really the bad guy here.

Book 2:
Charm City ~ Business tycoon "Wink" Wynkowski is trying to bring pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting fro him -- until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front page of the Baltimore Beacon-Light. It's a surprise even to the Blight's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink -- who's found in his garage with the car running.

Now the paper wants to nail the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story, and the assignment is right up the alley of a former newshound like Tess. But it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets, and to realize that this situation is really more about whacking than hacking.

We see more development of her relationship with several characters including her parents. We see more of Uncle Spike (who may not even be related to anyone) who has been found beaten to a pulp in his bar, leaving him in a coma. He left Tess his very bow-beaten greyhound who she finds herself nursing back to health.

The mystery is kind of not the most important thing as the person who ended up doing was kind of far fetched and I didn't see it coming. But I find myself wanting to know more about Tess and her friends and family. So I'll keep reading the next one.

Baltimore Blues ~ Introduces us to Tess Monaghan. Downsized ex-reporter Tess spends her days working part-time at the bookstore owned by sexy Aunt Kitty and rowing her mornings away and trying not to fall into the disgustingly polluted Patapsco from her city-owned boat. When rowing buddy Rocky pays her what looks like a fortune to follow his fiance, the trail leads to murder with Rocky the prime suspect.

What it leads to is another murder or someone very close to her and it becomes personal.

An interesting series and while it was slow to start it really ran the pace and finished better than it started. I liked her descriptions of Baltimore and of the newspaper industry. I'll read more of this series.

Inside Job by Connie Willis

Professional debunker Rob, proprietor of the Jaundiced Eye magazine, considers himself incredibly lucky to have Kildy as his sole employee. Smart, dedicated, gorgeous, and, thanks to her last movie before she hung up on Hollywood, rich. She says Rob has to witness this channeler Ariaura's act. It's quite a show, all right, for in the midst of Ariaura's particular ancient wise guy's basso spiel, a gravelly baritone interrupts to berate the audience as "yaps" and the act as "claptrap." Why is Ariaura undermining herself? Or is she? After all, she angrily accuses Rob and Kildy of scheming to destroy her. Could the baritone belong to a genuine channeled spirit, who just might be the legendary skeptic H.L. Mencken? Or is Rob being scammed by the oldest trick in the book? by his lovely sidekick Kildy?

While this is really a novella Willis really manages to fill it with thought provoking ideas. Can the skeptic trust someone enough to fall in love? Very reminiscent of some of the Dashiell Hammett style storyline of falling for the girl only to have her betray him and break his heart.

Connie Willis is regarded as a Sci Fi author but I find her more of a psychological writer as all of her characters are often more complex than meets the eye. She always makes me think afterwards. This was the perfect book to finish my time at Cerritos. I read a lot of Connie Willis while working at Cerritos Library. So it's fitting that my last library book from there I read is by Willis. Can you tell I'm a fan?

Slouching Towards Bethlehm by Joan Didion

This classic 1968 work is justly renowned as Joan Didion's finest collection of essays. Its central theme - and the theme behind much of what Didion writes - is the atomisation of American culture, the way in which things have fallen apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings that their ancestors took for granted. 33 years later, it is ironic to look back on the period that the writer depicts with such grim pathos when it is celebrated as a time of idealism and freedom by the survivors of the sixties.

I only got through the first couple of essays and found I had to really concentrate to fully appreciate her style. She writes really, really well and make one think. So I look forward to picking up this work and trying again at a more stable part in my life.

Alice in the know by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
#18 in the Alice series
Alice fills the summer before her junior year of high school with a job at the mall, hanging out with her friends, and wishing she had a bigger family. It's the summer before junior year, and Alice is looking forward to three months of excitement, passion, and drama. But what does she find? A summer working in a local department store, trying to stop shoplifters, and more "real life" problems than she could have ever imagined: A good friend becomes seriously ill, Lester has more romance problems than even Alice knows what to do with, and the gang from Mark Stedmeister's pool is starting to grow up a bit faster than Alice is comfortable with. Fortunately for Alice her family and friends are with her through it all, and by the end of the summer, Alice finds she knows a whole lot more than she had in June.

As usual reading Alice is reading a part of life I wish I could have had as a teenager. Naylor really seems to keep up with events in a teen's life yet it won't feel too dated in 5 years. I always enjoy a dose of Alice in my hectic life.

Sparks: an urban fairytale by Lawrence Marvit

The girl, Josephine, is a wondeful lass who can find neither happiness nor peace outside of her job at a small auto garage as a good mechanic. Her home life is hellish with a fat bullying thug of a father and a doped up broken zombie of a mother in a spiteful neighborhood that sees her as a freak. All of this takes their toll on her self esteem as she looks on enviously at the social life that other women seem to take on at ease.

It all culminates with a flight of fancy as she builds a construction of a idealed perfect man from spare auto parts. That little indulgence takes on a wondrous tone when a freak bolt of lightning strikes the construct and brings him to life. Eventually, the mechanical man and Josephine meet and the girl gains a companion she never anticipated.

In the story that follows, Jo struggles to teach the Robot, who soon dubs himself as Galahad from Arthurian legend, how to communicate and the complexities of life and existence. In return, Galahad helps make her see the true beauty of her nature that the world of fools around her cannot perceive even as she strives to fit in a square peg in a round hole kind of world. However, events take a terrible course of their own that will forever change the lives of the characters.

This was a very moving story as you feel the despair and loneliness she feels. It is a story of finding one's own path and taking the harder road to find happiness. Well done.

Friends, Lovers and Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith
2nd in the Sunday Philosopher's Club
Isabel’s niece, Cat, asks Isabel to run her delicatessen while she attends a wedding in Italy. There Isabel meets a man with a most interesting problem. He recently had a heart transplant and is suddenly plagued with memories of events that never happened to him. The situation appeals to Isabel as a philosophical question: Is the heart truly the seat of the soul? And it piques her insatiable curiosity: Could the memories be connected with the donor’s demise? Of course, Grace—Isabel’s no-nonsense housekeeper—and Isabel’s friend Jamie think it is none of Isabel’s business. Meanwhile, Cat brings home an Italian lothario, who, in accordance with all that Isabel knows about Italian lotharios, shouldn’t be trusted . . . but, goodness, he is charming.

I really liked this installment better than the first title. I think because there really wasn't a mystery. I have a much better opinion of this series as I really could relate to the philosophy aspect more.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

Jin Wang wants is to fit in. When his family moves to a new neighborhood, he suddenly finds that he’s the only Chinese-American student at his school. Jocks and bullies pick on him constantly, and he has hardly any friends. Then, to make matters worse, he falls in love with an all-American girl...

Born to rule over all the monkeys in the world, the story of the Monkey King is one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables. Adored by his subjects, master of the arts of kung-fu, he is the most powerful monkey on earth. But the Monkey King doesn’t want to be a monkey. He wants to be hailed as a god...

Chin-Kee is the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, and he’s ruining his cousin Danny’s life. Danny’s a basketball player, a popular kid at school, but every year Chin-Kee comes to visit, and every year Danny has to transfer to a new school to escape the shame. This year, though, things quickly go from bad to worse...

These three apparently unrelated tales come together with an unexpected twist, in a modern fable that is hilarious, poignant, and action-packed.

This book was a 2006 National Book Foundation finalist Young People's Literature. It is a graphic novel or comic story. Very bring and colorful. I couldn't figure out how these 3 different stories were connected. What a delightful surprise as while at first seemed to be a stereotypical look at Chinese Americans it quickly showed a mixture of both worlds.

Awaken Me Darkley by Gena Showalter
Part of the Alien Huntres series

It's sometime in the future, and aliens have been residents on Earth for more than 70 years. Enter Mia Snow, head of the New Chicago Police Department's Alien Investigation and Removal Agency, as she and her crack crew try to solve the latest string of extraterrestrially induced murders. This particular killer favors handsome young men with dark hair and dark eyes. Mia knows that the culprit is one of the dreaded Arcadians, the most clever and deadly species of all.

However, when her second-in-command--and best friend--Dallas Gutierrez is mortally wounded, and only Arcadian Kyrin en Arr, the prime murder suspect, holds the key to his survival, Mia has to make a hard choice between her ethics as a cop and her love for her friend. To make matters worse, she is physically attracted to Kyrin, and suddenly, her black-and-white world has gone all swirly gray.

Interesting book and it might be a series eventually from what the author wrote at the end of the book. It was a good mix of Buffy the Vampire slayer and erotica.