Peter James has written eleven police procedural novels featuring Brighton Detective Superintendent (DS) Roy Grace. The eleventh installment in this series is You Are Dead and the first book that I have read in the series. I can tell you it won’t be the last!! You Are Dead is the 50th book that I have read in 2015. I am now one book away from my goal!!
Yesterday, i finished Whistling Past the Graveyard, the 48th book that I have read this year! Three more to go to reach my goal of 51! I finished the 47th book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol a few days prior and as I thought about the books, I began to see similarities between the books. The big dissimilarity is that Whistling Past the Graveyard is a novel and Amazing Grace is nonfiction. The other is that Whistling Past the Graveyard is set in 1963 Mississippi and the children whose lives Jonathan Kozol writes about live in New York City in some of the poorest neighborhoods in our nation. But they both deal with the lives of black Americans. One happens at the time that black Americans were gaining their civil rights and dealing with overcoming deep-seated prejudices and a part of our nation that was being dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century. While the other views the lives of children in 1993 NYC who may now have those rights but are still fighting for equal treatment in a highly segregated New York.
Patrick Lee has a penchant for writing thrillers with a bit of science fiction weaved into the storyline. His last two books Runner and his current release Signal, both feature Sam Dryden and ex-special forces operative battling forces against advanced technologies. My first encounters with the works of Patrick Lee was the Travis Chase trilogy which included The Breach, Ghost Country and Deep Sky. In that series The Breach sends artifacts and people back and forth through a time portal. In Signal, Dryden confronts a machine that receives signals from the future!
Christopher Moore may be very near the top of my list of authors that make me laugh out loud when I read their books!! His latest book Secondhand Souls certainly did that in many places! Secondhand Souls is the second book in the Grim Reaper series, that feature Charlie Asher and his daughter Sophie and a crazy cast of characters. From Goodreads.com…..
Snow Falling on Cedars is kinda’ the type of books I read, but well not quite. While the basic storyline is the murder trial of Kabuo Miyamoto there’s a lot more that to it that sets this Pen/Faulkner Award winning novel apart from a typical book in the mystery genre. The novel provides not only a great trial mystery that keeps you guessing until the end of the book, but it provides a glimpse into the lives of Japanese-Americans during World War II and beyond.
So now I’ve caught up on my running,(well, actually if you consider today’s run I’m not caught up with runs right now!), it’s time to catch up on my reading. Over the last couple of weeks I have finished two books! The first is the Pen/Faulkner winning Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, and then I finished Gracie: A Love Story written by her partner and husband George Burns!
As I was sitting around over the weekend not feeling well, I spent my time in typical fashion reading!! Did I read any of the three books that I picked up at the library on Saturday? Of course not! I read some in Gracie: A Love Story and then started No Sanctuary by Richard Laymon. I am not sure where I got the book but it has been on my TBR shelves for a long while now. Anyway, on Saturday when I was moving things around I saw the back of the book and read the following
So as I have said many times October has been a busy month especially the last two weeks. But in those two weeks I have finished two books first Broken Promise from Linwood Barclay and most recently Silent Creed from Alex Kava. So where does that put me on my various reading challenges. Well, the addition of these two books have brought the total number of books I’ve read to 41 which is 80% of my goal total of 51 books. Since the goal of 51 books was very lofty, I’m really happy with where I am right now!! So right now I can achieve my goal with 2 more books this month and 4 in each of the following months. But with so much competing with my time over the next few month i.e Eagles football, Sixers basketball and Flyers hockey plus the World Series I don’t know if I’ll reach my goal!! Anyway, here’s a tabulation of my reads!!
So in the midst of all the goings on over the last week I did manage to finish my second book in October. It helped that the book, Silent Creed from Alex Kava was a real page-turner!! Silent Creed is the second book from Kava to feature dog-handler Ryder Creed and so far it has been a wild ride!! In Silent Creed Ryder is teamed with FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell for the second time. The initial pairing of Creed and O’Dell was in the thriller Breaking Creed. Maggie has been a favorite of mine through eleven thrillers!
