Book Lovers

Sam Pulsifer burned down the Emily Dickinson House when he was 18. Accidentally. Two people died in the fire and Sam had to pay with 10 years in prison.  When he gets out, he wants to forget all that or, rather, that others would forget all that. So he leaves home, goes to college, marries, and moves to a suburban cluster of homes where most residents don’t know each other’s names. But then a mystery man enters his life and things start changing and fast. He is implicated in several other fires that have burned down New England writers’ homes and is having a hard time convincing a bumbling investigator of his innocence. This novel, told in the first-person, is a mystery as well as a comedy, and it pulls on the heartstrings with strained family relationships. See if Sam really did the deed(s) he's accused of.

A photograph is the key to solving an apparent drowning and a suicide but it is also worth so much more to a number of people and someone is willing to do almost anything to get it back.  Detective Joona Linna (first seen in The Hypnotist) must find the killer before there's much more bloodshed.

When the Kellis-Amberlee virus sweeps across the world, infecting everyone and causing the deceased to rise from the dead, it was social media-not corporate news-that carried the story and gave the survivors a fighting chance. When sibling bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason are chosen to cover a historic presidential campaign, they know they will have to ask the tough questions while delivering crowd-catching content, but they have no idea they will also be embarking on a dangerous investigation of the virus that has shaped their world (and their occupation) for the last twenty years. Of the wide array of zombie fiction released in the last five years, Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy (of which Feed is the first installment) is exceptional. Grant paints a rich, detailed landscape of life after the end of death and more importantly, moves past tales of survival to explore the evolution of human technology, culture, and communication in a post-Outbreak world. A must read for fans of zombie fiction.

There’s man fiction and there’s older man fiction. Jim Harrison’s (MSU grad) “The English Major” falls into another category altogether (which tends to blend the three) older man literary fiction. Cliff’s wife of nearly 40 years has just divorced him to reconnect with a flash from the past. Cliff, previously an English teacher and then a farmer in northern Michigan, must leave his farm and decides to take a road trip west. Here he hooks up with a former student, visits his Hollywood producer son, and goes on many hair-brained adventures he learns his body can no longer handle. But more than what happens in the story is the assured, humorous voice of Cliff finding his way through. Harrison touches on many of his loves in life including cooking, the natural world, and poetry throughout, never dwelling on one for too long, because like Cliff’s journey the inner narrative is too interesting to stick to one narrative. For those who like to go along for the ride with a great character and learn a bit about themselves in the process.