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Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen I love Carl Hiaasen’s books. Laugh aloud funny, they are a great holiday between two books that are a little heavier in tone. In this fun read, investigative reporter, Jack Tagger has been punished by being made to write obituaries for a South Florida daily because he insulted the new owners of the paper at a shareholder’s meeting. Jack is “plotting to resurrect my career by yoking my byline to some famous stiff.” That’s when Jimmy Stoma, the infamous front man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, turns up dead in a fishy-smelling scuba “accident. Jack needs to figure out what actually happened. Standing in the way are [among others] an editor who wants Jack to “break her cherry,” an ambitious pop-singer widow, and the soulless, profit-hungry newspaper owner. Will Jack Tagger get the chance to trade obits for a story that could hit the front page, and give his career a new lease on life?


 


The Memory Game by Nicci French was terrific. Jane Martello is going through a midlife crisis. She’s thrown her devoted husband to the curb, taken up smoking and drinking, and can’t figure out why she’s so unhappy. So she goes into therapy. She’s also trying to figure out how the skeleton of he best friend who disappeared 25 years before ended up buried right under everyone’s nose in the partriach’s garden. It makes no sense unless the murderer is very close to home… As Jane remembers things about her past, she realises she holds the secret to what happened to Natalie. And she needs to know if the memory she has of Nathalie is real or if the images she’s seeing are false recovered memories.


 


The Old Fox Deceiv’d Martha Grimes is an American writing British mysteries and doing a fine job of it. Good crime that isn’t figure-out-able is hard to find. This one involves the bizarre murder of Gemma Temple in a tiny Yorkshire fishing village. Was Gemma the intended victim or was the black-and-white costume she was wearing the reason she was killed? Inspector Jury arrives to untangle the maze of unrequited loves, wrongs being revenged and even more murders, with some help from his aristocratic friend, Melrose Plant.


 


Think Like a Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner is another interesting entry in the series that started with bestseller Freakonomics and continued with SuperFreakonomics. This book is about following your curiosity and challenging what everyone assumes is true. Cars are deadlier than planes, but plane crashes get way more attention. Counter-intuitive, right? OK, how about this: Who do you think is easier to fool, kids or adults. Most people would say kids – like taking candy from a baby, right. Turns out magician Alex Stone says adults are easier to fool. Why? Kids are shorter so they tend to see the trick adults miss. The book promises to teach you to think like a freak. Maybe


 


The Brothers K by David James Duncan is an amazing, amazing story. This is the story of the Chance family. Papa Chance, loves baseball –he pitched in the minors until an accident during the offseason leaves him without a thumb and unable to keep following his bliss. Baseball and Papa’s love of beer face stiff competition from Mama’s Seventh Day Adventist faith. The Brothers K is about how the children of this family deal with their very different parents and their own individual and unique ways of seeing the world.


 


Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes tender, the characters are all very real. From the first scene of Papa Chance’s son sprawled securely in his father’s lap, watching cigarette smoke wafting into the air, to the last heart-breaking moments, Duncan takes you deep into this family’s enduring connections and their jagged rending at the hands of the world and their own stubborn natures. Beautifully written, the story is completely believable. not a boring moment.


 

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Published on November 24, 2015 23:48
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Gail Vaz-Oxlade's Blog

Gail Vaz-Oxlade
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