More excellent summer reads from my favorite authors

Reprinted from the Citizen:

As summer rolls on, there are so many excellent books just waiting to pop into your beach bag, and here I’ll cover a few I have recently enjoyed.

Susan Elia MacNeal continues the saga of Maggie Hope in The Hollywood Spy. Maggie Hope is an American who worked as Winston Churchill’s secretary in the first book in the series, The Prime Minister’s Secretary. Her skills led her to become a spy for the British during WWII, working for the elite SOE agency. 

After stints in London, Paris, Berlin, and Scotland, Maggie goes to 1943 Los Angeles to help her former boyfriend John, an RAF pilot training American flyers. John’s fianceé drowned and he suspects foul play. Maggie agrees to investigate.

The most interesting part of this terrific tenth entry in the Maggie Hope series is learning all about Los Angeles during this time. It contained a large number of Nazi supporters, who went underground once the US entered the war. The Ku Klux Klan picked up where the Nazis left off, with racism against Jewish people, Blacks, and Latin people running rampant, including acts of violence against those groups.

MacNeal immerses the reader right into Los Angeles of that time, and you can feel all her research right on the page, as established by her bibliography at the end of the book. It’s also fun to see so many real people drop in, including Walt Disney, Linus Pauling, Howard Hughes, Cab Calloway, Hattie McDaniel, and more.

I highly recommend “The Hollywood Spy” for anyone who enjoys Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series.

Laura Lippman pays homage to Stephen King’s book Misery in her novel, Dream Girl. Gerry Andersen is an author who has yet to match the mega-success of his first novel, “Dream Girl”. When Gerry takes a serious fall in his Baltimore apartment, he is bedridden and dependent on the care of his young assistant and the nurses who come to his apartment. 

One night Gerry receives a disturbing phone call from a woman who claims she is the real person he based his novel on. He knows this cannot be true, the character was a figment of his imagination.

When the phone calls continue, neither his overnight nurse nor his assistant hears the phone ringing. When he sees a woman in his room late at night and calls out, the nurse comes running but no one is there, and the security cameras for the building show that no one came into his apartment. 

Is Gerry losing his mind or is someone messing with him? Could it be one of his ex-wives? The book goes back and forth in time, and we get a real feel for the character of Gerry, who he is and where he comes from. Fans of Lippman’s Tess Monaghan PI series will enjoy the cameo by Tess as Gerry looks for help to find answers.

I read Dream Girl in one day, I could not put this one down.

Anne Leigh Parrish continues her wonderful series about the Dugan family in her novel, A Winter Night. We first met the Dugans in Our Love Could Light The World, a series of linked stories, and their story continued in the novels, The Amendment and Maggie’s Ruse. 

Oldest daughter Angie takes center stage in this beautifully written story. Angie is 34, working as a social worker in adult care/nursing home. She is seeing Matt, a bartender and friend of her brother, and so far it’s going well.

After some disastrous relationships, Angie has trust issues. She is seeing a therapist to help her work through it. Angie has always been the one to care for her father, a recovering alcoholic who is remarried, but as his life seems to veering off course Angie is called in to help him once again.

It’s great to reconnect with the Dugan family, and Parrish writes dialogue that just crackles with honesty, like mother Lavinia saying that her ex-husband’s “promises are never false. They’re just seldom kept.” Or when Lavinia says “if you want your marriage to work, you have to rise up to meet it.” (Lavinia gets the best lines.)

The Dugan family lives in the Finger Lakes region, and readers will be able to relate to many of settings and character.  And with the extreme heat we have been experiencing, a book set in a central New York winter is a welcome distraction. A Winter Night is a moving character study, and I highly recommend it. 

Friday 5ive- June 18, 2021

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly blog post about five things that caught my attention this week.

1) On Thursday night, my husband and I heard what we hoped was fireworks. We went out on our balcony and sure enough, there was barge in the East River shooting off fireworks. It was a few days too late for the Back to Normal celebration that New York State organized earlier in the week. Maybe it was practice for the Macys 4th of July Show?

2) My husband and I put together our new wine rack from Wine Enthusiast on Saturday. (Well, I held it together while my husband screwed in the 100 screws.) Thank goodness we had a cordless drill, we were able to finish in less than two hours. It's been awhile since we had to put furniture together.

3) I received the cutest invitation for our Beach Club Book Club meeting next month. The book is Jennifer Ryan's The Kitchen Front, about a cooking contest in England during WWII. I can't wait to read and discuss the book, if it's half as much fun as the invitation, it will be a great time.

4) We watched the hugely popular French TV series, Lupin, on Netflix this week. It tells the story of a man, Assane Diop, who sets about to avenge the false imprisonment and death of his father. Assane is a "gentleman thief", inspired by the French literature character Arséne Lupin, and it's a combination of Ocean's Eleven  and Sherlock Holmes. Omar Sy winningly portrays Assane Diop, a big man with a charming smile. It's fun to try and put the puzzle together as to what is happening. I forsee future Lupin tours of Paris, similiar to the Sex and the City tours in NYC. 

5) I read two terrific books this week. I stayed up late to finish in one day Laura Lippman's latest mystery, Dream Girl. Lippman has recently paid homage to books she loved Wilde Lake  (To Kill A Mockingbird), Sunburn (the novels of James M. Cain) and now she salutes Stephen King's Misery in Dream Girl. When writer Gerry Andersen is seriously injured in a fall at his Baltimore condo, he is bedridden and dependent on his young assistant Victoria, and the nurses and therapists who come to his home. He begins to get threatening phone calls from a woman who claims to be the character of his most famous book. Are these calls real or a figment of his imagination? It's a twisty mystery that goes back and forth in time through Gerry's life, and he has to take a look at how he has lived his life. and treated others, particularly the women, in his life. It's a fantastic, meaty mystery.

Julie Metz's nonfiction Eva and Eve, looks at the life of her mother, who escaped from Vienna with her parents during WWII. Metz and her mother had difficulties, and Metz hopes by visiting Vienna and Italy, where her mother spent nine days before boarding the ship to America, she will better understand her mother. If you only know about Austria's history during WWII from The Sound of Music or the brief mention of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Germany in your high school history book, you'll learn so much more about that important moment in history. It also has relevance in today's world if you look at what Russia is trying to do with the Ukraine and other neighboring countries. It's an enlightening book. My full review publishes June 28th. 

Our apartment building has lifted all mask requirements for vaccinated people, and it seems like teh whole world has changed for the better. I hope all is well in your part of the world as we get back to normal.

Summer Reads

Reprinted from auburnpub.com :

With Memorial Day in the rearview mirror, it’s time to turn our attention to summer reading season. There are so many books in so many different genres, what should we read?

For traditional beach reading, while fans of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are patiently awaiting the next season, Elyssa Friedland’s novel, The Last Summer at the Golden Hotel with its Catskill vacation hotel setting and family dynamics will fit the bill. 

In Mary Kay Andrews’ The Newcomer, a woman flees to a small beach town motel in Florida with her young niece after her sister is murdered. The retirees and snowbirds of the small town are suspicious of them, and a handsome cop becomes a romantic entanglement. (The hotel/motel setting is popular this season). 

Taylor Jenkins Reid, who scored big with Daisy Jones and the Six two years ago, is back with Malibu Rising, another rock’n’roll affiliation. The four adult children of famous rocker Mick Riva are throwing their annual summer blowout at their Malibu mansion. Everyone wants to be there, and the craziness that begins ends with the home burned down by morning.

The Queen of Beach Reads, Elin Hilderbrand, has Golden Girl as her annual entry. When a popular female novelist is killed in a hit and run accident while jogging, she ends up in the Beyond, where her guide allows her to follow her family for one last summer, and give her three adult children each one “nudge” to guide their behavior. 

If mysteries and thrillers are more to your taste, Laura Lippman channels Stephen King and the #MeToo movement in Dream Girl, as a famous novelist, laid up in his apartment after an injury, receives disturbing phone calls from a woman claiming to be the protagonist in one of his novels. No one believes him. Is he losing his mind or is he in trouble?

Fans of John Grisham’s legal thrillers will like Stacey Abrams’ While Justice Sleeps. When a Supreme Court justice mysteriously slips into a coma, his law clerk discovers that she has been named his legal guardian. She uncovers that he has been researching a controversial case before the Court, and now she is the middle of danger. 

Good historical fiction abounds this summer. Alka Joshi’s The Secret Keeper of Jaipur follows the characters from her brilliant 1950’s India-set novel, The Henna Artist as they move into the 1960s and try to find their way in the changing world. 

Chris Bohjalian goes back to 1662 Boston in Hour of the Witch.  Mary fears for her life after her husband’s violence towards her escalates. When a young boy she treated with herbs dies, Mary is accused of being a witch, and must fight for her life. It’s The Crucible meets The Handmaid’s Tale.

Beatriz Williams takes on Cold War spy novels in Our Woman in Moscow. In 1952, Ruth McCallister receives a postcard from her twin sister Iris who disappeared with her husband and young children four years ago after Iris’ husband defected to Russia when he was uncovered as a spy. FBI agent Sumner Fox convinces Ruth to travel to Moscow to help extract her sister. It’s a tension-filled narrative with twists and turns that will keep your turning the pages.

Nonfiction fans have many choices as well. Continuing with the Cold War, Anne Sebba’s Ethel Rosenberg- An American Tragedy  takes a fresh look at life and the case against the wife and mother who was executed with her husband in 1953 accused of for spying for Russia. 

Ashley C. Ford’s memoir, Somebody’s Daughter shares her story about growing up as a young black girl in Indiana. She had a troubled relationship with her mother, and her father was imprisoned for reasons no one would tell her. Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, and Oprah have praised this powerful memoir. 

There are a few suggestions for Father’s Day gifts as well. Popular business/current events writer Michael Lewis’ The Premonition tackles the COVID crisis through people who saw it coming when the CDC didn’t and tried to warn others. 

Sy Montgomery’s The Hummingbirds' Gift takes a deep dive into the world of that beautiful bird, perfect for the nature-loving dad. 

Tom Coyne takes readers on a trip across the country to the best golf courses in A Course Called America. If your Dad spends his weekends hitting the links, he’ll love this one. 

Happy summer reading to everyone!