Someone Who'll Watch Over Me By: Frank McGuinness

A devastating 3 hander! Three men in a cell in Beirut, trying to eep their sanity and their hope alive.  Just reading this was heart wrenching, I can only imagine what it is like to sit through a production of it!

The Dante Chamber By: Matthew Pearl

Being a HUGE fan of Pearl's The Dante Club, I was thrilled to have found The Dante Chamber at the library.  Taking place 5 years after the Dante Club, Chamber takes the reader to 1870's London and Purgatory.  Filled with great writing, twists and turns, lots of history and a great premise, Pearl enfolds his reader in the story and puts you squarely in the action.  A must for history/mystery/literature fans.

Short Edition By: Various

A number of short stories published at a kiosk, of all places.  You never know what you'll get, be it a romance, a children's story, a mystery, etc...  This go round, I was treated to a number of stories featuring children, learning important life lessons. The shorts that stood out for me were one set at Christmas in Iceland, one in an imaginary anthropormorphic barnyard, and one involving an oversized hat.  It's takes a lot of talent to write a short, concise yet pointed and poignant story, and these authors had it in spades!

Northanger Abbey By: Val McDermid

I picked this one up from the library because I love McDermid's writing.  Color me shocked when it turned out not to be a mystery, but an updated re-telling of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.  I've not read Austen's so I wasn't sure what to expect.  This was SO fun!  A month in the life of Cat Morland on her first big adventure away from home.  She meets a number of interesting people (one of whom I desperately wanted to punch int he throat every time he showed up on a page);  falls in love; is humiliated; is embarrassed; is infuriated; is enlightened; and does a little growing up.  You know...a typical teenage life all rolled into a month.  McDermid's wit and language serves this story well, and now I have to get Austen's original!

The Deep End of the Ocean By: Jacquelyn Mitchard

This was okay.  The topic was depressing as hell, and I only had any feelings for one characters and she was peripheral.  This one rambles a bit...some story lines are superfluous and don't really add to the overall story, so those moment took me out of the book. Not horrible, but not fabulous.

Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage By: Evangeline Bruce

Taking a different tact from other biographies, Ms. Bruce's look at Napoleon and Josephine is a biography of their marriage.  Told using their own letters, as well as the writings of others, this is a fascinating look at a couple who are still wrapped in a little mystery. Their lives were so entwined with the social, economic and political movements that the reader gets a healthy dose of the history of the time in which they lived.  Of course, there are so many conflicting stories about who these two really were, that everything written about them has to be taken with a grain of salt.  With that said, Bruce does an amazing job of culling through a lot of nonsense and getting to the heart (as much as she can) of who this couple was, what they meant to each other and how their relationship (and it's ups and downs) affected and empire.  Having known nothing about either of them, I found this to be a fascinating read.

Book #4 in a popular series

I think I have whip-lash from all the twists and turns in this one.  I can't wait for this to be published so fans of this series can enjoy the ride!

Rules of Civility By: Amore Towles

A look at one year in the life of a woman ahead of her times in many ways. Follow Katey through 1930's New York and the insular world of the people she encounters and becomes involved with and journey with her to her own version of the Rules of Civility. (by the by: love that the author included them in the appendix).

Death in a Budapest Butterfly By: Julia Buckley

A great deal of Hungarian folklore, a fascinating and unlikely set of suspects, and great plotting make this mystery (the 1st in a new series), a must!