What I've Been Reading (Last week, anyway)

I know I have been a bit quiet as of late. Traveling kept me busy last week. The free time that surrounded my training sessions was filled with a lot of reading, and very little of much else. I was about 1/2 way through reading Roadside Crosses by Jeffrey Deaver when I left for my trip on Monday. The story features Kathryn Dance, a spin-off character from the Lincoln Rhyme series. The plot is two-pronged: one prong is the continuation of the Daniel Pell case (The Sleeping Doll) and the mercy death of an injured police officer; the other prong follows a serial killer who announces his intentions using roadside crosses. This suspenseful book kept me going. I finished it on my way down to Columbia.




My second book of the week was Lisa Kleypas' Smooth Talking Stranger. This is the third book in Kleypas' series about the wealthy Travis family. Middle son Jack meets strong-willed Ella Varner in this story of unexpected parenthood and family "issues". The story was well-paced and interesting. It was definitely an easy read as a romance.I finished it on Tuesday night...




 Next up was The Neighbor, by Lisa Gardner. Detective D.D. Warren is calling to a missing person's case when Jason Jones reports his wife missing. Of course Jones immediately becomes the primary suspect, and exacerbates suspicion by refusing to talk with the police or actively look for his wife. I kept thinking something about his character struck a chord as I read. Near the end, the tie-in with Gardner's Say Goodbye (which, by the way, was a horrific but well-written story). I was sucked into this story and couldn't wait to find out what happened. Gardner's writing is fast-paced and contains lots of twists and turns. I really like her.


Having finished my supply of books by my flight Friday morning, I stopped at an airport bookstore to get something for the flights home. I had no clue what to get, so I called up Amazon on my iPhone to read ratings and reviews of the books I had to choose from (yup, this really is how I shop). Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had great reviews, so I got it. Larsson was the second best selling author in 2008, behind Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns). Larsson, a Swedish journalist and editor of Expo, died from a heart attack weeks after providing three manuscripts to his publisher for this series. His writing style is very engaging and the story is well written. I am glad there are other books in the series to be read next. The Girl... is set in Sweden and intertwines stories of publisher Mikael Blomkvist, corporate magnate Henrik Vagner, and the troubled Lisbeth Salander. The story line as described by Amazon.com:

Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back. This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. --Dave Callanan

I am about 1/2 way through and can barely put it down!