Bestsellers
”Rebel Island,”By Rick Riordan
Bantam Books ($6.99 paperback, 330 pages)
It’s just a measure of how well endowed the mystery bookshelves are at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library that I am just now getting to read anything by Rick Riordan, a New York Times bestselling mystery author from my old stomping grounds of South Texas.
When the new library opened up, I reveled in the old books — S.S. Van Dine, Brett Halliday — that used to be hidden away in the stacks.
That’s my excuse for not being up on the latest mystery bestsellers, and I’m sticking to it.
But I’ve clearly missed some fun, because this latest Riordan opus has enough twists and action and interesting characters to definitely make me want to go back and peruse his previous work in the Tres Navarre private eye series.
In this case, Tres Navarre has officially given up his private investigation business to work as a full-time faculty member at the University of Texas at San Antonio (whence my nephew graduated — he’s now a Texas State Trooper). And Tres has just married his so-pregnant-she’s-ready-to-pop lawyer girlfriend, Maia, who happens to be a Chinese American.
50 States of Literature, Adventure, Bestsellers, Mystery, New in Paperback, Review, Suspense
I took this photo of author Emily Giffin in August 2006 at an all-day Book Club Conference sponsored by the Memphis Public Library and Mid-South Reads.
I had tried to get a good shot from my seat in the front row while Giffin stood at the podium discussing her new book.
To my consternation, she stopped in mid-sentence, gave me an annoyed look and asked that I not take the photo until she posed for it. She explained that she hated to be photographed grimacing or with her mouth open. She then posed prettily, but because I was flustered, I snapped a picture which cut off most of her head.
However, after her talk, Giffin graciously let me take another photo with head attached. Later, I wrote : “By rights 34-year-old Giffin should appear frazzled, harried and careworn. She’s the mother of twin boys 2 1/2 years old, and she recently visited 17 cities in five weeks promoting her third novel, “Baby Proof.” Instead, she looks young and impeccably chic, and comes across as articulate and charming.”
Two years later, Giffin, a former lawyer, originally from Illinois, lives in Atlanta and has a new daughter, Harriet, as well as a new book on the New York Times best-sellers list. 
“Love the One You’re With,” (St. Martin’s, $25) was described by a reviewer in our “Books in Brief” column on June 1 as “a satisfying, light, chick-lit read about the pain of self-discovery.”
I don’t disagree with this assessment, but readers should be aware that there’s a darker quality and a bit more complexity to Giffin’s book than one might expect from a work in this genre.
I liked the slightly snarky, sarcastic tone that Giffin sometimes employs, especially evident when she exploits the Yankee vs. Southerner conflict generated by her characters’ backgrounds. Read the rest of this entry »
”Shinjuku Shark”By Arimasa Osawa
Translated by Andrew Clare
Vertical Inc.
Paperback, $14.95
285 pages
Both my kids have taken four years of Japanese under “Irigashi Sensei” at White Station High School, and I sincerely hoped I would like this book, the first English translation of a series of police procedurals that are extremely popular in Japan.
I do like the characters and the story, but the translation has serious problems.
The Shinjuku Shark is the nickname of the book’s hero, Samejima, a rogue, loner cop who won’t kowtow to his go-long-to-get-along superiors in the Japanese police hierarchy.
He has a beautiful rock singer girlfriend, Sho, who seems to be poised to launch into stardom.
The plot involves a gay, sadistic maker of illegal firearms and a mysterious serial killer who targets young police officers.
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The book blog on nytimes.com reports that in the May 11th issue of The New York Times Book Review, the Best-Sellers list will not carry a Harry Potter title for the first time in almost 10 years. Wow.
J.K. Rowling’s books, which changed children’s literature forever, also created changes in the publishing world. Harry Potter was so ubiquitous on the list at one point that the Book Review editor decided to create a separate list for children’s books so other authors could have a chance to get on the fiction list. And then a separate list was created for children’s series because the individual HP books were crowding the kids’ list.
Some friends at The CA persuaded me to read the books after the third one came out. I like to read books my kids might want to read, so I borrowed a copy of “The Sorcerer’s Stone” and jumped in. About halfway through, I became a fan. I zipped through the first three — marveling at Rowling’s creativity and the ability to weave multiple layers together – and then suffered withdrawal until the fourth came out. When a new title hit the bookstores, my family knew they’d be eating pizza and leftovers, and the house would go uncleaned, until I finished the last page.
The HP phenomenon isn’t over, though. “The Half-Blood Prince” — my favorite in the series — will likely make another showing on the Best-Sellers list when the film version comes out this fall. And there’ll be another bump when the final book is set to film in two parts a couple of years from now.
What was your favorite book? Do you think HP will be as popular with the next generation of young readers? Part of the fun was trying to figure out what happens next. Now that we know, will the interest still be there?
“Curse of the Spellmans,”
By Lisa Lutz
Copyright 2008
Simon & Schuster
$25 hardback
409 pages
One of my rare pleasures in listening to the radio in Memphis is the hour from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays when WYPL-89.3 FM (the library channel) broadcasts the reading of current mystery novels.
While going to pick up my son from White Station High School one Monday afternoon, I heard a delightful reading of “The Spellman Files,” the first installment of this series by Lisa Lutz. I don’t know the name of the young woman who read the book aloud, but she does a great job.
“The Spellman Files” was a big hit for the author in 2007, and this sequel, I hope, will do as well or better.
The Spellmans are a family of San Francisco-based private investigators: father Albert, mother Olivia, daughter Rae (who turns 16 in this book) and daughter Isabel Spellman (30), who is the heroine of the series. Rae and Isabel’s brother, David, is a lawyer who occasionally sends business to the family firm.
Richard Price’s “Lush Life,” which was lodged at No. 7 on the New York Times’ best-sellers list for fiction this week, is an immersion course on the Lower East Side of New York City, the mechanics of a homicide investigation, the street patter of cops and perps.
Don’t care about the Lower East Side, police procedures, the patois of city life? Richard Price can make you care. The place, the people and the talk in “Lush Life” are vivid and vital; the sense that human systems are indifferent to human beings is profound. (Click on our podcasts of the author reading from the novel when he appeared recently at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss. Something about the Bronx accent makes this seem like the complete “Lush Life” experience. )
The prologue introduces the Quality of Life Squad, an undercover operation, in the world-weary voice of the author at his booksigning, consisting of “900 pounds of white meat with guns, sitting in a cab that fools no one.” They are the personification of the ongoing reality play that sets cops up against the rest of the world, what Price calls the police-as-occupying-army dynamic of urban life.
An innocent victim is murdered, a survivor of the crime is wrongly abused in the investigation, another survivor capitalizes on the media attention to his friend’s death. 
It reads like life, which, of course, is unfair. This isn’t a spoiler: As Price pointed out at his Square Books reading, this is no mystery. You know how the killing goes down and who does it from the start.
”Lush Life” has no clear heroes; the homicide detectives are intriguing and charming characters, who operate with the ethical delicacy of savannah predators. One of the aforementioned survivors, a character Price describes as a close stand-in for himself (his name is Eric “Cash”) is a complex of compromises and self-preservation instincts.
The thrill of this book is in Price’s dialogue, which reads like found nonfiction, as if he’s transcribing tapes of real conversations. Dennis Lehane, another master of sound-and-place reconstruction, defers to his colleague in the “Lush Life” jacket notes: “Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced.” Price himself describes his gift as a mere genetic or biological trait. He says he doesn’t want to “go all Margaret Mead on it.”: “I just have a good ear, but it’s not like I worked on it. You know, some people run fast, some people are good mimics. I’m not writing down authentic; there is no authentic.
Richard Price: Intro [4:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (22) The Quality of Life Squad [20:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (36) Back at the Precinct [4:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (27) Some old junkie [5:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (28)
I confess I hardly ever pick up an uncelebrated book or author unless I’ve done some research. There are so many good books to be read, I don’t want to waste my time on the potentially bad ones. But I read something last night that made me think I’m missing out on some hidden gems.
Over at Critical Mass, the book blog of the National Book Critics Circle, Molly Giles talks about what it was like to judge the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Excited at first about all the books she was going to read (”Free books! New ones! Hardbacks!”), she soon realized what she’d gotten herself into, and dreaded seeing a new brown box filled with books waiting by the back door. She and two other judges together read some 350 books before deciding on this year’s prize, “The Great Man” by Kate Christensen.
After all that reading, here is some of what Giles learned about American fiction:
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