BETH'S PICKS FOR FEBRUARY

The Passage by Justin Cronin

SUMMARY
It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear-of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he#x19;s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey-spanning miles and decades-towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun. With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

AUTHOR HOME PAGE

http://www.justincronin.com

About Justin Cronin
Justin Cronin (born 1962) is an American author. He has written three novels: Mary and O'Neil, The Summer Guest and The Passage. Awards he has won include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Stephen Crane Prize, and the Whiting Writer's Award.[1]
Born and raised in New England, Cronin is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He taught creative writing and was the "Author in-residence" at La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA from 1992 to 2005. He lives with his wife and children in Houston, Texas where he is a professor of English at Rice University.[2]
In July 2007, Variety reported that the screen rights to Cronin's vampire trilogy was purchased by Fox 2000.[3] The first book of the series, The Passage, was released in June 2010.[4] It garnered mainly favorable reviews.[5][6] (from Wikipedia)

Stephen King on The Passage
http://enterthepassage.com/about/

REVIEWS

Library Journal Review

A human-created virus has infected humankind, mutating most into superstrong, near-immortal vampiric creatures. The "virals"-also called "jumpers" and "dracs" (after Dracula, of course)-can leap 20 feet through the air at a bound and split a human (or a horse, or a cow) in half with their bare hands. A small band of men and women embark on a cross-country trek, looking for a way to protect the few remaining uninfected humans from extinction. With them travels an enigmatic prepubescent girl who talks to the virals with her mind and seems to have been born 100 years before. VERDICT The monsters in this compulsive nail biter are the scariest in fiction since Stephen King's vampires in Salem's Lot. Although the novel runs 700 pages, Cronin is a master at building tension, and he never wastes words. Shout it from the hills! This exceptional thriller should be one of the most popular novels this year and will draw in readers everywhere

Kirkus

Literary author Cronin (Mary and O'Neil, 2001, etc.) turns in an apocalyptic thriller in the spirit of Stephen King or Michael Crichton.You know times are weird when swarms of Bolivian bats swoop from the skies and kill humans—or, as one eyewitness reports of an unfortunate GI, off fighting the good fight against the drug lords, "they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter." Meanwhile, up north, in the very near future, gasoline prices are soaring and New Orleans has been hit by a second hurricane. Wouldn't you know it, but the world is broken, and mad science has something to do with it—in this instance, the kind of mad science that involves trying to engineer super-soldiers but that instead has created a devastating epidemic, with zombie flourishes—here called "virals"—and nods to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and pretty much every other creature feature. Bad feds and good guys alike race around, trying to keep the world safe for American democracy. In the end the real protector of civilization turns out to be a "little girl in Iowa," Amy Harper Bellafonte, who has been warehoused in a nunnery by her down-on-her-luck mother. Mom, a waitress with hidden resources of her own, pitches in, as does a world-weary FBI agent—is there any other kind? Thanks to Amy, smart though shy, the good guys prevail. Or so we think, but you probably don't want to go opening your door at night to find out.The young girl as heroine and role model is a nice touch. Otherwise a pretty ordinary production, with little that hasn't been seen before.

Publishers Weekly Review

Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin's engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the gruesome reality behind the wish-fulfillment fantasies. When a secret project to create a super-soldier backfires, a virus leads to a plague of vampiric revenants that wipes out most of the population. One of the few bands of survivors is the Colony, a FEMA-established island of safety bunkered behind massive banks of lights that repel the "virals," or "dracs"-but a small group realizes that the aging technological defenses will soon fail. When members of the Colony find a young girl, Amy, living outside their enclave, they realize that Amy shares the virals' agelessness, but not the virals' mindless hunger, and they embark on a search to find answers to her condition. PEN/Hemingway Award-winner Cronin (The Summer Guest ) uses a number of tropes that may be overly familiar to genre fans, but he manages to engage the reader with a sweeping epic style. The first of a proposed trilogy, it's already under development by director Ripley Scott and the subject of much publicity buzz.

Booklist Review

In this apocalyptic epic that begins in a gloomy near-future, gasoline is $13 a gallon; New Orleans has become an uninhabitable, toxic swamp after a series of devastating hurricanes; the U.S. is steadily losing the war on terror; and the future of humanity hinges on the actions of a young girl. Six-year-old Amy Harper Bellafonte, abandoned to the care of Memphis nuns by her prostitute mother, and her protector, disillusioned FBI agent Brad Wolgast, are at the epicenter of a battle to preserve the human species after a government military experiment to create a super-soldier goes awry. Using an exotic virus found deep in the South American jungle, scientists have discovered that it has the ability to bestow vast strength and instantaneous healing abilities on humans, with one serious side effect: it turns its victims into bloodthirsty (literally) monsters. This door-stopper of a novel is such an homage to Stephen King's The Stand (in length as well as plot), along with Firestarter and even Salem's Lot, that it required some fact-checking to ascertain it was not written under a new King pseudonym.

Best in Books February 2011

The Bodies Left Behind by Jeffery Deaver

A fast-paced story that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat won the 2009 International Thriller Writers Best Thriller of the Year Award. The tone for this book is both suspenseful and violent which may not be appealing to all readers looking for action. Some twists found later in the story certainly make the reader realize that Deaver will not allow your assumptions to play out in the end.

Booklist Review

/*Starred Review*/ Deaver, who has written one excellent thriller after another, is such a good puppet master that he makes us believe whatever he wants us to believe, even things that are false, without telling us a single lie. He practices misdirection through dialogue: a character says something he believes to be true, and so we believe it, too, without questioning the assumptions on which the character is basing his statement. A perfect example of how this technique can be used to perfection occurs in Deaver's latest, in which Brynn McKenzie, a Michigan police deputy investigating a suspicious 911 emergency call, finds herself being pursued through the woods by a pair of killers. And when she meets up with a woman who is also being hunted, Brynn has two lives to protect, and precious few resources with which to do it. The novel, which in some places may remind readers of Barry England's Figures in a Landscape (1997), is vintage Deaver: tightly plotted, with plenty of right-angle plot twists and pitch-perfect dialogue. It's not until we're well more than halfway through the book that we even begin to suspect that we might have made some dangerous mistakes, accepted certain things at face value merely because the characters in the book sold them to us so successfully—but by then, it's way too late, and we are completely at Deaver's mercy. -- Pitt, David (Reviewed 09-15-2008) (Booklist, vol 105, number 2, p4)

First Chapter by Novelist

Jeffery Deaver biography and website

Classic Suggestion January 2011

The Mayor Of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled 'A Story of a Man of Character', Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town. -Product Description

Discussion Questions

Thomas Hardy Biography

Wikipedia article

BETH'S PICK FOR JANUARY 2011

Book Summary

In an Author's Note at the end of his book The Widow of the South, Robert Hicks tells us that "when Oscar Wilde made his infamous tour of America in 1882, he told his hosts that his itinerary should include a visit to 'sunny Tennessee to meet the Widow McGavock, the high priestess of the temple of dead boys.'" Carrie McGavock, The Widow of the South, did indeed take it upon herself to grieve the loss of so many young men in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, which took place on November 30, 1864. Nine thousand men lost their lives that day. She and her husband John eventually re-buried on their own land 1,481 Confederate soldiers killed at Franklin, when the family that owned the land on which the original shallow graves had been dug decided to plow it under and put it into cultivation.
Before the battle begins, Carrie's house is commandeered for a field hospital and all normal life is suspended. Carrie is anything but normal, however. She has buried three children, has two living children she pays little attention to, has turned the running of the house over to her slave, Mariah, and spends her time dressed in black walking around in the dark or lying down lamenting her loss. She is a morbid figure from the outset but becomes less so as the novel progresses. The death going on all around her shakes her out of her torpor, but death is definitely her comfort zone.
One of the soldiers who is treated at the house is Zachariah Cashwell, who loses his leg when Carrie sends him to surgery rather than watch him die. They are inextricably bound in some kind of a spiritual dance from then on. Their reasons for being drawn to each other are inexplicable, apparently, because they remain unexplained, and when Cashwell tells Carrie he loves her, she beats him nearly to death because she loves him too. At least, that is the reason Hicks gives. He violates that first caveat given to all writers: "show us, don't tell us." There is doubtless something deeply flawed in Carrie and screamingly symbolic about her behavior; it is surely elusive. Too bad, because Carrie was a real person whom Hicks lauds for her compassion and ability to grieve without end. Then, he throws in this gratuitous "love story" and confuses the issue. Carrie's relationship with her husband and children remains unexamined. Hicks is better at describing death and "the stink of war" than he is at life. If you read War and Peace and loved all the war parts and were bored senseless by the peace parts, this is your cup of tea.

About the Author:

Robert Hicks, the author of THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH, was born and raised in South Florida. In 1974 he moved to Williamson County, Tennessee; in 1979 he moved to 'Labor in Vain,' a late-eighteenth-century log cabin, near Leiper's Fork, Tennessee.Working both as a music publisher and in artist management in both country and rock music, Hick's interests remain broad and varied. A partner in the B. B. King's Blues clubs in Nashville, Memphis and Los Angeles, Hicks serves as 'Curator of Vibe' of the corporation. (From Bookreporter.com)
Robert Hicks is the author of The New York Times Bestseller The Widow of the South and has played a major role in preserving the historic Carnton mansion, a focal point in the Battle of Franklin (November 30, 1864).
Robert Hicks was born and raised in South Florida. He moved to Williamson County, Tennessee in 1974 and lives near the Bingham Community at "Labor in Vain," his late-eighteenth-century log cabin.
Working over the years as a music publisher and in artist management in both country and alternative-rock music, Hicks’s interests have remained varied. A partner in the B. B. King’s Blues Clubs in Nashville, Memphis, Orlando and Los Angeles, Hicks serves as ‘Curator of Vibe’ of the corporation.
A lifelong collector, Hicks was the first Tennessean to be listed among Art & Antiques’ Top 100 Collectors in America –- his collection focuses on Outsider Art, Tennesseana, and Southern Material Culture. He served as curator on the exhibition, Art of Tennessee, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. The exhibition was a seven-year endeavor from conception at his kitchen table to its opening, September 2003. He was co-editor of the exhibition’s award winning and critically acclaimed catalog, Art of Tennessee (University of Tennessee Press, September 2003).
In the field of historic preservation, he has served on the boards of the Tennessee State Museum, The Williamson County Historical Society, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He presently serves on the board of directors of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and of Historic Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee.
In December 1997, after a third term as President of the Carnton board, and in light of his years of service to the site, Hicks was named by board resolution: “the driving force in the restoration and preservation of Historic Carnton Plantation.”
He is founding chairman emeritus of Franklin’s Charge: A Vision and Campaign for the Preservation of Historic Open Space in the fight to secure and preserve both battlefield and other historic open space in Williamson County. Franklin’s Charge took on the massive mission of saving what remains of the eastern flank of the battlefield at Franklin -– the largest remaining undeveloped fragment of the battlefield -– and turning it into a public battlefield park. The American Battlefield Protection Program has called this endeavor “the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history.” By the end of 2005, Franklin’s Charge had already raised over 5 million dollars toward this goal, surpassing anything ever done within any other community in America to preserve battlefield open space. As Jim Lighthizer, President of the Civil War Preservation Trust has said, “There is no ‘close second’ in any community in America, to what Robert Hicks and Franklin’s Charge has done in Franklin.” The Governor named Hicks as a commissioner to plan out the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War in Tennessee.
Hicks became fascinated by the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, a major battle which occurred in the final months of the Civil War. During his many years working at Carnton, he began to develop a book idea, and during an accidental meeting with civil war historian and author Shelby Foote, he received further encouragement to complete a historic novel about the battle. [1]
The result was Hicks' first novel, The Widow of the South (Warner Books, NY, 2005). In writing the novel, he hoped to bring national attention back to this moment in our nation’s history, the impact those five bloody hours played in making us a nation, and in the preservation of the sites tied to the story. The Widow of the South was launched September 1, 2005 to overwhelming critical success, entering the New York Times Bestseller List after only one week out.
The novel is centered around the Carnton Plantation and mansion which was commandeered by officers of the Confederate States Army as a hospital during the Battle of Franklin II. Hicks creates a cast of characters including the Madame of the mansion and soldiers wounded during this monumental battle. The novel has been critically acclaimed as comparable to other literary works on the Civil War including "Gone with the Wind," and "The Killer Angels." [2]
In December 2005, the (Nashville) Tennessean named him ‘Tennessean of the Year’ for the impact The Widow of the South had on Tennessee, heritage tourism and preservation.
Hicks' second novel, A Separate Country (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette/North America) was released on September 23, 2009.

The novel is set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War. It is based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army--and one of its most tragic figures. Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever. At Gettysburg, he lost the use of his left arm. At the Battle of Chickamauga, his right leg was amputated. Starting fresh after the war, he married Anna Marie Hennen and fathered 11 children with her, including three sets of twins. But fate had other plans. Crippled by his war wounds and defeat, ravaged by financial misfortune, Hood had one last foe to battle: Yellow Fever.
Hicks' essays on regional history, southern material culture, furniture and music have appeared in numerous publications over the years. Hicks now writes op-eds for The New York Times on contemporary politics in the South.
He travels, throughout the nation, speaking on a variety of topics ranging from Why The South Matters to The Importance of Fiction in Preserving History to Southern Material Culture to A Model for the Preservation of Historic Open Space for Every Community and a host of other topics.
Hicks' first book, a collaboration with French-American photographer Michel Arnaud, came out in 2000: Nashville: the Pilgrims of Guitar Town (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).
He is co-editor (with Justin Stelter and John Bohlinger) of a collection of short stories, A Guitar and A Pen: Short Stories and Story-Songs By Nashville Songwriters (Center Street Books/Hachette, North America) was released in April, 2008. (From Wikipedia)

Author’s website:
http://www.robert-hicks.com/

Interview With the Author:
http://www.bookpage.com/0509bp/robert_hicks.html

Reviews
In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company…and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years before, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more. In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause. Known throughout the country as "the Widow of the South," Carrie McGavock gave her heart first to a stranger, then to a tract of hallowed ground - and became a symbol of a nation's soul. The novel flashes back thirty years to the afternoon of the Battle of Franklin, five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War. There were 9,200 casualties that fateful day. Carrie's home - the Carnton plantation - was taken over by the Confederate army and turned into a hospital; four generals lay dead on her back porch; the pile of amputated limbs rose as tall as the smoke house. And when a wounded soldier named Zachariah Cashwell arrived and awakened feelings she had thought long dead, Carrie found herself inexplicably drawn to him despite the boundaries of class and decorum. The story that ensues between Carrie and Cashwell is just as unforgettable as the battle from which it is drawn. The Widow of The South is a brilliant novel that captures the end of an era, the vast madness of war, and the courage of a remarkable woman to claim life from the grasp of death itself. (From bookbrowse.com)
A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact.....An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh. (From Kirkus Reviews)

The author gracefully yet forcefully enters the psychology of these various individuals, each one representing a certain side in not only the battle at hand but also in the overarching context of nation rending. And, almost strangely yet certainly beautifully, from all this carnage emerges a love story that transcends time. Bill Ott (From Booklist)

A wonderful novel...Hicks has perfected the art of mixing fact and fiction, and turned the book into a sustained, profound meditation on what it means to live, to love, and to die. Congratulations to Robert Hicks - he has written a moving and magnificent novel. (By author Tracy Chevalier)

Best in Books January 2011

Queen of the Night by J.A. Jance

Bestselling author J.A. Jance will be at the Southeast Regional Library on Thursday, February 3 at 11AM in the Assembly Room. The program is provided courtesy of the Friends of the Southeast Regional Library & Perry Branch. Ms. Jance will be discussing her newly released mystery book, Fatal Error. Copies will be available for purchase.

A book discussion for Jance’s current book, Queen of the Night, will be held in the Southeast Regional Library staff conference room on Thursday, January 27 at 10AM. Copies for check out are available on the Southeast Regional Blog display table near the new fiction area at the front of the library or the book is available for request through the library website at www.mcldaz.org. Registration is not required for either event, so grab a friend or two and join this opportunity to discuss a current novel and learn more about the author who uses Arizona as a backdrop for many of her stories.


Publisher's Weekly Review

Dedicated to the late Tony Hillerman, Jance's brilliant fourth suspense novel featuring former homicide detective Brandon Walker and his wife, novelist Diana Ladd (after Day of the Dead), spans some 50 years, from a murder in 1959 in San Diego to a rash of killings in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz., in 2009. Interwoven with these crimes are legends of the Tohono O'odham Indians (aka the Desert People) and the lives of such contemporary Native people as Lani Walker, Brandon and Diana's adopted daughter. Jance's masterful handling of a complex cast of characters makes it easy for the reader to appreciate the intricate web of relationships that bind them across generations. The title refers to the night-blooming Cereus, a desert plant that blooms once a year and is of great symbolic importance to the Tohono. Jance, perhaps best known for her J.P. Beaumont series (Fire and Ice, etc.), has crafted a mystery that Hillerman would be proud of and that her fans will love. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

J.A. Jance Website

Beth's Blog for December

Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
By Aimee Bender

SUMMARY

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother-her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother-tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden-her mother's life outside the home, her father's detachment, her brother's clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender's place as "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language" (San Francisco Chronicle).

About the Author:
Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction.

Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and many more places, as well as heard on PRI’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. She reviewed two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into 16 languages.

She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.
(from the Author’s website.)

More on the Author:
http://today.uci.edu/iframe.php?p=/Features/profile_detail_iframe.asp?key=32

Author’s website:
http://www.flammableskirt.com/home.html


REVIEWS:

Library Journal Review
Rose Edelstein is nearly nine when she first tastes her mother's feelings baked into a slice of birthday cake. Her "mouth was filling up with the taste of smallness.of upset." Meals become an agony for Rose, and she subsists on junk food from the school vending machine. When her mother begins an affair, Rose can taste that, too. Her brilliant older brother, Joseph, seems to have some type of autism spectrum disorder, though it is never named. Rose grows up and manages what she now considers her food skill, discerning not only the city of production but also the personality and temperament of the growers and pickers. She also draws closer to her father, finally understanding his prepossessions. This is an unusual family, even by California standards. VERDICT Bender (Willful Creatures) deconstructs one of our most pleasurable activities, eating, and gives it a whole new flavor. She smooths out the lumps and grittiness of life to reveal its zest. Highly recommended for readers with sophisticated palates.

Publisher’s Weekly
Taking her very personal brand of pessimistic magical realism to new heights (or depths), Bender's second novel (following An Invisible Sign of My Own) careens splendidly through an obstacle course of pathological, fantastical neuroses. Bender's narrator is young, needy Rose Edelstein, who can literally taste the emotions of whoever prepares her food, giving her unwanted insight into other people's secret emotional lives-including her mother's, whose lemon cake betrays a deep dissatisfaction. Rose's father and brother also possess odd gifts, the implications of which Bender explores with a loving and detailed eye while following Rose from third grade through adulthood. Bender has been called a fabulist, but emerges as more a spelunker of the human soul; carefully burrowing through her characters' layered disorders and abilities, Bender plumbs an emotionally crippled family with power and authenticity. Though Rose's gift can seem superfluous at times, and Bender's gustative insights don't have the sensual potency readers might crave, this coming-of-age story makes a bittersweet dish, brimming with a zesty, beguiling talent.

NPR review and patrons comments:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127475483

Interview with Aimee Bender:
http://www.sycamorereview.com/2010/09/aimee-bender-on-the-burden-of-sensitivities-an-interview/

Best in Books December 2010

Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson

Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson is a fun book to grab when you need a break from busy December activities. This mystery was the 2004 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Amateur Sleuth novel, If you haven’t read any of the books in the Goldy Bear series, readers will not have a problem starting with this 12th book. Goldy Schultz is a Colorado caterer who prepares scrumptious meals for her clients, but inevitably gets in the middle of a crime that requires her meddling to discover the real villain. Recipes mentioned during the novel can be found in the back of the book to provide an added bonus during your holiday cooking

Publishers Weekly
*Starred Review* The divine diva of the culinary cozy returns with a crime novel that will have fans of Goldy Bear Schulz, caterer and caffeinated sleuth, cheering as they race for the nearest pastry shop. The 12th carb-laden installment of Goldy's adventures (Chopping Spree, etc.) offers as its main course a toothsome corpse - du jour: Goldy's abusive ex-husband, Dr. John Richard Korman ("the Jerk"), whose shenanigans have annoyed a long-suffering Goldy and enlivened Davidson's series since its debut 14 years ago. After Goldy arrives at her new catering center to prepare a memorial luncheon, she's attacked; when she comes to, she discovers that her kitchen is full of spoiled food and overrun with mice. She immediately suspects her longtime nemesis Korman, who's out of prison after serving less than a year for aggravated assault and living lavishly in Aspen Meadows with Sandee Blue, his "fifty-fourth conquest" - a young stripper, according to his other ex, Marla, Goldy's entertaining sidekick. When Korman attends the almost-sabotaged event, he argues with Goldy over their son, Arch. Shortly afterward, he turns up dead alongside Goldy's missing gun, making her a prime suspect in an aromatic brew of murder and mayhem. This marks a turning point for Davidson, as the elimination of Korman provides a much needed jolt to the series. Her latest noir-flavored cozy may attract new readers to a sleuth who feverishly cooks through any crisis and whose recipes are now gathered at the back of the book. (Warning: do not read on an empty stomach!) Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Reviewed September 13, 2004) (Publishers Weekly, vol 251, issue 37, p61)