Chris Bohjalian, SECRETS OF EDEN

A literary murder mystery, set in a Vermont small town, in which George strangles and Alice and then kills himself with a gun (or so it seems). The story is told from the points of view of the Baptist pastor of the town (Stephen Drew), the investigator (Catherine), Stephen's new girlfriend who writes about angels (Heather) and whose parents enacted a similar murder/suicide drama, and Katie, the daughter of Alice and George who tells the truth at last. It's well-written and suspenseful; each of the four voices sounds different. (So often multiple points of view sound too much alike.) My only gripe is that Catherine felt like a "stereotypical" woman investigator, tough-talking, sensitive underneath, and willfully wrong about what really happened. But a good read.

James M Tabor, BLIND DESCENT

Think "Journey to the Center of the Earth" times two. The split account (although the first, Bill Stone's adventure, gets many more pages than the second) of two men (and their crews, some of whom are women) exploring supercaves. The American Bill Stone explores Cheve Cave in southern Mexico; and the Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk goes into the freezing supercave Krubera in the Republic of Georgia. Both are trying to find the deepest cave on earth. For those who liked "Into Thin Air" or books of that ilk, this is a good one. The accounts of near drowning (and drowning) in silt-filled water thousands of feet below the surface gave me nightmares.

Debra Dean, THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD

This enjoyable debut novel gives us two stories in one: the first is a story about a woman named Marina who worked at the Hermitage to wrap and ship paintings out of the Leningrad museum as the Nazis approached the city. From the title (a reference to the many Madonna paintings in the museum), I expected this to be the main storyline. But I came away feeling (in a good way) that it is not; this novel is about memory and how the pieces of past and present fit together, in much the same way the vehicle and tenor (though those categories can be problematic) fit together in a metaphor. The second story is about Marina, now in her eighties and living in the US, experiencing Alzheimer's. Dean has written the narrative in temporally disjointed "fragments"--bouncing from the events of 1941 to present day and back to the short lectures about artists and paintings that Marina would give as a docent. In 1941, another Hermitage worker, Anya, explains to Marina a memory trick: when she had to memorize the entire Law of God, all the Roman emperors and their reigns, etc. she created a memory palace, where the rug, or door, reminded her of x or y, so she could remember it. Marina begins to create her own memory palace, to remember the palace (Hermitage) and which paintings were in which rooms. (This is why I feel the book plays with notions of memory, metaphor, and literal meanings.) In the end, when Marina goes missing (like a painting), her family searches for her, and we readers (privy to her memories the way her children and her husband are not) understand the logic of what she's done.

Judy Blundell, STRINGS ATTACHED

Another very good, beautifully written YA novel from the writer of WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED, with the same sort of high stakes and rich emotion. 17-year-old Kit Corrigan from Providence goes to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer and actress. Providence and New York are linked through her--because she connects Billy Benedict, the angry boy she loves, with his father Nate, who is a mob lawyer and longs to make amends by giving Kit an apartment in New York when she desperately needs it (though there are "strings attached"), with her father who once was Nate's bootlegging partner, and with her aunt Delia who was once Nate's mistress in that very apartment. Her past is full of lies and bribes, deaths and sudden disappearances that she doesn't know about or understand, and this book slowly unwinds that past until she does.

Rebecca Sklootk, THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

There's been so much praise for this book that I don't feel I need to add any. It's a triple narrative: the story of a black woman with cervical cancer whose cells were taken without her knowledge by a (white) researcher at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1900s; the story of the field of cellular research, including its uneven development; and the story of a persistent journalist trying to write Lacks's story with erratic, emotional help from her (impoverished, dysfunctional) family. Told with compassion and in a straightforward voice, it's a page-turner. (Who knew the story of some cervical cells could be such a compelling read?) Plenty of complexity and many gray areas.

Scott O'Dell, THE BLACK PEARL

A great upper-middle-grade novel. Otherworldly, set in Baja California. The protagonist is a boy named Ramon Salazar whose father runs a fleet of boats that hunt for pearls. Ramon goes off on his own to find a huge black pearl that seems to have evil powers--an ability to encourage people's ambition, desire, and greed. Great reading for the tween set.

Jennifer Egan, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

This novel is brilliant and sharp-edged and so clever I felt like my neurons were firing faster when I was reading it. It's sort of like a double serving of Starbucks latte, particularly chapter 9 by Jules Jones who is brilliant and manic. (Each chapter is focalized through a different character, with a distinct voice, either in third or first person.) Even her most incidental descriptions are cuttingly original. It's never ideal to take an author's words out of context because they never sound as clever but here are a few, of many: Sasha had commandeered two seats at a low table, a setup that made [her uncle] Tom feel like an ape, knees jammed under his chin. * [I wondered] how my ex-wife had managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind.
However, I found myself having a hard time caring about these characters--the pathological shoplifter, the schizophrenic who throws a fish onto his old friend's desk, the uncle who takes money from Sasha's mother to find her in Italy but instead spends all his time looking at art, the famous music exec who cheats on his wife with young girls hoping to make it big in the music industry. Maybe this is supposed to be a Fateful Warning to those of us who might live to see the world in the last chapter, where everyone texts instead of talks and global warming has turned New York City hot in January. Maybe it's because I'm coming off of Julia Glass, but I feel like there is very little softness, or compassion, or forgiveness in this book. Maybe that's the point.