2010 Top Reads

Since I kept track of every book I finished this year, it was easy to pick out the ones I liked best. I know I haven't forgotten the absolutely great one I read in February because I wrote it down. And these include books I happened across this year. Not published this year. Or written this year. This was the year I discovered Ruth Rendell, so my taste evolves constantly. Suggest somebody I haven't read. I look for new authors all the time.

1. The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Absolutely the best book I read this year. I could not put the book down. She employed the "if this one would only talk to that one" technique in an excrutiatingly brilliant way. The bloodbath of an ending rivals Hamlet. She captures the self-involved world of the teen ager so well. It is riveting.

2. The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill This book should have been breathtakingly frustrating. All of the plot lines of the book end without resolution. But it certainly left me eager for the next book. The plots advanced the characters that I adore like Simon's sister, Cat. The first in this series, Various Haunts of Men, didn't engage me as much as this one. Making Simon aloof from everyone in that one meant I had no interest in him. Or sympathy for him. I was right there with him about Diane. But wanting to giving him a swift kick as Cat did. Do Something, Simon. Anything.

3. Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny In a year that I hadn't read the previous two books, this would have been at the top of the list. Gamache is an absolutely excellent character who needed some weaknesses exposed. And this book does that. This series is fast becoming my favorite. I still think the first one in this series, Still Life, is one the most beautifully written books I have ever read. The villagers of Three Pines are really the stars here.

4. Friday Nights by Joanna Trollope This book had all the permutations of women's lives. All the life choices modern women make to try to exist in the world are represented by the characters in the book. Single women, married women with children, single women with children, widowed women with children, career women. And the painful and glorious role men play in those strategies. An excellent look at the problems and joys of children and work and home.

5. Simisola by Ruth Rendell I read every single Wexford book this year. I picked the sad story of Simisola because when I see the title of this book, I remember the story instantly. I can be reminded of the story in the others, but this resonated with me. Wexford has a misstep in this book and comes all over with liberal guilt, as he should. The racial overtones and implications in this book raise questions for the reader as well. I'm sure I'd have done what Wexford did. And that is sobering.

6. A Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris No this is not the vampires. This is my personal favorite series written by True Blood's author. Harper Connolly can tell where bodies are buried and knows how they died. She is hired by private people to either find the body or tell them more about the body. And her family situation is complex in that modern way. Her half sisters live with her aunt and uncle who hate her. She travels with her "brother" who is really not her brother--he was raised with her when his dad married her mom. So the half sisters are related by blood to each of them. Um yeah. The plots here are ingenious in presenting situations that require her "talent."

7. Stork Raving Mad by Donna Andrews These books are so funny and so outlandish that a reader should be put off. But somehow it all makes sense. And you follow the intrepid Meg while more and more people camp at her house and she becomes more and more pregnant with twins. Of course a murder occurs with all the other mayhem. But somehow keeping her mother from decorating the nursery is on Meg's list more than the murderer. I wish Donna wrote several books a year. Everyone needs to laugh this much.

8. Death Message by Mark Billingham Billingham represents the token male on my list. I read Bloodline as well, but the story of the murderer and the cell phone is better. Thorne trying to work this out while being just this side of a Luddite is priceless. His usual sidekicks are there, making it difficult for him. Great cop story.

9. The Fixer-Upper by Mary Kay Andrews As much as I miss this author being Kathy Hogan Trochak, these fluffy Southern tales are fabulous for a light boy meets girl or rather girl meets boy. Her heroines always learn something and fall in love. This book is no exception. I love the work on the house almost as much as the romance. But I was happy this was actually work that crapped on the heroine instead of a cad. Her previous book, Deep Dish, I didn't like as much because it traversed well-traveled ground. This was different.

10. Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin My favorite Gail Godwin of all time is Father Melancholy's Daughter and I recommend it as well. Unfinished Desires is about a girl's school, and how changing alliances and friendships affect the lives of one class of girls. And what effect that all has when their daughters go to the school. In less skillful hands, the dual timeline and changes in narrator could leave a reader bewildered. Godwin weaves together mother and daughter stories with ease. Truly awesome.

The most surprising thing to me after re-reading my list of books was that I read 90 books this year and only seven were by men. Ouch. And two of those were the same man (Billingham). Men don't seem to be doing much better this year--first three so far are also by women.

Review at new Harrogate festival blog You're Booked

The Deputy – Victor Gischler

BY ANN, ON NOVEMBER 18TH, 2010

Reviewer: David Speer

The Deputy by Victor Gischler, Tyrus Books

I’m tempted to call Victor Gischler a Renaissance man. In at least two ways. Maybe more.

One. He’s the writer of all sorts of things. His debut novel, and one of my favorites, “Gun Monkeys,” was nominated for the Edgar Award. You may be more familiar with some of his other novels — the ones with the clever titles like “Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse” and “Vampire a Go-Go.” He also writes comic books, Deadpool and X-Men and others. There’s Twitter talk sometimes about a screenplay. And if you do follow him on Twitter there’s the occasional feature called “Ask Gischler” where he offers to answer any and all questions. Note I said he offers to answer them. I’m not sure he ever answers anything.

Two. When I said Renaissance man, I was thinking more of a typical man who lived during the time of the Renaissance. The kind of man whose life was nasty, brutish, and short. One who learns that life has a noir underbelly. Who rolls life over on its back and says, “Come over here and look at this. Is that cool or what?”

The kind of man who could write “The Deputy” (Tyrus Books). The kind of novel that could make you to want to go out and clean up a town.

“The Deputy” is about Toby Sawyer, who the local police chief lets work as a part-time deputy so that Toby can make something of himself. Toby is a deputy in Coyote Crossing, Oklahoma. Take Washington D.C. out of the competition (after all, it’s in a class all by itself), and Coyote Crossing could be in the running for the title of the most corrupt town on Earth.

At its core, the story of “The Deputy” is a western movie of the type we’ve all seen or heard hundreds of times. It takes place in a town that needs one good man to clean it up. But Toby is not Shane of the movie or Marshal Matt Dillon of TV’s Gunsmoke. He’s not Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. And he’s surely not Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Because Toby sure doesn’t set out to clean up a town. He just wants to love his son, have a good woman by his side — or with him in bed — and find the missing body of Luke Jordan so he can go home and get some sleep.

But Toby is a guy who can’t manage to do one thing right. Or the easy way. So, naturally, when he goes about cleaning up Coyote Crossing, he does it in a really messy way. Given that chance to make something of himself, Toby goes out of his way to screw up. Given the seemingly dead-easy task of guarding the freshly killed body of one member of the town’s most notorious trouble-making family, Toby wanders off to have sex with his girlfriend. His girlfriend who is not his wife and not the mother of his child. Who probably is not going to be the good woman by his side by the end of the book. Or even by the end of the night.

And believe it or not, it goes downhill from there.

Gischler’s genius is that he makes us want good things to happen for Toby. No matter how stupid he is. And he is. No matter how violent he is. And he is. No matter how much of a screw up he is. And he is. We like Toby. We root for him to win. We want him to clean up Coyote Crossing, even though Gischler has shown us over the course of 249 pages that this ass-end-of-nowhere town is not worth cleaning up. We want Toby to win even while we’re questioning whether what he’s winning is really worth having.

It might just take a real Renaissance man to make us want that.

Louise Penny

I finished Bury Your Dead quite a while ago. I've been hemming and hawing around about talking about it because it is so complex and difficult to talk about without ruining the book for other readers. I grasped completely the brouhaha on Louise Penny's blog when someone blurted something out. It's difficult not to. Let's just say that I peaked ahead on this one to reassure myself about one of my favorite characters.

There are four stories going on at once in the book. Some are told in flashbacks, some in historical documents, some direct drama. I thought from the blurbs I had read that this was going to be similar to Daughter of Time. It does have that element to it, but it so much more than that.

The book really turns Gamache into Sherlock Holmes or even better, Nero Wolfe. His detecting is almost all done through reading documents, even in the present day murder. He does meet and talk to people, but not as much as a usual Three Pines mysteries. He does very much let other people be his "Archie". And his solving of the Champlain mystery is indeed straight out of Josephine Tey.

I adore all the minor characters in these books and was relieved when they came back in with such vigor. The use of Clara as a fifth columnist was hysterically funny. And of course any time that Ruth is around is fun. The poignancy of Ruth and the duck is an absolutely stunning element. It's just bizarre, but wonderful.

And this use of the minor characters is the reason I love these books. There are comic elements in all the books, but at the heart, something deadly serious is going on. There is a murder and it's not funny. And it is usually dangerous. Louise Penny knows how to combine all the elements of life in a story about a murder investigation.

And although I am absolutely character driven, this book, and by extension all the Three Pines books, is also technically brilliant. I normally hate weaving around from one story to another and letting out bits of story drop by painful drop. I might in less skillful hands have called the story about the raid sandbagging. Because the characters know the whole story--it just isn't revealed all at once. But the pacing and all the distractions of the three other stories kept me hanging. on. every. morsel.

A fabulous denouement and almost a cliffhanger at the end of the book. But a character one, not a plot one. What will happen next? The last book left me stunned. This book left me in despair at how long it will be until the next one comes out. How will she dodge the Cabot Cove conundrum and find another way to kill someone in the eensy town? Will everyone welcome Gamache back with open arms? And what complicated technical problem will Louise Penny set for herself? I can't wait.