Another book featuring Serge A. Storms, the almost-likable serial killer and amateur historian of Florida.

Serge, his coke-addict, stripper girlfriend, Sharon, and his stoner sidekick, Coleman, rent a house on Trig­ger­fish Lane, Tampa. Their landlord is trying to drive out the few remaining homeowners on the block, so that he can bulldoze it for condos.

It's quite the neigh­bor­hood. a former mil­lion­aire who likes to test-drive expensive cars; the psychotic Little League coach with a pit bull; the student party house; the South American death squad guy in hiding; and Jim Davenport, …continue.

Lee Donne agrees to housesit for her absent-minded grand­fa­ther. Soon, someone is trying to scare her out of the house in Eugene, Oregon. Buried deep in the house, she discovers why: old photos of young men lynching a black man. One of those men is now running for President as a third-party candidate.

Lee goes on the run and takes her story to a newspaper. She decides to hide in plain sight, à la The Purloined Letter, and heads to New Orleans, posing as a newspaper pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Fairly en­ter­tain­ing and in­tel­li­gent thriller.

Last week, we watched the TV adaptation of Hogfather, which got me to re-read the book. The book is a lot funnier. Pratch­et­t's written de­scrip­tions don't translate very well to the screen.

The Hogfather is the Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus: a large, jolly fat man who delivers presents to children on the longest night of the year. The Auditors, celestial bu­reau­crats who take a dim view of the messiness of human existence, decide to have the Hogfather killed. Death takes it upon himself to deliver the presents to children instead, while setting his …continue.

The G8 conference is about to open in Gleneagles, Scotland, during the first week of July 2005. Hundreds of thousands of anti-glob­al­iza­tion activists are heading to Edinburgh to protest.

Edinburgh cop, DI John Rebus, is about the only police officer in Britain who's not on G8 duty. He's been sidelined because of his propensity for pissing off his superiors. Instead, he gets involved in two different in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

A Labour MP plunged to his death from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. Suicide or murder? Why does Rebus keep …continue.

For centuries, carefully selected historians have mys­te­ri­ous­ly received a book that contains only a picture of a dragon holding a placard that says, Drakulya. Three gen­er­a­tions of one family have followed the trail of those books: the narrator as a teenager in the 1970s, her graduate student parents in the 1950s, and her mother's father in the 1930s.

The trail has led them from the Pyrenees to the Balkans and Istanbul, from libraries to monas­ter­ies to remote mountain villages. The narrative moves back and forth across the three gen­er­a­tions, as …continue.

Third in the Walker Papers series of urban fantasies.

Joanne Walker discovered six months ago that she's a powerful shaman, and she's not happy about it. She's an officer in the Seattle Police Department and a former mechanic, and being a woo-woo shaman does not fit with her self image. She's contrary and stubborn and her de­ter­mi­na­tion not to accept her new state leads to big problems.

The people that she's close to are going into comas. In her blundering ignorance when she first came into her powers, she un­wit­ting­ly awakened …continue.

Rae Newborn has struggled with depression for decades. The death a year ago of her second husband and their young daughter drove her to attempt suicide. Now she's moved to Folly, a small island in the San Juans that she inherited from Desmond Newborn, her grand­fa­ther's brother.

Desmond went off to the First World War and came back broken by shell shock. He bought Folly in the 1920s and built a house with his own hands, then dis­ap­peared after the house burned down.

All alone on Folly, Rae starts …continue.

In the Seventies and Eighties, Tom Sharpe was a best­selling author in Britain, pumping out a dozen hilarious satires, marked by their savagery. His particular targets were apartheid, the British class system, and political cor­rect­ness. Then he dried up, producing only three books in the last twenty years.

Wilt in Nowhere is his fourth book about Henry Wilt, a lecturer at a third-rate community college, married to the formidable Eva and father of four ghastly quadru­plets. Eva takes the girls to America to stay with her rich uncle in Tennessee. Henry …continue.

The latest book from the 1632 series; this one is the long awaited sequel to 1633. The premise of the series is that through some mysterious alien event, a small West Virginian town is sent back to Germany in 1631, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, utterly changing the course of history. The Americans ally themselves with King Gustav Adolf of Sweden, forming the United States of Europe.

The authors adeptly juggle a series of plots that were set in motion in the earlier book. The …continue.

Roddy Doyle has visited Paula Spencer twice before. First in The Family, a BBC TV serial; then in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Ten years on from the last book, Paula is a recovering alcoholic who only recently crawled out of the bottle. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger have passed her by: Paula continues to clean Dublin offices and houses for a living. Her youngest two children are still at home. Jack is fine but Leanne is heading towards alcoholism herself. Her other son, John Paul, is estranged and …continue.