Lily is a cleaning woman in the small town of Shake­speare, Arkansas. A cleaner with a traumatic past, who erects high walls around herself and works out at the gym and the dojo fervently. One morning, she opens up the gym to find a body­builder whose larynx has been crushed by a laden barbell. Tensions are already high over the murder of a young black man, and racist literature starts appearing everywhere, followed by a bombing at a black church. Lily falls in with a private detective who is trying to get …continue.

Dark Fire is set in the summer of 1540, a few years after Henry VIII es­tab­lished himself as the head of the Church of England. Matthew Shardlake is a London lawyer, who takes on a case defending a young woman against the charge of murdering her 12-year-old cousin. She refuses to speak and will be "pressed" by heavy weights until she enters a plea—or dies. In exchange for a temporary reprieve, Shardlake agrees to take on an in­ves­ti­ga­tion for his sometime patron, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's first minister. An alchemist claims to have discovered the …continue.

This book is blurbed by Dan Brown on the front cover; happily, The Dante Club is a much better book than The Da Vinci Code and Pearl is a much better writer than Brown.

The poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, their publisher, J.T. Fields, and the historian George Washington Greene are completing the first trans­la­tion of Dante Alighier­i's The Divine Comedy ever to be published in America. It is Boston in 1865, just after the Civil War. Two prominent Brahmins are murdered …continue.

This is the second mystery featuring Nora Gavin, an American forensic pathol­o­gist living in Ireland. The body of a ritually murdered Iron Age man is found preserved in a bog, and Gavin is called in to examine the body. Shortly thereafter, another similarly murdered body is found in the bog, but this one is wearing a wristwatch.

Hart writes lean, clear prose, with believable characters, and a not-completely improbable plot. Her Irish characters sound and act like Irish people, rather than refugees from a Lucky Charms outtake.

My main …continue.

Ed Loy has returned to Dublin after 20 years in Los Angeles to bury his mother. An old friend asks him to find her missing husband. This sends him into a viper's nest of corruption among property developers and upwardly mobile gangsters, as he confronts the demons of his past.

Loy, after his long, self-imposed exile, finds a very different Dublin to the one that he left. The economic miracle known as the Celtic Tiger has wrought huge changes over the last 15 years, cat­a­pult­ing Ireland from a country that …continue.