Cathy Ace

Cathy Ace is the BC Bestselling and Bony Blithe Award-winning author of the Cait Morgan Mysteries, and the brand new WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries.

Her fifth Cait Morgan Mystery, The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes, was published in May 2015, her sixth, The Corpse with the Diamond Hand, will be published in October 2015.On July 1st 2015 her first WISE Enquiries Agency Mystery, The Case of the Dotty Dowager, was published and the second, The Case of the Missing Morris Dancer, will be published in the UK in October 2015, and in the USA and Canada in February 2016.

Recently I asked Ace about what she was reading. Her reply:

I have a reading problem – I can’t read mysteries when I am writing, and mysteries are my favorite type of book to read! At the moment I am writing Cait Morgan Mystery #8, The Corpse with the Ruby Lips (due out in the fall of 2016), so am reading the following:

Newspapers: I read online rather than in paper format. I like to keep up with local and national news, as well as broader Arts news. I also try keep in touch with my roots back in Wales, too. On an intermittent basis (but usually at least weekly) I read the local newspapers here in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, the Canada-wide Globe and Mail, NY Times, and the South Wales Evening Post. I also think of the BBC News website as a “newspaper” and like to keep an eye on international events there.

Non-fiction: I can happily read non-fiction when I am writing and am finally finishing a book I’ve had for many years. Rich: The Life of Richard Burton by Melyvn Bragg was published back in 1988, though I only got my copy in the 1990s. It’s horrifying to me that this book has been on my “To be finished” pile for so long! Needless to say, upon choosing it as my summer read I had to go back to the beginning of the book and start again. Why this book? First of all, I’m Welsh – Richard Burton was a Welsh man who, as Melvyn Bragg says in his Foreword “…led many lives. In his one span he soared and fell, triumphed, failed and fought on…” and I am always transfixed by his presence on the screen. His hedonistic ways and multiple marriages aside, he had a great talent, and I find his voice to be almost mesmerizing, especially when he reads the work of Dylan Thomas, the poet from my home-city, Swansea in South Wales, whose words roll off his tongue with a magic that can only be felt when the accent is just right. I’m also enjoying (re-)reading it because my new series of books, The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries, are set in Wales, and I’ll be off to visit my mum and sister there next month. I miss them, and it, terribly, so this is a good way to “stay connected”. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the glamour-couple during the 1970s when I was growing up, and his achievements showed this Welsh-girl that no dream was beyond her grasp. I’m also doing my best to record and dig out DVDs of as many of his movies as I can: Under Milk Wood, Cleopatra, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Where Eagles Dare, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Night of the Iguana, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Becket, and even The Last Days of Dolwyn are waiting to go…but, first, there’s the garden to be seen to!

Gardening: I am a keen gardener, and that means working on the garden at all times of year. It just so happens we’re in the middle of a big project which involves clearing a good amount of land and planting trees. My preference is to plant for color, with the eye of an impressionist – so we plant different colors of trees and shrubs close to each other so the colors mingle as the years pass. I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it works for me! However, you still have to be aware of the plant’s preferences, and you can’t rely on a tiny label for that sort of information so I’m constantly referring to two volumes to check on habits, soil/sun/water preferences etc. The Ward Lock Encyclopedia of Gardening by Anita Pereire (with a Foreword by the delightful Alan Titchmarsh, who expresses views about gardening with which I agree) and splendid photography by A. Descat is full of little Post-It notes so I can find things easily, and its layout is truly useful. The other book is The Firefly Encyclopedia of Trees edited by Steve Cafferty. We moved to this house with five acres of land about a dozen years ago – we now actively garden about three of those five acres, so these books have been put to good use.

Cooking: I love to eat, which means I also love to cook (my Welsh Canadian professor of criminology character, Cait Morgan is a “gourmand rather than a gourmet” and I am much the same!). Where we live, in a rural area, the Four H movement is active; youngsters raise and show animals through the year, then sell them either just before, or in an auction at, the annual Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) held each August. This means we can buy meat we know has been raised without the use of hormones, steroids or anti-biotics, often in organic conditions, and certainly with the full, loving attention of a young person who can use the money to put towards their future in some way (one girl we bought pigs from for several years took her “earnings” and underwent training to become a scuba-diving instructor, which is now her profession as she travels the world). This is the way we buy our pork, lamb, and beef. Pig: A Passion for Pork by Johnnie Mountain is a super book (clearly not geared toward vegetarians!) which serves as a source of inspiration throughout the year. Grilling on the back deck through the summer means it’s easy to get stuck in a bit of a rut as far as meat-dishes are concerned, so I seem to use the book more now than in the winter. I haven’t developed the expertise to make my own sausages yet, but maybe next year…

Visit Cathy Ace's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Levine

Laura Levine is a former sitcom writer whose credits include The Bob Newhart Show, Laverne & Shirley, The Jeffersons, The Love Boat, Three’s Company, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. As an advertising copywriter, she created Count Chocula and Frankenberry cereals for General Mills. Her work has been published in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

In her latest (and favorite) incarnation as a mystery novelist, she has been an IMBA paperback bestseller and winner of the RT Book Reviews award for Most Humorous Mystery.

Levine's new novel is Death by Tiara.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

After being sucker punched by Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, I have been an Unreliable Narrator junkie, devouring books like The Silent Wife, The Girl on the Train, and Disclaimer. I love being surprised by a story. It’s same thrill I used to get when, as a child, I watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV, with those surprising twists at the end. After all these years, I still can’t resist them.

But there was one book I recently read without an unreliable narrator that absolutely blew me away. It’s called Moving Day, by Jonathan Stone, about an elderly man who loses all his possessions, swindled by a psychotic con artist who preys on the elderly, knowing they’ll never fight back. Only the hero of this book fights back. And what a battle. I was utterly engrossed every nail-biting step of the way.

Taking a break from all the sturm and drang above, I was delighted to return to Anne Tyler. Her latest book, A Spool of Blue Thread, examines the multi-generational lives of a Baltimore family. All her books seem to examine the lives of a Baltimore family. But she’s so adept at making her characters come alive, it’s always a joy to discover her latest clan. This book is no exception. Tyler’s an amazing writer, full of insight, humor, and compassion. I’m an avid fan.

Visit Laura Levine's website.

The Page 69 Test: Killing Cupid.

My Book, The Movie: Death by Tiara.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nina George

Nina George works as a journalist, writer, and storytelling teacher. She is the award winning author of 26 books, and also writes feature articles, short stories, and columns. Her novel The Little Paris Bookshop spent over a year on bestseller lists in Germany, and was a bestseller in Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands.

Recently I asked George about what she was reading. Her reply:

Preamble I: I need reading as others need air or G&Ts before noon or a room on their own. Meaning: I used to read a lot, simultaneously and totally different stuff; and all this in a very vivid way. I am a type of book-eater. So: what I read this week will be a total different sneak peak inside my daily reading as it was a few weeks ago (The Shock of the Fall, or Passage from Connie Willis or Winston, a book for children from Frauke Scheunemann about a girl exchanging bodies with a tomcat).

Preamble II: I learned everything from books: being brave, how to love, and that dying is democratic. Books are my best friends in any manner, and I am totally with my protagonist Jean Perdu, who said: "What you read is more important in the long term than the man you marry." (Except if your husband is a writer. Like mine).

For it is from books that humans learn to be human. They learn courage, love and compassion, and about other cultures. They learn to get angry, to behave themselves and to fight; they learn to think for themselves. Readers are the saviors of the world; they make it warm, loving, understanding, tolerant and complex. On the contrary, TV people, video gamers and non-readers make the world grey, poor, dull, simple, dumb and indifferent.

Preamble III: My mother tongue is German and my writing English is very jolly.

Answer: The nights I spend with the horclings from Peter V. Brett's High-Fantasy-Epic Das Lied der Dunkelheit / The Warded Man, because I need to feed my inner child. In the ladies room I like to be surrounded by ladies, too – at the moment with Sara Gran and Dope. Gran's ultrarealistic writing is steely and dangerous like a boner knife. In the living room is my Karte der Wildnis waiting for me to discover the last savage places in our digitalized and surveyed world. The wording is different to Gran's vodka-clearness – it is palatable, poetic, pétillant.

My all-time-talisman-books – every writer has some of them, writing goddesses and door-openers to the inner writing room – is every novel from Mister metaphors-never-read-before Jon Kalman Stefansson, from Mister simple speech, high emotions Stephen King, and the Ensemble-Buildings of Mrs Anna Gavalda. I do not know how anybody can survive without reading them.

Visit Nina George's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Little Paris Bookshop.

The Page 69 Test: The Little Paris Bookshop.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brendan DuBois

Brendan DuBois is the award-winning author of numerous novels and more than 120 short stories. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations.

His latest Lewis Cole mystery is Blood Foam.

Late last month I asked DuBois about what he was reading. His reply:

At this point in time (Tuesday, June 23rd) I'm reading an autobiography, Bringing the Thunder: The Missions of a WWII B-29 Pilot in the Pacific by Gordon Bennett Robertson Jr. Er, and why is that? Well, I'm working on a rather lengthy short story (about 10,500 words right now) about a B-29 tail gunner in World War II, and I want to make sure I get the details right. A lot of time writers can get away with a little bit of surfing on Google, but to actually get the details of B-29s and their missions, I've had to order and read four autobiographies. No complaints here, I love reading history, and like I said, I wanted to get the details right.

Visit Brendan DuBois's website.

My Book, The Movie: Blood Foam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Sneed

Christine Sneed's third book, the novel Paris, He Said (Bloomsbury USA) was published on May 5, 2015.

Along with being named a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times book prize in the first-fiction category, her first book, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry won AWP's 2009 Grace Paley Prize, was awarded Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis prize, and was chosen as Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association in the traditionally published fiction category. Portraits was also longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story prize and was named one of the seven best books of the year by Time Out Chicago. Sneed's second book, the novel Little Known Facts, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for best adult fiction 2013, was named one of Booklist's top ten debut novels of 2013, and best new book by a local author by Chicago Magazine.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Sneed's reply:

I just finished Andre Dubus III’s soulful, beautifully written memoir Townie. Corny as this will probably sound, I can’t see myself ever forgetting this book. Dubus’s rendering of his and his three siblings’ upbringing in tough, economically declining mill towns outside of Boston is searing, sometimes tragic, but most of all, a remarkable testament to Dubus’s (and by extension, his siblings’) ability to transcend a childhood and adolescence marked at times by serious hardship. He examines with arresting insight a number of dualities, in particular, his predilection toward physical violence even as he began to realize that the world is in desperate need of more kindness and mindfulness. In this amazing book, Dubus III is viewing the first four decades of his life through the prism of mature adulthood, and with the seasoned artistry of a brilliant writer.

And two other books that I read not long ago and really admired: Mark Wisniewski’s novel Watch Me Go – this man couldn’t write a dull sentence if he tried. I first read his work in The Best American Short Stories 2008, and loved “Straightaway,” the story that year’s editor, Salman Rushdie, chose to include in it. Wisniewski’s new novel, coincidentally, grew out of this BASS story. Watch Me Go is literary thriller that deftly takes on the themes of race, identity, love, and socioeconomic disparities in America. There’s also quite a bit of horseracing. Wisniewski has a number of other books all worth reading, among them the short story collection, All Weekend with the Lights On.

Anne Calcagno’s novel Love Like a Dog was such a pleasure to read too. Calcagno is a fine, generous writer and storyteller. This novel, set in contemporary Chicago, concerns a boy and his father, and a dog they rescue, along with the tension the father’s criminal activity causes in their lives. It’s coming-of-age story that bears similarities, now that I think of it, to the other two books I’ve included in this post. I’m also looking forward to reading Calcagno’s first book, a story collection, Pray for Yourself, soon.

Visit Christine Sneed's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Roe

Andrew Roe is the author of The Miracle Girl (Algonquin Books). His fiction has been published in Tin House, One Story, The Sun, Glimmer Train, Slice, The Cincinnati Review, and other publications, as well as the anthologies 24 Bar Blues (Press 53) and Where Love Is Found (Washington Square Press). His nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, and elsewhere.

Recently I asked Roe about what he was reading. His reply:

I’m going through one of those fickle phases where I’m reading more than one book, bouncing back and forth, simultaneously enjoying the variety and freedom while also feeling a little weird and unfaithful, like I can’t fully commit.

So here’s some of what’s currently on my reading rotation: Jonathan Evison’s This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, which will be published in September by my publisher Algonquin Books and chronicles the life of the 79-year-old title character, who re-evaluates her life in the wake of her husband’s death (I wasn’t planning on reading this one yet, but I picked it up this past weekend and couldn’t stop); Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America, which puts a historical and cultural lens on Dylan and his work, focusing on key points in his decades-long career; and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which came out a few years ago but I somehow haven’t managed to read until now, even though Whitehead is one of my favorite writers.

The last book I finished was The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor (another Algonquin author). You might know Pitlor as the series editor for Best American Short Stories, but she’s also an accomplished novelist. The Daylight Marriage is her second novel, and it’s a devastating excavation of a stalled marriage as well as a gripping page-turner. I dare you to read the first chapter and not keep going.

Visit Andrew Roe's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Miracle Girl.

The Page 69 Test: The Miracle Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan David Kranz

Jonathan David Kranz maintains dual identities as a marketing copywriter and a fiction writer. His debut novel, Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea, launched in early June. He lives in Melrose, MA with his old lady and two young adult daughters.

Recently I asked Kranz about what he was reading. His reply:

Middlemarch

At close to 800 pages and with its imposing Masterpiece Theater air, George Eliot’s Middlemarch has long been a novel from which I’d successfully kept my distance. But all the talk around Rebecca Mead’s book, My Life in Middlemarch, caught my ear and piqued my curiosity.

I’m glad it did. Middlemarch has so many virtues (many of which Mead avidly articulates in her study), but what stands out for me is that Eliot takes seriousness seriously. Her principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydgate, hunger for significant work, hers in a vague calling to greater social good and his in medicine. In the thickets of Middlemarch convention, their ambitions stick out like exotic flowers, and there is no shortage of naysayers eager to heap ridicule on our heroes’ failings.

Fail, they do. But while Dorothea and Lydgate make foolish choices, Eliot is careful never to paint them as fools. Our respect for them grows even as their worlds, and their ambitions, contract. Virginia Woolf famously applauded Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and I suspect it’s because the novel doesn’t merely accept ambivalence, but celebrates it, offering a vision that distinguishes the achievement of a meaningful life from the clutching at a significant one.

Tokyo Heist

Diana Renn’s YA novel Tokyo Heist has a mystery, has a romance (or two), and has an angst-ridden teen, much as we expect from a YA novel. But it also has a protagonist, Violet, who falls in love with a culture, the art and traditions of Japan. In too many stories, location is merely a backdrop to the action, a scrim that can be dropped or lifted at will to lend verisimilitude to the action. But in Tokyo Heist, Japan serves as a key character, perhaps even the leading agent of change, that helps Violet gain confidence and take her first steps toward claiming her talents as an artist. For my money, too many YA stories focus exclusively on sexual and/or emotional awakening; Tokyo Heist makes intellectual awakening exciting, and gives it a rightful place in the journey toward adulthood.

All the Light We Cannot See

When others zig, I like to zag--contrariness is a big part of my vanity. When a book is widely applauded, I’m prepared to put it down. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See has been praised from many quarters but for once, I’m joining the chorus.

You might think that there can’t possibly be anything more to say about World War II. But Doerr reminds us that the deep reflection, the one that invites intimacy with history—a way to touch, see, smell, feel and hear a traumatic event—is always fresh, that it always reveals something new.

In the novel, a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, cannot see the destruction she senses around her. The orphan German boy, Werner Pfennig, uses radio to hear an alternative to violent Nazi propaganda. In this novel of convergence, the story moves back and forth in time to eventually connect on the island of Saint-Malo, where allied forces are bombing one of the last German strongholds on the Atlantic coast.

Much of the story hinges on the fate of a priceless diamond that may or not be cursed. But when Marie-Laure and Werner finally cross paths, the enduring power of the diamond becomes insignificant, and the fleeting transience of their connection becomes the lasting thing of importance. Theirs is the story that stays with us.

Visit Jonathan David Kranz's website.

The Page 69 Test: Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria Shorr

Victoria Shorr is a writer and political activist who lived in Brazil for ten years. Currently she lives in Los Angeles, where she cofounded the Archer School for Girls, and is now working to found a college-prep school for girls on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Shorr's new novel is Backlands.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

Funny you should ask—I am on a Coleridge bender at the moment, and it's all I want to talk about. It started this winter, when someone mentioned Alathea Hayter's Voyage in Vain, about Coleridge traveling to Malta to escape home—and opium. Something caught my imagination—I knew little of Coleridge beyond what we all know, "Kubla Khan," the interrupted opium dream. I picked up the book, and found myself immediately drawn—as were so many of Coleridge's contemporaries—into a life of seething, half-thrilling, half maddening poetic passion, and the era of the Sublime—almost a voyage itself, far away from our own "Get Comfortable" lives and times. I then went on to the two volume biography by the brilliant Richard Holmes—I'm on Volume Two, but holding out hope that it will last forever. If it doesn't, I'll turn to Susanna Hecht's Scramble for the Amazon, about Euclides da Cunha, the great Brazilian writer, who chronicled a tragic popular uprising in the Backlands there in the 1890s, helped map the Amazon, and lived to be killed, Brazilian-style, in Rio, by his wife's lover.

Visit Victoria Shorr's website.

The Page 69 Test: Backlands. 

My Book, The Movie: Backlands.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carola Dunn

Carola Dunn is the author of many mysteries featuring Daisy Dalrymple, as well as numerous historical novels. Born and raised in England, she lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Dunn's latest novel is Superfluous Women, the 22nd Daisy Dalrymple mystery.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I've been travelling, driving from Oregon to Southern California and back. The perfect reading for the motel evenings (and also for staying in a house with young children) is Discover magazine. I've been a subscriber since it was called Science '80. Every issue is full of fascinating stories about what's going on in the world of scientific research, from archeology, anthropology, and medicine to cosmology. I always read it from cover to cover, though I usually don't understand the physics, even at this popular level.

The latest issue but one has an article about an astrophysicist who has come up with a hypothesis about dark matter: that it doesn't exist. His theory, based on a development of Newtonian gravity, would do away with the clash between Einsteinian gravity and quantum mechanics. I don't claim to fully comprehend the arguments but that sounds to me like a good idea! The great thing about Discover is that it doesn't bombard me with math which I wouldn't understand at all.

The latest issue has a large section of news about green energy—with lots of good news about new ideas and inventions and improvements in old technology. Sometimes I almost think we will take climate change seriously enough to do something about it.

Before I started my travels, I was rereading some of Michael Innes's Appleby mysteries. They vary enormously, from very literary (he was a lecturer in English at Oxford University) to melodrama to outright farce. He had a way of creating quirky characters and weird plots that I enjoy, as well as comparatively straightforward murder investigations. I particularly like the books where Appleby's artist wife Judith is involved.

Since reaching my destination, I've read a young adult book, The War that Saved My Life. It's a good story and good characters, but as usual with American writers setting books in England, the author hasn't quite mastered the differences between US and UK English, particularly the historical aspect (WWII). If asked, I always advise US writers of UK books to use an American protagonist, which makes the inevitable mistakes less glaring. That wouldn't have worked in this case but the author could have had an actual real live Brit do a read-through.

And now I'm reading Sara Hoskinson Frommer's cozy mystery, Her Brother's Keeper. I don't read many contemporary mysteries, but I do enjoy her series.

Visit Carola Dunn's website and blog.

Coffee with a Canine: Carola Dunn and Trillian.

The Page 69 Test: Heirs of the Body.

The Page 69 Test: Superfluous Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Solovitch

Sara Solovitch is a journalist, a mother, a gardener, a voracious reader, a hiker, and a really good cook. She's also a classical pianist, which is what led her to write Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright. The memoir chronicles her yearlong journey to understand and overcome a lifetime of performance anxiety, beginning with a childhood full of disastrous performances and ending with an hour-long concert the day before her 60th birthday.

Recently I asked Solovitch about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m in the middle of Francine Prose’s novel, Bigfoot Dreams. Like all her books, it’s sharp-elbowed and wickedly funny. Prose has a way of commenting on the culture that makes you look at things in a whole new light. In this book, she tells the story of a smart and cynical reporter whose job it is to make up stories for her sleazy tabloid newspaper. One day, she makes up a story that turns out to be true – truer than she ever could have imagined. And that’s the story that ruins everybody’s life. This is a book about a midlife crisis in which every life choice is questioned. It makes you squirm and laugh.

I recently finished the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Sometimes boring, sometimes compelling, it was always un-put-downable. It’s like making a new friend and feeling this great camaraderie because you not only like the same books and music; you eat the same food, you both bite your fingernails, and you keep saying “Me too” whenever they admit something about their life. I’ll keep returning to his books for their no-holds-barred honesty. His voice grabs me by the throat and doesn’t let go until, after nearly 600 pages, he’s finally done.

I’ve just started reading Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, by Orlando Figes, an amazing writer of Russian and Soviet history. His book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, was one of my all-time favorite books. It recreated the terror and repression of life under Stalin with descriptions of nine people living in a single room, accounts of 116,885 Party members executed or imprisoned in a single year – it was all revelatory. And the Russians loved Stalin so completely that many of them couldn’t conceive that the abuses could be blamed on him. Many of them actually wrote to him, sure that he didn’t know what was happening, appealing to him for help like some loving father. It was beyond poignant! I suspect that Natasha’s Dance will be equally fascinating.

Visit Sara Solovitch's website.

My Book, The Movie: Playing Scared.

--Marshal Zeringue