In Karma’s a Killer, yoga instructor, Katie Davidson, agrees to teach “doga” or yoga for dogs at a local animal rescue’s fundraiser, and chaos ensues. First, the doga class goes very wrong when someone insists on bringing Alfalfa the rabbit into the class filled with dogs. Then, animal activists stage a violent protest at the event. While Katie struggles to maintain her sense of inner peace, one of the activists is found dead, and a woman named Dharma, who claims to be Katie’s long-lost mother, is arrested for the murder. With her high-strung German Shepard companion, Bella, Katie sets out to discover the truth.
Tracy Weber provides a host entertaining characters. Katie is all too human and humorous in her struggle toward enlightenment in the midst of her investigations. Even Weber’s secondary characters are memorable. For example, Dale is a former high-powered lawyer who now hides behind the persona of a goat-farmer with a southern accent. Furthermore, Weber has a refreshing eye for humorous detail from the unusually appropriate mugs doled out by the local barista to Bandit, the terrier, toilet-paper terrorist. This second installment in the Downward Dog cozy mystery series is simply fun at its best.
(Reviewed in exchange for a copy of the book in Manhattan Book Review.)
One of Santiago Torres’ closest friends, Jasper Willoughs, dies in a fall from a Georgetown University dormitory. Although ruled a suicide, Santi, a Jesuit priest and a Gonzaga high school headmaster, knows his friend too well to believe that. Jasper, a fellow priest finishing his doctorate on the early history of the Jesuit order, had been excited to meet Santi because he had found something that would cause him to rewrite his thesis. Soon, Santi receives mysterious clues from The Odd Fellows Society, a Georgetown club for history and trivia geeks for whom Willoughs created an annual scavenger hunt. Is Santi crazy, or did Willoughs somehow threaten a merely rumored, Georgetown secret society called the Stewards? Either way, Santi becomes caught up in a real life scavenger hunt around the nation’s capital. To complicate matters, his partner is Abby Byrnes, the woman he has secretly loved for eighteen years, and his brother, with whom he shares a complicated history and no affection, is the FBI agent on the case. Can they figure out the clues before Santi becomes the next victim to die under mysterious circumstances?
The Song of Hartgrove Hall is the story of Harry Fox-Talbot. In alternating chapters, the reader sees Fox as a young man and as an elderly man. The young Fox reveals the struggle of the Fox-Talbot brothers to save their dilapidated ancestral home—Hartgrove Hall—and Fox’s undeniable passion for composing music, collecting folk songs, and his brother’s girl, Edie Rose. In contrast, the elderly Fox struggles with the death of his beloved wife, his inability to compose more music, and the discovery that his young, difficult grandson has an amazing gift for music.
In The Evening Spider, two young mothers live over a hundred years apart in the same house. In 2014, Abby Bernacki, a history teacher on maternity leave, begins to hear strange sounds through her baby daughter’s monitor at night. At the same time, Abby increasingly recalls her college roommate, who Abby found dead. Sensing something off in the house but afraid to talk to her husband, Abby begins to research while becoming increasingly erratic. She discovers that a criminal lawyer, his young wife, and their baby daughter lived in the house in 1887. The young wife, Frances Barnett, becomes obsessed with two famous murder trials until her husband eventually commits her to a lunatic asylum.
Robert Hendricks’ father died at a young age, leaving Hendricks with his mother “who feared the worst” and a mentally-ill uncle. While serving in World War II, Hendricks was injured but cannot remember what occurred. At the same time, he met and lost the great love of his life, never to form another close attachment. By the novel’s opening in London in the 1980s, however, Hendricks has become a successful psychiatrist and author, although he feels a sense of disconnection. One day, Hendricks receives an unexpected invitation to visit a neurologist living on an island of France who knew Hendricks’ father and admires Hendricks’s work. This doctor encourages Hendricks delve into his past, but to what conclusion?
In Submission, Michel Houellebecq posits a future France in which the new Islamic party gains power through an alliance with the Socialist party. The Islamic party’s primary concerns are with education and the birth rate. The party ends compulsory education at age twelve, severely limits women’s access to higher education, and provides a “Muslim educational option” at all levels. The party also emphasizes the primacy of the family unit, even in economics, while sanctioning polygamy and veiled dress for women. Through these means, the party grows and indoctrinates new generations with the goal of gaining control of an expanded E.U.
How would you like to lessen your risk for many chronic illness by living a fulfilling life and eating delicious food with friends and family? If so, The Mediterranean Family Table is for you. Much more than a mere cookbook, the authors provide a solid, scientific basis for following this lifestyle and detailed guidelines for food and exercise at every stage of life from infants, children and teens to middle and advanced age. The one-hundred and twenty-five recipes included in this text are mouth-watering and fairly uncomplicated to prepare. Ricotta pancakes, nut butter smoothies, stuffed mushrooms with spinach, orecchiette with zucchini and ricotta salata, and Chilean sea bass with tomatoes, capers and olives are but a few examples. Furthermore, the authors clearly know whereof they write. Acquista is a doctor board certified in pulmonary and internal medicine who learned this lifestyle as a child near Sicily, while Vandermolen has over a decade of experience in academic medical institutions as a medical writer. If this book has a drawback, a few more pictures of the dishes would have been nice. However, this book should not be missed by anyone interested in a practical, yet delicious guide to maintaining the Mediterranean diet lifestyle.
In November of 1938, a young, Jewish man named Walter survives a horrific, life-changing tragedy in Germany. Fleeing Europe as a lost soul in need of healing, Walter boards the wrong ship and travels to India. Discovered by a scholar who recognizes his promise, Walter arrives in the United States a strange and disheveled young man in Indian garb. At the scholar’s insistence, Walter enrolls in a Jewish Seminary. There he meets Sol, a promising rabbinical student who lacks Walter’s insights, and Sol’s fiancee, Rosalie, the daughter of a free-thinking rabbi. These three form a love triangle that endures for decades.