Ballantine Books

K.A. Merson: The Language of the Birds

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Debut

This novel really lets the author’s freak flag fly, in the best way.  It definitely is not a book for every reader – it will help if you enjoy puzzles, cryptology and maps, but even in you don’t, the story and the characters make the read worthwhile.  The main character, Arizona, is a neurodivergent 17 year old who has just lost her father.  As the book opens, she and her mother are headed to the ghost town of Bodie, California, to scatter her father’s ashes.

She and her mother and Arizona’s dog, Mojo, have arrived in the family Airstream, and when they get there, Arizona tells her mother she’d like some time to herself.  When she goes to meet up with her mother at the appointed time, however, her mother is nowhere to be found.  Hours later, Arizona at last reports her mother’s disappearance to a park ranger who tells her to wait at her campsite. read more

Ben Machell: The Unusual Suspect: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Day Outlaw

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Character is key in almost any book.  This was brought home to me recently when I read and really enjoyed The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell after having encountered several other true crime books that simply didn’t satisfy.  The trend today is to serve up an unsolved mystery and slather it with internet speculation and/or trial transcripts.  there may be a few satisfying crime books, fact or fiction, where you never find out who dun it, but it’s certainly very few.  I won’t name names, but if you write a book about say, a person who evidently either killed themselves or was murdered in a flamboyant fashion, it’s important to know their character to decide which of the two were more likely, something a journalistic “just the facts” approach doesn’t provide. read more