I really wanted to love this book.

I definitely loved Heads You Lose, the wonderfully fun and zany novel that Lisa Lutz wrote with her ex-boyfriend. (Read my review here.) And I have to say that Trail of the Spellmans is pretty entertaining, for the most part. It’s a continuation of The Spellman Files, a series of novels about a rather dysfunctional family detective agency. Isabel Spellman, a 30-something year old detective, working for the family agency, is in the middle of several cases. Her father has a secret. Her mother is behaving bizarrely and no one seems to comment on it. Her brother and sister are feuding and neither will tell Isabel what the problem is. Her boyfriend’s mother is coming to visit and her tiny niece, Sydney, calls everything a banana. It’s enough to push anyone to a breakdown.

In this book, the cases they’re working seem chosen to play up the family drama. Her mother is taking classes — suddenly, indiscriminately studying everything from pottery to Russian literature, every day of the week, and no seems to find that remarkable except Isabel. She and her sister, Rae, are shadowing clients who may or may not be involved in illegal dealings — possibly with each other — and her parents seem very reluctant to talk seriously about the conflicts of interest they are facing. And perhaps most importantly, Isabel and her boyfriend, Henry, are facing serious problems. (I would think that the biggest problem is that she refers to him as Ex-Boyfriend #13, even though they’re still together, but that seems par for the course.) Everything seems gearing up for a giant collision.

Some of this book is laugh-out-loud funny. There is some very clever writing and I would probably try another Lutz novel, perhaps an earlier Spellman “document” (this book is Document #5). Some of it plods along, particularly in the middle. I found the family a little too precious, a little too forcibly funny, and that, of course, takes all the fun out of it. When Isabel is hiding from her boyfriend, she goes to her brother, David. But she doesn’t ring the doorbell and ask for asylum; she sneaks in a window. It just seems forced. There is quite a big deal about the secret that has caused a falling-out between David and Rae, and while the secret is definitely sufficient to cause a family feud, it just seemed so totally implausible that it sort of spoiled the fun.

All in all, it wasn’t a total loss, but I’m not convinced this was the best of the Spellman books. I am still open to trying an earlier book, but not as eager as I was right after Heads You Lose.

My copy of Trail of the Spellmans was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

This Will Make You Smarter is a challenging book that leaves you with a lot to think about. The essays are short — some  shorter than a single page — that cover interesting scientific concepts, new and old ideas to help us think about the world.

The founder and publisher of the online science salon, Edge.org, John Brockman, does  a great job editing this collection, turning more than 100 essays on a wide range of topics into a coherent manuscript that works its way across the spectrum. You start out talking about one concept and smoothly work your way into another — it definitely kept me interested in topics that could potentially be pretty dry.

There are too many important concepts to cover them all, but there were a few that I found really interesting.  First, there was an interesting article by Douglas Rushkoff* called “Technologies Have Biases.” This passage was thought-provoking:

“We are free to use any car we like to get to work — gasoline, diesel, electric or hydrogen-powered — and this sense of choice blinds us to the fundamental bias of the automobile toward distance, commuting, suburbs and energy consumption.”

And that’s true — we buy a hybrid because it’s “greener” and we are pro-environment, but the very fact of buying a car shows a preference that we don’t even think about.

I also found “The Focusing Illusion” by Daniel Kahneman** a fascinating idea:

“Marketers exploit the focusing illusion. When people are induced to believe that they ‘must have’ a good, they greatly exaggerate the difference that good will make to the quality of their life.”

Think about that and apply it to our current political climate. When politicians convince us that a particular issue is important, no matter what the issue, we attach an unreasonable importance to specific laws or measures related to that issue, and the difference they will make in the government. It has given me a different slant on the political commercials I have seen.

There are also a number of essays on risk and uncertainty, and just how bad humans are at understanding risk and dealing with it. The chance that we might be killed in a terrorist attack is almost infinitesimal, but we have spent a huge amount of money, time and effort protecting ourselves against the threat. On the other hand, we are far more likely to die in our car on the way to the grocery store, and yet many people don’t even bother with seat belts or regular brake checks.

All in all, this was a terrific, thought-provoking read that can be applied to so many aspects of modern life. I think that anyone who picks this up is going to find topics that interest them and cause them to rethink their usual assumptions. I would love to buy a copy for all of the teachers I know and challenge them to use some of these concepts in their classrooms! (There is a great essay on the importance of understanding which concepts are easy to teach and which ones are harder to grasp — they could start with that.) I will definitely be passing this on to some thoughtful friends.

My copy of This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking was an Advanced Reader copy, provided free of charge.

* Douglas Rushkoff, Media theorist, documentary writer and author, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for the Digital Age

**Daniel Kahneman, Professor Emeritus of psychology and public affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; recipient, 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Happy Wednesday — it’s time for some new words! You know how this works – share a few words from your current book that you had to look up, then head over to Bermuda Onion’s Weblog to learn some new ones.

I wasn’t sure I was going to have time to post, as the trip to Sheffield has been keeping me pretty busy. (Also, my colleague seems determined to show me all of his favorite haunts. ) But I do have a few words this week from This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking:

1. Teleologically -  Belief in or the perception of purposeful development toward an end, as in nature or history

“In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle saw the world teleologically - rain falls because water wants to be lower than air; animals (and slaves) are naturally subservient to human citizens.”

2. Comity – An atmosphere of social harmony

“Squabbling colleagues or relatives agree to swallow their pride, take their losses, or lump it and enjoy the resulting comity rather than absorbing the costs of continual bickering…”

3. Proxemics - The study of the cultural, behavioral, and sociological aspects of spatial distances between individuals.

“To understand how our cosmopolitan and multigendered cities work, we need a proxemics of urban sexuality.”

There are probably going to be a few more words from this work, but this gives you a flavor. Some of the subject matter is dense, but the essays are short — some are less than a page — and flow well, one to the other, making for really fascinating reading.

What new words did YOU learn this week?

Carry the One has a dramatic beginning: it’s the evening of Carmen and Matt’s wedding and they are surrounded by their family and friends. It’s a non-traditional, very Bohemian wedding at a farmhouse owned by Alice, Carmen’s sister, and Jean, both artists. In the wee hours of the morning, several party guests — drunk, stoned and sleepy — are making their way home when there is a tragic accident. A young girl is killed on a dark country road. One guest will take the blame, but they will all carry the guilt.

For the rest of their lives, the accident will play in the background — their relationships, their careers, their friendships are all tested and changed. Their lives are already intertwined: Carmen’s sister, Alice, and her brother, Nick, were in the car when the accident happened. Nick’s girlfriend, Olivia, was driving. Alice’s new lover, Maude (sister to Matt, the groom) was in the car, as was Tom, Jean’s married lover. (If you’re confused, don’t feel bad. It took me a while to sort them out in my head.) Even Carmen and Matt, who weren’t in the car, carry the guilt of letting them all drive off, knowing they weren’t sober enough to be behind the wheel. That little girl becomes a constant presence in their lives. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”

I think the most tragic story belongs to Nick. He was a wild kid with an equally wild girlfriend, but that all ended the night of the wedding. After that, it was just a slow spiral — although he still has flashes of brilliance and you always believe he can pull himself out. Alice’s life is a perfect example of  ”be careful what you wish for.” Carmen tries so hard, but she just doesn’t get it when it comes to relationships. I found myself wanting to sit her down for a stiff drink and some straight girlfriend talk. But that’s life, isn’t it? Things never seem to turn out the way you planned. It’s all ups and downs with long stretches in between and nobody ever really lives happily ever after. I was proud of Olivia; she had the hardest road of all, I think, but the peace she found came at a great price.

I really loved this book. I got caught up in these stories so easily and I was surprised by how invested I felt in their stories. Even when I wanted to smack them in the head or shake some sense into them, I wanted things to turn out well. It’s really a sign of great writing, I think, when you feel all wrapped up in the story. At the same time, I found myself afraid to turn the pages, because you just knew that some stories would end in tears — and they did, quite literally, for me.

My copy of Carry the One was a review copy, provided free of charge.

 Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is intriguing as soon as you look at the cover — it took a second or two for me to realize the little girl on the cover (her name is Olive, by the way) is floating. Floating. And such an odd expression on her face! She made me want to open the book and turn the pages.

This is the story of Jacob Portman, an unremarkable young man with a very remarkable grandfather. All through his childhood, Grandpa Portman told wonderful stories of his own boyhood — in particular, of his time on a magical island full of the most unusual children. There was a girl who could fly. There was a young boy who could lift boulders over his head and all sorts of children with peculiar skills and talents. The island itself was like a paradise, always sunny, always beautiful, and the children played and lived happily ever after.

Of course, eventually Jacob began to grow up and he began to recognize his grandfather’s stories as fantasies. His father is able to fill in some of the blanks about Grandpa Portman’s tragic young life — the loss of his parents, his time in an orphanage — turned into the fantastic stories he shared with Jacob.

But what if those stories were all real?

The story is a little predictable, but the strange and spooky photos give it a marvelous twist. Jacob grows up and learns a lot about himself and his family. Some of the things he learns are not pretty, and he doesn’t always do the best job coping with them, but you really root for him to get his act together.

What I loved the most about this book is that the photos are real. From the author’s notes:

“The pictures in this book are authentic, vintage found photographs, and with the exception of a few that have undergone minimal postprocessing, they are unaltered. They were lent from the personal archives of ten collectors, people who have spent years and countless hours hunting through giant bins of unsorted snapshots at flea markets and antiques malls and yard sales to find a transcendant few, rescuing images of historical significance and arresting beauty from obscurity…”

Real pictures of floating girls and invisible boys! What is more cool than that? I can understand why these eerie photos inspired a novel — they could inspire several different types of novels, in my opinion. With no history behind them, the stories you could invent for these spooky images are endless.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a quick read — it’s meant for young adults, which isn’t my usual genre, but I definitely enjoyed it (even when the story got a little predictable). I picked this copy up for my personal library and I am definitely going to enjoy sharing it with others.

Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home with Books. To participate, post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken then leave a direct link to your post in the Mister Linky. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don’t post random photos that you find online.

This week, I am traveling (go figure!) and so I’ve got a few pics from the road. First, I found the button! As you might recall from an earlier Snapshot, there is a great light show in the tunnel at the Detroit airport. The only concern is that the flashing lights can cause problems for people with certain medical conditions, so there is a button you can press to suspend the light show. It’s pretty well hidden, but I found it:

I haven’t pressed the button, but eventually, I will.

And next, here’s my desk at the hotel. I was working late at night on my website, getting some things loaded for the next day. Trying to keep the site up-to-date on the road can be hard, but it does help me keep things organized.

This is my first Bailey Weggins mystery! Bailey is a fun character — a true-crime journalist, based in Manhattan, writing for a celebrity magazine and getting seriously involved with a hot new boyfriend. There’s all kinds of material there for fun stories, and Kate White delivers the goods in So Pretty It Hurts. Bailey’s boyfriend is out of town (and Bailey isn’t sure she believes his story about it) so she takes off with her good friend Jessie. Jessie has the hots for music mogul Scott Cohen and Scott has invited her and a friend to a weekend house party at his retreat in the woods. It’s exactly what you’d expect: a rock star, a couple of models, a couple of journalists…and maybe a murderer.

This was a quick read — lots of fun, interesting characters and just enough introspection to keep it balanced. Bailey is trying to sort things out with her boyfriend, Beau Regan. She says that part of the reason she accepted Jessie’s invitation is that she is punishing Beau for being away. That’s crazy! If you get invited to a weekend retreat with rock stars and models, you go! Doesn’t matter where your boyfriend is, if you ask me.  But Bailey ends up snowed in with a dead model, a depressed friend and someone is lurking in the halls late at night. And once she gets home, it gets even worse.

If you like models and celebrity gossip, you’ll enjoy this book. It’s a fun mystery with a great setting and a lot of humor. Bailey’s work as a journalist gives White a lot to work with and it’s a world Kate White knows well – she is the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine! There’s the mystery to solve, her job to save and she definitely needs to work on her relationship. The storylines wrap up nicely and I look forward to seeing what Bailey does in her next book.

If you’re looking for another mystery series to add to your library shelves, this is definitely one to check out. So Pretty It Hurts is number six in the line-up, so I’ve got a little reading to do to get caught up. My copy of So Pretty It Hurts was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

In Burnedby Thomas Enger, Henning Juul is a veteran investigative reporter, returning to work after a series of personal tragedies left him changed and fragile. An apartment fire killed his son, ended his marriage and left him physically disfigured. He is struggling to deal with his fears and a case of PTSD that has left him unable to work for more than two years. A lot has changed in the world of internet news, he feels shaky, his sources and contacts may have moved on, but  he needs to prove himself, prove that he can still do the work — even if his new partner is dating his ex-wife. He’ll have the perfect opportunity: a gruesome murder committed in one of the city’s public parks. As Juul is drawn deeper and deeper into the case, both the danger — and the potential payoff — increase.

I have to admit that about 50 pages in, I almost set this aside. Early on, Juul is almost too fragile and too pathetic. It was painful to read. Here is a man who lost everything — his wife, his son, his career — and he feels responsible. He’s having a hard time adjusting to the regular rhythms of life. But I wanted to see what would happen to him and in the end, I’m glad I stuck with it.

The story is set in Oslo, Norway, which meant that the geographic references, and a lot of the cultural ones, were tough for me. There was some unfamiliar slang, but for the most part, it was easy reading. It was certainly an interesting look at the changes in the news business that have happened in just a few short years! Juul has to relearn his job while he is rushing to cover a major news story. His methods are very different from his showier colleague, but in the end, you know he’s going to be more successful.

Juul’s story is heartbreaking and you can’t help but root for him. Once I got past my frustration with Juul, it was easy to get sucked into the mystery. A young college student has been murdered — buried up to her neck and stoned to death in a tent set up in the park. The most obvious suspect, her Pakistani boyfriend, has some shady acquaintances. Her college friends, her colleagues in the film school and even her instructor all look a little suspicious. There are rumors that the murder was an honor killing, which has the potential to stir up a great deal of racial unrest. Juul is not going to have much time to get his sea legs back on this case, because he may be the next target.

I have been reading a lot of Scandinavian authors recently. Burned is Enger’s first novel, but I definitely look forward to reading the follow-up. With the cliffhanger that dangles at the end of Burned, how could I miss it!

My copy of Burned is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Joe O’Loughlin is an unlikely hero. He’s a psychologist with a failing marriage, serious health problems a troubled relationship with his daughter. He’s in a holding pattern, not sure if he’s looking for a safe place to land or just circling until he runs out of fuel and crashes. He makes some bad choices in Bleed for Me, but it’s hard not to root for him.

Joe gets a late-night call from his estranged wife, Julianne. Sienna, his daughter’s best friend, showed up at the door, covered in blood, and then ran away. Joe finds her — wet and shivering, silent, eyes flat and staring. By the time she comes around at the hospital, Joe will have the news: her father, decorated police officer Ray Hagerty, is dead. And it looks like Sienna killed him.

Maybe I’m a little burnt out on family drama right now. This is a pretty good mystery — there’s a lot of suspense, a good lead-up to discovering the killer, some misdirection and at the center, a troubled man, struggling against some pretty long odds. I just didn’t find it as moving as I had hoped.

Sienna is a difficult character for me, although that probably means Robotham has done an excellent job of writing a teenager. Most of the time, I want to whack her on the back of the head with something. She is that special teenage blend of stubborn and pathetic; she desperately wants help but she is dead-set against doing anything to help herself. Even when it becomes clear that she is in real danger — danger of being railroaded for her father’s murder and possibly a target of the real killer, if she’s not the real killer — she is unwilling to tell the truth, unwilling to give Joe anything to work with. He’s a psychologist, he understands what he’s dealing with, but getting through to her is a long, slow process.

Mr. Parkinsons is a main character in this novel, without having a single line. Joe O’Loughlin suffers from Parkinson’s Disease; it is largely at fault for the changes that lead to his marital problems. It makes it difficult for him to continue his work, it makes it difficult for him to get through the day, in one case it gets him arrested, when an officer sees his jerky, disjointed movements and draws the wrong conclusion. It has clearly changed Joe’s outlook on life and as much as his wife loves him, I can see how it would be difficult for her.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, even if I wasn’t swept away by it. It’s a good mystery, interesting characters and a main character you can root for. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have teenage kids, because I found the teenagers in the book the most difficult to deal with, even as a reader.

One small note of warning: as I mentioned in an earlier post, there is one small instance of rather extreme animal cruelty in this book. I struggled over mentioning it, but I think many readers will find it disturbing. It is moderately graphic, and if that bothers you, I suggest skipping it. It has a definite place in the storyline, but you will see it coming, I think. Simply turn a couple of pages and go on; the disturbing details do not come up again after that point.

My copy of Bleed for Me was a review copy, provided free of charge.

There is something I find really intriguing, at least in novels, about a female criminal. Their motivations seem so different from most male criminals — it never seems to be just about greed or power. It’s something more subtle. In The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb, Margot is a promising young journalist. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that the lavish lifestyle she can glimpse from her assignments is just out of her grasp…but there are ways to extend her reach.

Margot meets Lawrence Billings, a man who is an expert at non-verbal communication. He teaches seminars on body language and reading a person’s face and what their physical attributes can tell you about their personality. Margot is eager to learn, maybe a little desperate, and she is able to use the things she learns from Lawrence to turn more men into her victims. She’s not a killer, but she still destroys their lives. She is beautiful and cunning and ruthless and she takes them for everything they’ve got. Even Lawrence is swept under, in his own way, as she turns his techniques against him.

This is an interesting read, told in a sort of disjointed way, with bits and pieces of the stories of the main characters told moving backwards and forwards in time. There is Margot — her troubled childhood, her ruthless nature and the destruction she leaves behind. There is Lawrence, who is interested in teaching Margot because he senses she is someone special. He eventually pays the price for getting involved with her, even though he tries to do the right thing. There is John Potash, lured into Margot’s web and faced with the destruction of his life and family. And there is Dan France, the mystery man at the hospital, who may decide to throw it all away…

I enjoyed the mystery and the way the reader had to piece the story together. I enjoyed the characters, for the most part. I have to say that I found the subject matter a little harder to swallow. I absolutely believe that you can tell a lot about a person from their body language and their non-verbal cues, but face reading goes well beyond that. Do I really believe that you can tell that someone is an obsessive-compulsive by the indentations at their temples? That people with few friends have short eyebrows or that people who seek attention have deeply cleft chins? Or that you can tell the details of my childhood from my hairline?

“The hairline is like a graph of life during adolescence.” He traced the laser dot along the ridges of her hairline. “And this jagged edge right here, well, that probably means our friend Margot’s adolescence was less than smooth sailing, am I right?”

“You’re right,” she said, speaking intentionally loud enough to be picked up by the overhead mike. “Like many people I had a difficult, um, transition to adulthood.”

No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that you can tell anything about my personality from the shape of my ears, because I do not believe that everyone with similarly-shaped ears has certain traits in common. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the book while I was reading it.

However, I have to admit that, writing this review only a few days after finishing the book, I find that it didn’t really stick with me. I enjoyed it, recommended it to a friend of mine who I think will also enjoy it very much, but I didn’t remember the names of the characters and I had to double check several details as I was thinking this through. Some books are just like that — a pleasure while you read them, but one that fades quickly once you’re done.

My copy of The Face Thief was a review copy provided free of charge.