The Broken Window (Jeffrey Deaver)

A typically exciting example of the Lincoln Rhyme series, full of Deaver's usual twists and turns. A fiendishly clever serial killer uses the kind of data collected online about each of us not only to track his victims, but to frame others for the crimes. He is only caught after targeting Rhyme's cousin to take the fall for his latest killing. This is as much a warning about issues of cyber-privacy as it is a murder mystery.

A Taste of Fame (Linda Evans Shepherd & Eva Marie Everson)

This was an impulse selection at the library, and it was a mistake. Nothing against the book or the authors, but it's not for me. A group that started out as a bible study class morphed somehow into a catering club (not any kind of a formal business - women are just good at food, you know?). Through an unlikely set of circumstances they wound up as contestants on a national TV cooking contest. They are sure to win, collecting $1 million (for the church capital fund, of course), becoming closer together and resolving their personal issues in the process. I gave it about 40 pages before moving on. I found it too "chick-lit" - too much about girls hanging together, worried about husbands and kids and boyfriends, and clothes and jewelry and food.

Ordinary Injustice (Amy Bach)

Bach describes problems with America's criminal justice system by analyzing four situations in depth: a county in Georgia providing ineffective defense to indigent suspects, a highly respected judge in upstate New York thrown off the bench for routinely denying rights to people in need, a prosecutor in Mississippi who arbitrarily decides to ignore inconvenient cases, and another prosecutor turned defense lawyer who raised questions, freeing men he had sent to jail decades before, raising the ire of lawyers and police. In each case, she sees the problems stemming not from a few bad actors, but from well-intentioned people trying to get by in a broken system. The problem is that too many important legal decisions are made in secrecy, without any oversight, under conditions that focus on moving cases through the system efficiently, not on justice. This is a scary, important book.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)

An ambitious and largely successful attempt to illuminate some of the complex historical forces that drove some human cultures, largely Eurasian, to develop so much faster than others since the end of the last ice age. The main factors he identifies are environmental; Eurasia had a larger suite of plants and animals suitable for domestication, an east-west axis that made it easier for crops and livestock to diffuse to nearby regions with similar climates, and few natural boundaries to this diffusion. As a result, farming and husbandry developed earlier and spread faster there, supporting denser human populations and therefore more innovation (and more deadly germs from the animals, to which they developed some resistance). The author supports his thesis with a great volume of data that is exhaustive, not to say exhausting.

The Birth of the Mind (Gary Marcus)

Subtitled "How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexity of Human Thought." A fascinating description of the current science linking genes to psychology. Working from molecules up, the author describes how the brain, and therefore the mind, is specified in our DNA. It's not hardwired, but flexibly prewired, through general recipes and autonomously functioning agents. It makes the whole system awe-inspiring!

The Road to Ruin (Donald Westlake)

Classic example of a Dortmunder story. He and his band of merry crooks devise a clever plot to steal the classic car collection from a sleazy ex-corporate executive who has ripped off everyone who ever had dealings with him. Unfortunately, several other groups have devised clever plots of their own. All these plots collide in the usual hilarious fashion. Lots of fun, and some great lines. (The executive is safe from the law because "You can't touch these guys, every one of them is surrounded by a moat filled with man-eating lawyers.")

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (Don Robertson)

A gentle, nostalgic story set in 1944. A 9-year-old boy decides to make a trek across Cleaveland to bolster his courage and self-respect. He winds up dragging his little sister in a borrowed wagon, and arrives just in time to be part of a great explosion, during which he proves his courage for real. The disaster was real, and the stories of all the people it affected are equally real, and sad. The writing style has it's oddities, partly because of the times (it was written in 1962, set in 1944), but also for idiosyncratic reasons (many words, such as selfrespect, are run together, and everyone is given the same, complete name each time). I enjoyed it but didn't love it.

Burn Me Deadly (Alex Bledsoe)

Sequel to "The Sword-Edged Blonde," an interesting mix of sword-and-sorcery fantasy and hard-boiled detective story. When sword-jockey Eddie LaCrosse picks up a young woman who escaped from someone, she winds up dead and Eddie spends the rest of the book trying to find out why and deliver some justice. This one's more sword than sorcery, and there are some graphic torture scenes that are hard to take, but it's still a good read.