Fool Moon (Jim Butcher)

Harry Dresden is a wizard in contemporary Chicago, working with the police to solve crimes that have occult elements. In this story, people have been torn apart by something with monstrous claws and teeth right around the full moon, and Harry has to figure out how to stop it. There are multiple kinds of werewolves in this story, some good, some bad, some in between, but the real complication comes as Harry tries to sort out his relationships with three women: his young apprentice, a smart and lovely reporter, and a tough, no-nonsense detective. I love this series, because the stories are engaging and Harry is someone I can really like.

Storm Front (Jim Butcher)

I've read a few of the books from this series here and there and liked them, so I'm starting over from the beginning. Harry Dresden is a wizard, all trained up and powerful and everything, living in modern Chicago and hanging out an actual shingle identifying himself as such. There are lots of other wizards around (he's got a very chancy relationship with the White Council that governs wizards' affairs), but he's the only one that's out and public. He's called in as a police consultant to study some particularly gruesome murders that have a magical basis, and also hired by a woman as a private investigator to look for her husband, an amateur wizard who's disappeared. Naturally, these two cases come together in an unexpected but satisfying way. I really like Harry's voice and attitude. He's a good guy with some serious skills who throws himself into problems way beyond his level when there are people in trouble. He reminds me a bit of Travis McGee, in John D. MacDonald's wonderful series, with a layer of cool magic on top.

Maisie Dobbs (Jacqueline Winspear)

Just after WWI, Maisie Dobbs sets herself up in London as a private detective. She is a terrific character: former downstairs maid, university student, wartime nurse, and now solver of mysteries, someone who cares a lot about people and is stunningly brilliant. In this first story of the series she is drawn into an investigation of a secluded farm called The Retreat where soldiers disfigured in the war can find comfort and acceptance, but her instinct that something is amiss there proves appallingly true. Masie's weapons include a near-telepathic ability to tell what people are feeling and the ability to blend in and play many roles, but mostly she is brave and smart and compassionate. I expect to read more in this series.

Land of Shadows (Rachel Howzell Hall)

This is a good, solid example of a gritty police-procedural murder mystery. The protagonist is a tough homicide detective, a black woman who grew up in the Jungle, a low-income high-crime area she now polices. A new murder has elements that remind her of her own sister's murder many years before, and she becomes obsessed with not only solving this murder, but showing that the same man is responsible for both. There are some flaws, but it is a good first effort and indicates some promise for the future of the series.

The Suicide Murders (Howard Engel)

This is a pretty typical example of the hardboiled detective story. Benny Cooperman is in his office when a beautiful woman brings him a job - she thinks her husband is having an affair. Cooperman agrees to look into it and starts following the husband, but then the next thing he knows the husband is dead of an apparent suicide. He's not convinced, though, and continues to dig into what he is more and more convinced is murder, and along the way uncovers more suspicious "suicides" that prove to be murders in disguise. Most of the typical tropes are here: an ambivalent relationship with police, corrupt politicians, getting waylaid by thugs, and being suspected of a crime himself. I definitely enjoyed the story enough to stick with it and learn how it ended, but have to say that I found it vaguely disappointing, especially when Cooperman made some pretty stupid decisions. No great enthusiasm here, but also no real aversion.

A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Another delightful English cozy mystery featuring Flavia de Luce, 11-year-old chemist and sleuth. She invites an old Gypsy woman to stay on her family's property, and the woman is savagely attacked, so Flavia digs in to investigate the mystery. Along the way she encounters dead bodies, the enigmatic granddaughter of the injured woman, an eccentric religion, a long-vanished child, and some faux antiques, all weaving together into a satisfying conclusion. Flavia's voice as she narrates her experiences in her off-kilter household and eccentric village is delightful, despite a few unresolved loose ends. [Minor spoiler: When Flavia first meets Porcelain she "couldn't rub two shillings together if my life depended on it," but later hands Flavia a five-pound banknote (a lot of money in post-war England) to pay for her horse's care. Flavia never notices the contradiction, and I kept expecting it to mean something, but it just slid by. Unsatisfying, and not the only such glitch.]

Golden Fleece (Robert Sawyer)

This short novel is Sawyer's first, a murder mystery aboard a spaceship on its way to explore a distant planet. The mystery is not a whodunit, because in the first few pages we witness the murder and realize it was committed by JASON, the artificial intelligence that runs the ship. The mystery is why the computer believed this murder was necessary and whether the others would figure it out. I confess that the story didn't work for me. The main human character had a past decorated with so many separate issues and traumas, none of which were actually related to the current situation, that it felt strained and overwritten. When the reason for the murder, and the ship's other unusual behaviors, is finally revealed, I don't buy it. I've read a few of Sawyer's works and had much the same reaction to them as well.

Side Jobs (Jim Butcher)

I've become a real fan of the Harry Dresden series, so I checked out this collection of short works. It begins with the first-ever Dresden story, written as an exercise for a creative writing class and never before published. Butcher acknowledges that it's not a strong story and didn't deserve publication initially, an opinion I could agree with, but I enjoyed seeing where the story began. It finishes with a novelette that Harry never even appears in, with Murphy and others of Harry's friends dealing with his apparent murder, trying to cope with the kind of evil he usually fights without him. If you like the Dresden series you will like these stories.

An Impartial Witness (Charles Todd)

This second story of the intrepid WWI nurse Bess Crawford is as gentle and as strong as she is. Gentle, not in the sense that nothing bad ever happens, for there are murder and mayhem and life-and-death knife fights, but in the sense that Bess herself is a good soul, struggling to see that right triumphs in a dark world. There is an interesting mystery beginning with the murder of a young woman, where Bess is an impartial witness to some of her last hours. From there, the mystery spirals, taking in additional people and additional crimes. There were a few spots where I was annoyed at how much she pushed other people to accept her view of things because she knew she was right, only to have her view overturned moments later, and now she knows her new view is right. In the end she did wind up solving the mystery, so it all came to a satisfactory conclusion. I enjoyed the feeling of England during this bloody, heart-tearing war and the stoicism of the people determined to keep finding the best in life despite everything.

Rooms (Lauren Oliver)

Part ghost story, part mystery, this novel bounces between several points of view. After Richard Walker dies, his estranged wife, their two adult children, and their daughter's little girl come to the old house to clean up and hold his memorial service. They don't know that the house is the home, in fact the body, of a collection of ghosts. As the story unfolds, we learn about who the ghosts are and why they are still here, and we learn about the broken lives of the people moving through the old place. At times the people, living and dead, felt more like symbols than real people, but the author's language is seductive and the tale draws you in.

Case Histories (Kate Atkinson)

This mystery has an unusual structure. It starts by describing three crimes that took place over a 30-year period (a little girl vanishes, an overwhelmed new mother murders her husband, a teen is killed in a random workplace attack). It then jumps to a present-day detective who winds up looking into all three cases, while dealing with the divorce-drinking-angst difficulties that fictional detectives often seem to deal with. I expected that the three cases would wind up linked somehow, but that's not what happens; their only real link is that the detective is investigating them. I enjoyed figuring out what was happening or had happened, and there were some surprising twists and turns along the way, but I can't say that I loved this book. Some of the threads remain too loose for me, and some of the events too coincidental to be convincing. So while the characters and settings were generally well drawn, and the mysteries mysterious, I didn't quite click with this book.

The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)

This story was all the rage when it was released, in serial form, back in 1859, and it's easy to see why. Sometimes described as the first mystery novel, there is a lot of mystery here, with mistaken identities, secret assignations, brooding mansions on bleak hills, dastardly villains, and impossible love. A drawing instructor falls in love with one of his pupils, who is engaged to another man, though a mysterious woman in white warns that the marriage will come to a bad end. The plot has enough twists and turns for anyone's taste, and most of the characters are fascinating, larger-than-life individuals, both good and bad. From our modern perspective, though, the central love interest is a nobody: she is lovely, and plays the piano well, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be anyone there. We much preferred her mannish, resourceful sister, and wish he had fallen in love with her instead. Still, this old book holds up well, and I can recommend it.

Shovel Ready (Adam Sternbergh)

The first-person narrator of this book scrabbles a living in a dark, dangerous post-apocalyptic New York City. He calls himself Spademan, a name with two meanings. He once was, he tells us over and over, a garbage man, back when the city worked and people came and took away your garbage. Now, he is a killer for hire, one with strict rules about not knowing why you want someone killed, only that you're willing to pay for it. When someone points him at the estranged daughter of a famous evangelist, he starts to have second and third thoughts and winds up being drawn deeper and deeper into a morass of murder, torture, and terror as he tries to do the right thing. It is surprisingly easy to like this protagonist because we never see him acting in his primary occupation as a cold-blooded murderer; we only see him as someone who has become the unlikely defender of the young and helpless. With its intense action and its spare style (short, incomplete sentences and one-line paragraphs abound) this story moves quickly, almost breathlessly. Recommended.

Lush Life (Richard Price)

This is a kind of police procedural, a will-they-catch-'em mystery instead of a whodunit. It begins by introducing a collection of colorful characters, then bringing them together with a bang when one is murdered. The rest of the story tracks the aftermath of that murder on the victim's friends and family, the police officers trying to solve the crime, and the criminals involved, all set in a gritty New York City that was a character in itself. The story is a gripping one, though I often found myself lost in the no-doubt authentic street slang. In the middle my patience with some of the more self-destructive characters flagged, but not enough for me to consider quitting before the story came to its resolution. Was there closure, redemption, or healing for anyone? I doubt it. But the story did resolve, and it felt as real as anything I've read.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Laline Paull)

This is a unique twist on a time-travel story. Harry is one of a small number of people who, for unknown reasons, live their lives over and over. Each time they die, they are born again at the same moment, in the same circumstances, to the same people, and live  through the same world again and again. What is the best way to deal with this strange situation? These folks have banded together into a society devoted to finding the newly born infants, seeing that they are shepherded into life with comfort and security, and living however they choose until their unavoidable death and cycling back yet again. By and large they try to avoid making a large impact on the unfolding of grand events in the world; past experience has shown that pushing too hard against the fabric of history has terrible ramifications. But now, someone seems to be doing just that, and the world is coming to an end. Can Harry and his friends find who is doing this and stop them? The action spirals up to a grisly, frantic, intense pitch, as Harry works against powerful hidden forces over and over again. I followed it breathlessly to the end. Recommended.

Lock In (John Scalzi)

Scalzi's latest is a murder mystery/police procedural set in a future where a new illness left a substantial percentage of the population has been locked in, with complete awareness and full cognitive functioning but no voluntary control over their own bodies. Technology allows these people to live full lives in two ways: through remote operation of a mechanical bodies (charmingly called "threeps") or, much more rarely, through stepping in to the brains of people called Integrators and taking over their bodies for a while. The protagonist is one of the locked-in folks, starting his first day on the job as an FBI agent and faced with a bizarre murder involving an integrator. The murders proliferate and lead him to the fringes and the center of the new world culture being created by and for the thousands upon thousands of locked-in people. Many of the standard tropes of the genre are here -- the tough-talking, hard-drinking partner, the tension between the Feds and the local police, the triumphant confrontation with drunken thugs harassing a woman on the streets, the interrogation of suspects dancing the line between intimidation and the law -- but they all have a new twist because of the futuristic setting. I quite liked it.

The Devil's Alphabet (Daryl Gregory)

This is not my favorite of Gregory's books (that I've read so far, anyway), but still really good. Years ago the residents of a small town in Tennessee suddenly started to change - some became huge, tall and strong, some grotesquely fat, some red-skinned and hairless (and spontaneously pregnant, always with girls). Many died in the transition. A few were skipped over, not changing at all, including the narrator who escaped to Chicago after the quarantine was lifted. Now he's come back to town for the funeral of a dear friend and is drawn back into mysteries within mysteries, relating to drugs, violence, death, and the true nature of this metamorphosis. I loved his other books for their view from inside madness; the narrator here is rather tamely sane, so I never felt drawn into the wonder of the story quite so much. Gregory does explore the nature of family, including the narrator's strained relationship with his father and how family and children shape our view of the world.

Frozen Heat (Richard Castle)

Sorry. I love the Castle TV show, and I am tickled at the joke of having the Nikki Heat novels actually published by "Richard Castle," but I don't actually want to read them. What is good fun on TV comes across as too formulaic as a novel. Oh, well.

Afterparty (Daryl Gregory)

I loved this science fiction story about a near-future world where everyone with a couple of bucks and an Internet connection can develop and produce their own designer drugs. A few years ago an enthusiastic group of young entrepreneurs in a budding start-up were working on something that they hoped would treat many of the ills that plague so many of us, and it went horribly wrong. The narrator of the story was one of the developers, and one of the initial victims, living out her life in a mental institution until she becomes convinced someone is recreating that drug and putting it out on the street again, and she goes on a mission to find out who is doing it and stop them. Her quest involves a Toronto drug cartel, an ex-spy, a dual-faced assassin, and a mixed crew of the folks from the original start-up. The writing is taut, the narrator's voice convincing and engaging, the action gripping, and most of all everything was clearly informed by the best thinking in  neuroscience. How could I not love it?

Great North Road (Peter Hamilton)

This one was overambitious of me. I think it is a good story, with lots of intriguing sense-of-wonder science fiction stuff layered over a gritty police procedural dealing with a very odd murder - but it's almost 1000 pages and I just couldn't pull it off. I ran out of energy and time less than a third of the way through, and moved onto another. I could argue that it failed to grab me sufficiently, but in all honesty, I think it was a failure of my patience, not a failure of the book. Sorry.