Salvage and Demolition (Tim Powers)

This novelette is a tangled knot in time, centering an odd manuscript that is found in a box in 2012 linked with odd events in 1957. It is a very brief love story that spanned 55 years. Like most of Powers's stories, it is odd and mystical, but without the length of a novel form the full atmosphere doesn't really have time to coalesce. Enjoyable, but lacking depth because it is so short.

Up at the Villa (W. Somerset Maugham)

This short novel is a quick read, and has an old-fashioned air (especially in its rather stilted dialogue) which is not unexpected in a novel written in 1940. The events, though, and rather sharply modern. A young widow is living in Italy as she considers the marriage proposal of a man 24 years older, one who has been devoted to her since she was a child, and who has great prospects in his career for the British government. The problem is that, while she has enormous respect for him, she doesn't love him. The night he proposes, as she is thinking it over, she offers a ride to a down-on-his-luck stranger, and the consequences unravel the respectable, comfortable life she saw before her. I was quite taken up in the events of the story, though I have to say that the ending was no surprise. This is a good, if slight, example of the writing nearly a century ago.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Laura Lippman)

This slender novella is an interesting mystery with the twist that the protagonist is a detective laid up on total bed rest by a difficult pregnancy. She watches life in the park she can see from her window, and notices a woman in a green raincoat walking her dog every day, until the day the dog shows up trailing its leash, and the woman is gone. What happened to her? I figured out the answer about halfway through, but still enjoyed the story in a mild way. As a novella, it doesn't have the scope to fully develop the characters or the events, and as a late novel in a long series it relies on a lot of back story I didn't have, which left me somewhat unsatisfied. Not bad, though.