Take a break from turkey and stuffing to dig into these six paperback titles
On the slight possibility that you might have some reading time on Thanksgiving weekend, here’s a half-dozen fresh paperbacks for your perusal.
“The Best Bad Things” by Katrina Carrasco (Picador, $19). A finalist for both the Lambda Awards and the Washington State Book Awards, Carrasco’s debut novel is set in 1880s Port Townsend, casting as its heroine a former Pinkerton detective who’s now on the trail of opium thieves. Reading it with pleasure last year
“Queenie” by Candice Carty-Williams (Gallery/Scout Press, $16). This debut novel was billed as “a black Bridget Jones” — and the prospect of Jonesian antics were enough to get me to start turning pages. But what I found
“Newcomer” by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur Books, $17.99). Need a new mystery series? This book, by internationally bestselling Japanese author Higashino (translated by Giles Murray), is the latest to feature brilliant Detective
Kyochiro Kaga of the Tokyo Police. It might be for you if you like “fiendishly difficult mysteries,” wrote a New York Times reviewer
“The Current” by Tim Johnston (Algonquin, $16.95). Johnston, the bestselling author of “Descent,” structures this thriller around two mysterious deaths, a decade apart.
“In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein” by Fiona Sampson (Pegasus Books, $18.95). The horror classic
“Frankenstein” celebrated its 200th anniversary last year — and its author, Mary Shelley, was still in her teens when she began writing it. Sampson’s breathless yet meticulous retelling of Shelley’s remarkable life swept me in last year, re-creating a vivid, passionate young girl long ago, for whom writing was part of the process of becoming herself. (For all interested in Shelley’s life, I also highly recommended Charlotte Gordon’s “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
“The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: The First & Definitive Account of Native American Life of the Last 125 Years” by David Treuer (Riverhead, $17). Treuer, an Ojibwe writer who grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, here sets out to examine the image of the American Indian in literature and history. He writes from a perspective of Native American resiliency and survival, notes a Washington Post reviewer.