Top Ten New-to-me Authors in 2023

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023. 

Some of the authors on this list write crime fiction or spy fiction, but a good number of them write books in genres I read less of (fantasy, general fiction, science fiction). All of them were good discoveries, and I plan to read more books by every one of the authors on this list. 

My list is in no particular order.

Kotaro Isaka

Bullet Train is the first book I read by this Japanese author. I like Japanese books, but have read more mysteries and thrillers than other genres. It looks like this book was the 2nd in a series of three books that have been translated into English.

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb is a  pseudonym used by Megan Lindholm. Assassin's Apprentice is the first book in a fantasy series, The Farseer Trilogy. I plan to read the 2nd book in the series this year. I discovered this book and author via Cath at Read-Warbler when she reviewed The Mad Ship, part of a different series.

Deanna Raybourn

Killers of a Certain Age is a story about four older women who have worked for years as assassins. The organization that hired and trained them is called the Museum, and now the Museum has turned against them and ordered their deaths. It is not exactly spy fiction, but it reads much like a spy thriller, so it was perfect for me. Deanna Raybourn has written several series in the historical fiction genre. 

Carson McCullers 

Carson McCullers was a well-known American author whose novels were mainly set in the Deep South. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the first book I read by this author.

Helene Hanff

This author is best known for 84, Charing Cross Road, a book comprised of the letters between Hanff and Frank Doel, who worked at a book store on Charing Cross Road in London. The correspondence began in October 1949 and continued for the next 20 years.

Jesse Q. Sutanto

This author has written young adult fiction and some adult mysteries. The book I read was Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.

Michael Christie  

Christie is a Canadian author. I read his second novel, Greenwood, set in Canada, from 1908 through 2038. It is a multigenerational family story with a focus on nature and ecology, especially trees. 

Becky Chambers  

This author writes science fiction, and my first experience with her writing was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a space opera. 

Rosamunde Pilcher

Pilcher was a very well known British author of romances and family sagas. Many of her books are set in Cornwall, but the one I read, Winter Solstice, is primarily set in Scotland in the two months leading up to Christmas. Luckily, I purchased The Shell Seekers at the book sale last year, so I have another to read sometime this year. 

Bob Cook

This was a new spy fiction author for me. Paper Chase is a humorous book about four old spies who retired years ago, and only get together at the funerals of other old friends who were intelligence agents. They are forbidden to publish their memoirs, but they decide to do it anyway. Felony & Mayhem reprinted Paper Chase and Disorderly Elements, but I am going to try to track down other books by this author.

Short Story Wednesday: "Chin Yong-Yun Meets a Mongol" by S. J. Rozan

 

I started reading S. J. Rozan's Lydia Chin and Bill Smith series in 2008 and by the middle of 2009 I had read all the books in the series at that time. Since then I have read any new books as they became available. I still have the last two books in the series to read. 

Briefly, the series is about two private investigators. Lydia Chin is an American-born Chinese private eye in her late twenties who lives in New York’s Chinatown with her mother; Bill Smith is a white private eye in his forties who lives in Manhattan.  

In 2021, I discovered that S.J. Rozan had written several stories using Lydia Chin's mother, Chin Yong-Yun, as the main character. The first one I read was "Chin Yong-Yun Finds a Kitten" in Bullets and Other Hurting Things, edited by Rick Ollerman. I enjoyed that story so much I started looking for other stories featuring that character. The next two stories I read were "Chin Yong-Yun Takes a Case" and "Chin Yong-Yun Sets the Date" which I discussed here. 

I am still pursuing more stories about Chin Yong-Yun and in December I found another one in Collectibles, an anthology edited by Lawrence Block.

"Chin Yong-Yun Meets a Mongol"

The story starts out with Chin Yong-Yun explaining how she met a Mongolian and why the Mongolians and Chinese have not gotten along historically. An-Zhang and his partner, Tony, are friends with Tomorbaatar, who is the Senior Cultural Attache at the Mongolian Consulate. He likes his job and he has a Chinese-American boyfriend, so he wants very much to keep his job and stay in the US. But his new boss at the Consulate does not like him and wants to send him back to Mongolia.

An-Zhang and his friend want Chin Yong-Yun's help to acquire a valuable book called The Secret History of the Mongols. If she can get the book, Tomorbaatar can give it to his boss, who will return it to his country (and let his employee keep his job). The reason Chin Yong-Yun may be able to help is because the current owner is Uncle Seven, with whom she has a long history going all the way back to before she and her family left China for the US.

Chin Yong-Yun does set out to get the book. The story is complicated but not too long, lovely and entertaining, told from her point of view, with much humor. 

Classics Club Spin #36, January 2024

 

The latest Classics Club Spin has been announced. To join in, I choose twenty books from my classics list. On Sunday, 21st January, 2024, the Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. The goal is to read whatever book falls under that number on my Spin List by Sunday, 3rd March, 2024.

So, here is my list of 20 books for the spin...

1. Patricia Highsmith – The Talented Mr.Ripley (1955)
2. Shirley Jackson – We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
3. Madeleine L'Engle – A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
4. William Shakespeare – Much Ado About Nothing (1598)
5. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)
6. John Steinbeck – Cannery Row (1945)
7. William Thackeray – Vanity Fair (1848)
8. Anthony Trollope – The Warden (1855)
9. Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
10. Virginia Woolf – Flush (1933)
11. Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart (1958)
12. Roald Dahl – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
13. Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre (1847) 
14. Anne Brontë – Agnes Grey (1847)
15. Albert Camus – The Stranger (1942)
16. Lewis Carroll – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
17. Willa Cather – My Ántonia (1918)
18. Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows (1908)
19. Graham Greene – Our Man in Havana (1958)
20. Graham Greene – The Quiet American (1955)

This list is not that different than the last one. I substituted three books for ones that I had already read or needed a copy for. 

Are there any of these you recommend? 

Short Story Wednesday: Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

 

Dark Tales includes 17 stories by Shirley Jackson. Most of them are fairly short, between 5 to 12 pages. One is 24 pages long, another is 18 pages. 

For years I have avoided Jackson's stories and novels because she is known for writing scary or unsettling stories. I should not have worried; these stories did not scare me and most of them were not that unsettling . 

I had read the first story in the book before I purchased it. Patti blogged about "The Possibility of Evil" at her blog, Pattinase. It is available to read online. Reading that story gave me the confidence to try more stories by Jackson.

On the back cover of my Penguin paperback edition, there is this description:

For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson’s scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh.

I have now read the first eight stories in the book. I did not find any of them to be scary; some were spooky, some were unsettling in a good way, and some were puzzling. All were strange.  

Maybe I will find some scary ones in the next nine stories, but I will be just as happy if I don't.

The other seven stories I read were:

"Louisa, Please Come Home"

This was my favorite of this batch of stories. Louisa wants to get away from her family and successfully escapes to a town not too far away. Every year on the anniversary of the day she left, her mother puts out a message on a radio news broadcast to ask Louisa to come home.

"Paranoia"

I liked this story. The title is apt. A man is having problems getting home in time to take his wife out for dinner. The ending was surprising.

"The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith"

This story was a good read but in the end I would have liked some more clarity. Sometimes I am okay with an ending that leaves you hanging; sometimes not.

"The Story We Used to Tell"

For me, this was the spookiest story. It did not scare me or impress me initially but I kept thinking about it afterwards. 

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

This was another good read. It was about a mean little girl, almost devilish, who torments a woman who lives in the same apartment building. But in the end it did not go anywhere and I was frustrated. More than one reviewer said that they did not get it.

"Jack the Ripper"

As you can tell from the title, this is a Jack the Ripper story. It was very short and I did not understand it.

"The Beautiful Stranger"

This one is about a young wife with two children who meets her husband at the train station. He looks like her husband but she is convinced that he is not her husband. Another one I did not understand, and it was unsettling. 

I look forward to reading the remainder of the stories in this book.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Goals, 2024

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is Bookish Goals for 2024. 

Last year was the first year I have given a lot of thought to reading and blogging goals over the next year. The goals for this year are similar to last year, and informed by my experiences in 2023.

My goals for the year:

1. Aim at reading mostly books that I owned before January 1st of 2024. I have signed up for Bev Hankin's Mount TBR Challenge 2024 on Goodreads in order to track the number of books I read that fit that criteria. My goal is 48 books.  This ties in with my next goal...
2. My husband and I have a joint goal to not buy any books before the Planned Parenthood book sale in September. That effectively means almost 9 months of not buying books. One exception: We can buy ebooks. 
3. Read more graphic novels. I read a total of 4 graphic novels last year, which was an improvement. I will aim for 8 this year.
4. Read more science fiction and fantasy, novels or short stories. In 2023 I read 3  science fiction novels and 1 fantasy novel. I read a few science fiction short stories from 4 different books. My aim is to improve on that, the more the better.
5. Read more espionage novels. In 2023, I met my goal of at least 10 novels in that genre. I would like to read more than that this year, maybe 15. I will also aim at reading more spy fiction by authors that I haven't read but are on my shelves, virtual or otherwise.
6. Read more ebooks. I buy a lot of ebooks but have a hard time reading them. I read one novel on my Kindle in 2023 and some short stories from a few collections.
7. Read at least one classic a month, preferably from my Classics Club List, since I have been working on my Classics list for over 5 years, and still have a lot left on the list. But any classic reads would be good.
8. Increase my short story reading. Last year I lamented the fact that I start short story anthologies or collections but often take months or years to finish them. However, I have decided that enjoying reading short stories is more important than completed books. Instead I will aim at reading more short stories per month (which will require tracking them in some way, which I am not good at). 
9. Share my thoughts on every book I read. I borrowed this goal from Jana's list from 2023. I try to do this already, even if it is only in my monthly book lists, but sometimes I only provide a summary. I may start putting shorter reviews in Goodreads. This will be a work in progress, and I don't expect to succeed at it overnight. It goes along with my last goal...
10. Write shorter book reviews. This has been a goal for several years but I have had little success. Last year, when I tried to write short reviews, they turned into long reviews. I don't necessarily want to write only brief reviews, but I would like to master that art.

Addendum: 

I have some authors I want to read more books by. This is not something I could do in one year, but I want to use this post as a reminder to read more by these authors:

• Raymond Chandler (4 remaining books in the Philip Marlowe series)
• Ross Macdonald (14 remaining books in the Lew Archer series)
• Ross Thomas (He wrote mostly standalone books; I have only read 3 of his books. I have 10 on my shelves.)
• Victor Canning (4 remaining books in the Birdcage series)
• Anthony Price (13 remaining books in the David Audley series)
• Reginald Hill (10 remaining books in the Dalziel and Pascal series)
• Rex Stout (Reread any books in the Nero Wolfe series that I have not read since I started blogging. Around 24 books.)

Books Read in December 2023

 

 

December was a very good reading month. I had planned to read Winter Solstice to coincide with the solstice, and I finished two days before Winter solstice, on December 19th. The remainder of my books were mysteries: two with espionage elements, one Christmas mystery, the most recent Thursday Murder Club mystery, and a book of Miss Marple short stories by Agatha Christie.

Fiction

Winter Solstice (2000) by Rosamunde Pilcher

Elfrida Phipps, once an actress on the London stage, 62 years old, has been living in Dipton in Hampshire, England. She has become friends with Gloria and Oscar Blundell and their 12-year-old daughter. Oscar's wife and child are killed in an automobile accident. Oscar asks Elfrida to help him move to Creagan, Scotland where he owns half of an Estate House which used to belong to his grandmother. Mainly set in Scotland in the two months leading up to Christmas, this is a lovely story of friends and family.  See my review.

Crime Fiction

The Last Devil to Die (2023) by Richard Osman

Book 4 in the Thursday Murder Club series. Two men and two women in their seventies or eighties have formed a club called the Thursday Murder Club. They started out investigating cold cases, but now they investigate current crimes whenever they get the chance. In this case, an antique dealer has been killed. He was a friend of Elizabeth's husband Stephen, and the foursome feel they have to solve the crime. Their friends in the police discourage them, but they persist. Joyce takes on a bigger role in this case. This is a wonderful series; I will continue to read these books as long as the author writes them.

Missionary Stew (1983) by Ross Thomas

I loved this book; it is only the third book I have read by this author. I would call it a political thriller but it has a bit of espionage too. All the characters in this book are very strange; that is often true in fiction about politics or espionage. The two protagonists had unusual childhoods, one with a father who was jailed for being a Communist, the other having been basically ignored by his mother, an intelligence operative in France during World War II. The mother is a real piece of work. And one of the prominent secondary characters is named Velveeta Keats. I want to read all the rest of his books, and fortunately I have ten of them on my shelves. 

The Paris Diversion (2018) by Chris Pavone

I have read Pavone's first three books and enjoyed them. The Paris Diversion is an espionage thriller which begins with a terror attack on Paris. It is the second book featuring Kate Moore and her husband Dexter. The first book was The Expats. If you enjoy fast-paced thrillers you might like this.

Who Killed the Curate? (1944) by Joan Coggin

This is a vintage Christmas mystery, a humorous mystery, of the screwball comedy type, I guess. It was first reprinted by Rue Morgue Press in 2001, and more recently reissued by Galileo Publishers in the UK. The main character is Lady Lupin, who is now married to a vicar and living in a small village. She doesn't fit in at all; she is too scatterbrained and doesn't have any idea of how to be a vicar's wife, but she is so well-meaning that no one minds too much. And she and her husband are madly in love, which is very refreshing. It is set at Christmas which is why I had saved it to read in December. I enjoyed it, but I only recommend it to readers who like a lot of humor in their mysteries.

Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (1985) by Agatha Christie

This collection is comprised of 20 short stories by Christie, all starring Miss Marple, the amateur sleuth who lives in a small village in the UK and uses her observations of the people she knows in St Mary Mead to solve crimes. The first thirteen short stories were published in book form in The Thirteen Problems in 1932 (aka The Tuesday Club Murders). The others were published in three other collections of Christie's stories, mixed in with stories about other sleuths. I reviewed some stories from this collection in June, in September, and this month.

End of Year notes

I read 90 books in 2023. The longest book I read was 823 pages:  Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. The average number of pages for the books I read was 295. 

Of the 90 books I read, 60 books were from my TBR pile (purchased prior to 2023), which surpassed my goal of 48 books. I will continue to aim at 48 books from my TBR in 2024. 

I read more espionage books in 2023. Of the 65 mysteries I read, ten were espionage novels. One of my nonfiction books was about espionage in World War II, Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre. Espionage fiction is my go to comfort reading. That may sound strange because so often those books are fast-paced thrillers. I do love those too, but several espionage books I read this year were slow-paced thoughtful books.

I was surprised that I read 12 nonfiction books. Several were books about books, one was graphic nonfiction, and two were biographies of the Mitford sisters. 

The photos at the top and bottom of this post were taken at the Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden, a small park in Santa Barbara. One of our favorite places to visit, it is near downtown and covers only one city block, but has lots of paths to walk around on. The large aloe plant with orange flowers at the top was blooming in January 2023, and I have seen many such plants all over the Santa Barbara / Goleta area in December and January.

The photos were taken and processed by my husband. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to The Optimist's Daughter

 

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting book this month is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I wasn't in any hurry to read this book, but when it came up as a starting book for Six Degrees, it motivated me to get a copy. I have been reading it (at a slow pace) for three days now and am only halfway in. It is about two young people who create video games, and so far it focuses on relationships and family. I like the way it is structured, and I am enjoying reading it, immensely. 

1st degree:

Staying with the theme of video gaming, my first link is to Didn't See That Coming by Jesse Q. Sutanto. This is a young adult novel; the main character is an avid video-gamer. When she plays online she uses a male name to avoid harassment. The storyline is similar to The Shop Around the Corner (or You've Got Mail).  

2nd degree:

I enjoyed reading another book by Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. Vera Wong is sixty years old, widowed, and lives alone above her tea shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. One morning she finds the dead body of a man on the floor of her tea shop, a man she does not recognize. She reinvents herself as an amateur detective.

3rd degree:

Staying in Chinatown in San Francisco, my next book is City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley. Miranda Corbie is a 33-year-old private investigator who investigates the death of Eddie Takahashi, against the wishes of the Chamber of Commerce and the police. Kelli Stanley makes San Francisco of the 1940's come alive; she describes the tensions within Chinatown due to the war in Asia and Europe very well. I learned much about Chinatown and the US attitude toward the war at that time. My husband introduced me to this series and he has read all four books in the series.

4th degree:

China Trade is another book set in Chinatown, but this time in New York City's Chinatown, in the 1990's. It is the first book in S. J. Rozan's series about two private investigators who frequently work cases together. Bill Smith is a white private investigator in his forties who lives in Manhattan; Lydia Chin is an American-born Chinese private investigator in her late twenties who lives in New York’s Chinatown with her mother. I am linking to Constance's review at Staircase Wit, because I read this book before I was blogging.

5th degree:

My fifth book is another book by  S. J. Rozan, Paper Son. This is the 12th book in the Bill Smith and Lydia Chin series, published in 2019. In this book Lydia discovers that she has relatives in Mississippi. Lydia's mom, Chin Yong-Yun, requests that Lydia go help out a cousin in Mississippi who is in jail, and she insists that Bill Smith go along to help. This is one of the best books in the series, and I enjoyed it especially because of the setting. I grew up in Alabama and I had relatives in a small town in Mississippi. This is a pretty good look at the South, without being over the top, not that I have spent a lot of time there in the last few years.

6th degree:

Another novel set in Mississippi is The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty. The book was published in 1972 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973. Laurel McKelva Hand is a widow, living and working in Chicago. She goes to New Orleans with her father, Judge McKelva, and his second wife, Fay, to visit the Judge's eye doctor. The judge dies while in the hospital for eye surgery. Laurel returns to her hometown in Mississippi for the funeral. Many readers love this book, but I did  not. It was funny at times, sad at times, but I could not connect with the characters or feel any involvement in the story.

The links in my chain of books centered on Chinatowns in different cities in the US, contemporary and historical, and then hopped over to Mississippi. 

If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your links go?

The next Six Degrees will be on February 3, 2024, and the starting book will be the book you finished on this month (or the last book read).

Short Story Wednesday – Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories

When I first got this book, I was surprised to learn that Agatha Christie had written only 20 short stories featuring Miss Marple. The first thirteen short stories were published in book form in The Thirteen Problems in 1932 (aka The Tuesday Club Murders). The others were published in three other collections of Christie's stories, mixed in with stories from other sleuths. 

I started reading the stories in this book in June 2023. (There were two previous posts in June and in September where I reviewed a few of the stories.) I just finished all the stories in the book with the very last story on December 30, 2023. 

"Sanctuary"

Bunch Harmon, the vicar's wife, discovers a man's body in the church when she brings in flowers for the alter. The man is not dead but he is bleeding; she goes to get the doctor, and the police are called in. After the man dies, of a gunshot wound, his sister and her husband come to talk to Bunch. She gives them his belongings, including a coat that he was wearing. The police say that the man killed himself, but Bunch is not satisfied that everything has been resolved. Shortly after that she goes to visit Miss Marple, her godmother, who is staying at her nephew Raymond's flat in London. Between the two of them, the puzzle of the man's death is solved.

This was one of my favorite stories in the book. There are some interesting notes on this story at the Agatha Christie website.

Top Ten Tuesday: My Favorite Books of 2023

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week's Top Ten Tuesday topic is Favorite Books of 2023. Note that the key word here is favorite, and these are the books I enjoyed reading the most in 2023. The list is in no particular order, and I included 13 books because it was so hard to choose only ten.

And here's my list:

Winter Solstice (2000) by Rosamunde Pilcher

This was a Christmas read and the first book I have read by Pilcher. It was published in 2000 and is over 500 pages long. A lovely story, with some romance on the side, set mostly in Scotland.

Assassin's Apprentice (1995) by Robin Hobb

This is a fantasy novel, the first book in The Farseer Trilogy. Hobb has written a good number of fantasies, under the pseudonym Robin Hobb and under her own name, Megan Lindholm. I don't have a lot of experience with reading fantasies, but this one sucked me in from the beginning. 

Slough House (2021) by Mick Herron

In the Slough House spy fiction series, Mick Herron has created a department in MI5 that is used to dump failed spies, agents, or analysts with no plans to allow them to be reinstated as MI5 agents. Most of the members of Slough House fool themselves into believing they can return, eventually. It seems like this concept would have a limited life span but the series is still going strong. This is book 7 of 8.

Killers of a Certain Age (2022) by Deanna Raybourn

This story is about four older women who have worked for years as assassins. The organization that hired and trained them is the Museum, and now the Museum has turned against them and ordered their deaths. The older women protagonists were a plus. It is not exactly spy fiction, but it reads much like a spy thriller, so it was perfect for me.

SS-GB (1979) by Len Deighton

SS-GB is an alternate history in which England has been invaded by Germany. The main character is Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer of Scotland Yard, who is forced to work under Gruppenführer Fritz Kellerman of the SS. Len Deighton is one of my favorite authors of spy fiction and I don't know why it took me so long to read this one.

The Last Devil to Die (2023) by Richard Osman

Book 4 in the Thursday Murder Club series. This was one of the few books I read that was published in 2023, and one of the few series that I try to keep current with. Two men and two women in their seventies or eighties form a club called the Thursday Murder Club. They started out investigating cold cases, but now they investigate current crimes whenever they get the chance.

The Mask of Memory (1974) by Victor Canning

The 3rd book in a loose series called the Birdcage books. They all revolve around a covert security group in the UK, a branch of the Ministry of Defense. The agents change from book to book, although some show up in multiple books. The series could easily be read out of order with no problems. Victor Canning is one of my favorite authors of spy fiction.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014) by Becky Chambers 

This is a space opera, the first book in a trilogy, the Wayfarers series. To get away from an unhappy event in her past, Rosemary Harper (not her real name) joins the small crew of a ship that creates tunnels through space for faster travel. She is the clerk, taking care of ordering and forms and such. Some of the crew is human and others are various types of aliens.

Greenwood (2019) by Michael Christie 

Christie is a Canadian author and the story is set in Canada, from 1908 through 2038. It is a multigenerational family story with a focus on nature and ecology, especially trees. It starts in a dystopian future in 2038 but soon travels back to follow the previous generations of the Greenwood family.

Missionary Stew (1983) by Ross Thomas

I loved this book; it is only the third book I have read by this author. I would call it a political thriller but it has a bit of espionage too. The two protagonists both had strange childhoods, one with a father who was jailed for being a Communist, the other having been basically ignored by his mother, an intelligence operative. The mother is a real piece of work. And one of the prominent secondary characters is named Velveeta Keats. Who can resist a book with a woman named Velveeta?

A Midsummer's Equation (2011) by Keigo Higashino

This is the 6th book in the Detective Galileo series but only the third to be translated to English. This entry in the series takes place at a fading resort town on the coast of Japan. Manabu Yukawa, also known as "Detective Galileo," plans to speak at a town meeting regarding a planned underwater mining operation. A guest staying at a hotel nearby is found dead at the base of the cliffs, and Yukawa is pulled into the investigation. 

Bullet Train (2010) by Kotaro Isaka

I like stories set on a train, and this one takes place almost entirely on the Bullet train that travels from Tokyo to Morioka. This is the type of thriller using very short chapters, each focusing on a particular character; the story hops from character to character. This can get confusing but it was still a favorite for me.

The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (2017) by Karina Yan Glaser

The Vanderbeekers live in Harlem, in an apartment that takes up two floors of an old brownstone. There are five Vanderbeeker children between the ages of 4 and 12. Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbeeker struggle to make ends meet. Eleven days before the end of the year, in the midst of preparations for Christmas, the Vanderbeekers are notified that the lease on their apartment will not be renewed; they have to be out by the end of the year. This is a lovely middle-grade book, with nice illustrations. The first book in a series of seven.