Sophreena Angelica McClure, in the proper Southern tradition, is named for her two grandmothers.  With business partner Esme Sabatier, Sophie is the owner of a successful genealogy service which specializes in creating archival family scrapbooks.

Esme brings a very special talent to their business. She has the gift or curse, depending on the day, of hearing the dead speak.  As a medium, Esme contributes just the right touch of paranormal influence and a feisty attitude to this story. Pillar of the community, Dorothy Pritchett Porter, hires Esme and Sophie to research her family history. To Dorothy’s delight, the research uncovers a long lost heirloom ruby and diamond ring that will be a highlight of her family scrapbook. These scrapbooks will be the focal point of Morningside’s Founders Day celebration. As Sophie and Esme rush to complete the job, death intervenes.

Paging the Dead is more than just a crafty cozy mystery.  It is about relationships that span generations, transcend familial bonds and draw you into the world of genealogical research.

I hope you will enjoy Paging the Dead as much I did. I am eagerly awaiting the next adventure of Sophie and Esme.  If you enjoy Carolyn Hart’s Bailey Ruth series or Patricia Sprinkle’s Family Tree Mysteries Paging the Dead is for you.

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“Almost” is the key word.  Anthony Wolf has counseled hundreds of teens and their parents, and knows whereof he speaks.  I am the parent of a teen myself, and what he says rings true for me.  Teens are in a transitional period.  They are almost ready to fly away from the nest, but not quite—which makes parenting them a tricky task.

The title of Wolf’s book expresses this perfectly: Get Out of My Life, But First Can You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?  Teens really do both need us and want us to leave them alone.  With humor and wisdom, Wolf explains how the “adolescent mandate,” that which tells these young people they must separate from their parents and live on their own soon, comes into conflict with the baby self which still lives inside them and wants to be pampered and safe.  Indeed, this conflict exists in all of us—wanting help versus wanting to be independent, but in the teen years it intensifies painfully.  Teens and their parents confront a transition bigger than anything they’ve faced so far.  How can teens learn to be “grown-ups” while their parents keep telling them what to do?

Wolf stresses how important it is that parents not get completely out of their teens’ lives.  Teens both desire and fear total independence, and most are not ready for it.  They still need their parents.  Parenting my teenaged daughter has felt sort of like a dance.  Sometimes she advances while I withdraw, and sometimes it goes the other way around.  We step on each other’s toes a lot, but we are also learning how to dance more gracefully. There are no hard and fast rules, but has there ever been in parenting?

Wolf’s book has helped me greatly, and I strongly recommend it to other parents of teens.  Whether your child is 13 or 19, Wolf’s wonderful insights apply.  You will find yourself chuckling, as he seems to have been a fly on your kitchen wall, overhearing the conversations (and even the shouting matches).  As one reviewer aptly put it, “Wolf takes much of the fear and anxiety out of raising a teenager with this reassuring upbeat question-and-answer guide.”  Heaven knows, we parents of teens need all the reassurance we can get!

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Nine years later, Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi and his team — Samir, and Amal, capture and interrogate a suicide bomber. The prisoner claims that the world in which they are living is a mirage. In the real world, America is a superpower, and the Arab states are just a collection of backward third-world countries.  A search of the bomber’s apartment turns up a copy of The New York Times, dated September 12, 2001, which recounts the destruction of the twin towers in New York City.   As Mustafa and his team continue to investigate this bizarre claim, they come in contact with the gangster Saddam Hussein and Senator Osama Bin Laden, both of whom know about the mirage claim and provide both help and hindrance as the investigation proceeds. Mustafa and his team also make a visit to America and the independent republic of Texas where they come across a “who’s who” of well known and sometimes notorious American political and religious leaders, including David Koresh, Dick Cheney and Lyndon B. Johnson.

A typical problem with books that start with a great premise is that sometimes the author doesn’t know how to end it without becoming too farfetched or unsatisfying to the reader.  Fortunately, I felt that Matt Ruff did a good job with the ending.  I came away feeling that sometimes no matter how much things have changed, in many ways they still stay the same, and yet there is hope for the future and maybe this time we will get it right.

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Katherine “Kit” Craig is a newspaper reporter for her family-owned paper who dresses and lives the rockabilly lifestyle. She is full of life and always in search of the truth. She’s waiting outside the motel where her best friend has gone undercover when she sees a man dressed as if he was one of the Rat Pack staring out the window. Within mere hours she would be brutally attacked – with the intent to rape and kill – in her own her home.

Grif is supposed to collect Kit’s soul before leaving earth. Fortunately for Kit, he acts on impulse and saves her by beating up her attackers. Now Grif’s in some real trouble with the heavenly host, and has been banished to earth to once again don weak and sinful flesh until he is able to let Kit Craig die and bring her soul home. Only he decides to protect her and help her figure out who murdered her best friend and why in exchange for the ace reporter’s help in solving his wife’s fifty year old murder case.

I really liked this book because the characters are fully drawn and believable and provide some great dialogue, Vicki Pettersson’s world building of Sin City and the rockabilly culture, the whole angel / urban fantasy premise and the story itself was gripping and kept me turning pages. One warning though, there are some slightly disturbing scenes involving forced prostitution of underage girls and there’s a fair helping of violence toward women (by the bad guys). Still, it was very enjoyable and highly recommended for fans of Jim Butcher, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, or Tad Williams‘ newest book The Dirty Streets of Heaven. The next in the Celestial Blues series, The Lost, came out this spring.

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Eventually the seizures were so severe she ended up in the emergency room.  Not knowing what was causing any of her symptoms, they decided to admit her to the epilepsy ward where they could at least monitor her seizures.  Cahalan eventually spent over a month in the hospital before a neurologist figured out she was suffering from an extremely rare, only recently discovered form of an immune disorder which caused swelling, or encephalitis, of the brain.   How this was discovered and treated is described in the second half of her book.

Cahalan decided that she would write her own story, Brain on Fire, after she returned to the newspaper.  Because she had little memory of what happened, she went over the medical reports and films of her time in the hospital and compared them with her diary.  She also interviewed her family, friends, and many of the doctors involved in her treatment.  What they said was so different from what she remembered it was shocking.

Cahalan was extremely fortunate because she was admitted to one of the premier hospitals in NYC, which led to her case being referred to the doctor who had recently discovered this new disorder.  Had she been treated anywhere else in the country, or at a different period of time, she may have been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or some other severe mental disorder.  One wonders how many people admitted to psychiatric hospitals may have a rare or unknown physical rather than mental illness.  The author discusses this in the book, and states over and over how lucky she was to find not only a cause, but a successful treatment. Cahalan’s book was fascinating, although frightening.

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Initially, Jeremy and the task force stop a plot by one terrorist to set off a bomb in a NY subway. On his team is Krina Gersten, also a NYC police officer with some special skills that Fisk feels will aid his team. It is now several years later and events are breaking fast because of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Bin Laden has been killed and the various agencies are trying to examine all the data that may have been hidden in his residence. Some of the computer experts discover what may be messages hidden in innocent looking pictures. The science of finding these messages is called Steganography. Now it becomes a race to decipher the hidden messages and perhaps prevent a new and larger attack.

An event aboard a SAS jet bound for NYC sets the team in motion. A single terrorist is foiled in his attempt to bring down the jet. The passengers and stewardess who helped stop the terrorist are being treated as celebrities in NYC, as well they should be. However, something doesn’t sit right with Fisk. The foiled incident was too easy and Fisk is sure that another passenger on the plane has bigger plans for NYC. He convinces the team that they must locate another passenger who has disappeared off the ‘grid.’

This fast paced novel created out of today’s headlines will keep your attention. Please enjoy The Intercept by Dick Wolf.

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Elizabeth Mooney is determined to break free from her life of poverty and her drunken father. To accomplish this, she sets her sights on Howe Whittington, who happens to be Whittington, Georgia’s namesake. The Whittington family is rich and refined but there is more to them than Elizabeth bargained for. Elizabeth marries Howe and enters a life of misery. Her marriage is anything but loving and Howe constantly cheats on her.

One day, Howe has a stroke while in church. The unfolding events after Howe’s stroke turn everyone’s lives upside down. Now, Elizabeth must contend with a husband who has no filters and must tell the truth about all his transgressions. Howe doesn’t stop there though. He also has the urge to tell everyone else how to live a proper life and in doing so, reveals their personal business. To the shock of Howe’s family, Howe has also developed the uncontrollable urge to curse. The stroke has yet another consequence: Howe is now fully aware of all the pain he caused and sets forth on a path of repentance and wants to repair his relationship with Elizabeth. This turn of events forces Elizabeth to make decisions that will affect her family and deal with emotions she has tried to bury.

Waking Up in Dixie is a funny novel without losing its tone of regret and promise of hope. It is a great novel for anyone who has ever had to ponder matters of the heart and for those who have made mistakes and tried to make amends.

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Erik Larson’s

Science and magic were not always distinctly separated. Magic could contain scientific elements and science could seem magical. And while magicians might use scientific advancements to trick the crowds, the progress of science was so rapid that scientific claims sometimes were viewed as little more than magic tricks.  Some colleagues ridiculed Einstein for his theories and Marconi’s claims were often doubted.  The opposition remained fierce no matter what the young inventor did; no PR stunt or demonstration seemed to be able to do away with the negative criticism of the non-believers.

But opposition died down after his invention, the wireless Marconi system, in the most spectacular and public way had been part of a manhunt that reached from Europe to North America. The wanted man was a Dr. Crippen, a mild-mannered American gentleman living in London, who had (so it was believed anyway) committed the most grisly crime imaginable.

In Thunderstruck, the author tells the story of Marconi and Crippen, and how the two – so to speak – came to meet. Larson’s book can be described (and perhaps dismissed) as creative non-fiction as he actually manipulates the reader. Sometimes, for example, it seems as if he is writing about concurrent events when, in fact, they are separated by several years. But is the research solid? Yes, it is. And is it a good read? Oh, yes.

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Born ugly and unwanted in a tiny village in India, Tilo is discarded by her family for the sin of being a girl. Resentful at being treated so shabbily, young Tilo throws herself on the mercy of the mythical serpents of the oceans, who deliver her to the mystical Island of Spices. There, she is initiated into the priestly sisterhood of Spice Mistresses, sent out into the world to help others by offering magic potions of fennel, peppercorn, lotus root, etc. She works her gentle magic in a tiny, rundown shop in Oakland, California, hidden within the body of an old woman. Here, Tilo devotes herself to improving the lives of the immigrant Indians who come to buy her spices–including an abused wife, a troubled youth, a chauffeur with dreams of American wealth, and a grandfather whose insistence on Old World propriety may have cost him his relationship with a beloved granddaughter. The spices are harsh taskmasters, and Tilo’s life is limited until her rebelliousness reasserts itself, and she becomes involved in the lives of her troubled customers.

Tilo is forbidden to step out of her little shop or get involved with anyone, but of course Tilo goes out and gets involved with her customers. She falls in love with Raven, the quintessential romantic hero–dashing, handsome, rich, and brooding–but Raven actually embodies nothing less than the great spirit of the American Indian.

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Helen is a precocious child trying very hard to appear more grown up than her actual years and her behavior elicits mixed emotions. I spent part of the book feeling true sympathy for her and the rest wanting to shake her until her teeth rattled. Her loneliness and confusion engender empathy, while her treatment of Flora is infuriating.

In Flora, Gail Godwin creates what I sometimes think is the trickiest character of all—a genuinely good person. Flora is what another character calls “simple-hearted”. This is not similar to being simple-minded. Flora is likeable without being unbelievable and moral without being preachy. She isn’t perfect. She has her insecurities, like everyone else, but she manages to deal with them without resorting to cynicism, or meanness, or liquor. She was chosen by Helen’s father more out of convenience than anything else, but he couldn’t have found a better companion for Helen if he had tried.

The developing relationship between Helen and Flora is the heart of the story. Where will that relationship lead? The first line of the novel, which is narrated by Helen, contains hints, “There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.”

This is a story of innocence and its loss, actions and their consequences, memory and forgetting. The themes of this short novel are played out not only in the relationship between Helen and Flora, but in the backdrop of an America doing what is deemed necessary to win a war. The writing is gorgeous and reminded me of one of my favorite short story writers, Alice Munro. Add this to the list of fabulous books published this year by North Carolina writers.

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