Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins (hardcover, $17.99)

Okay, I'm ready for the third and final volume. I raced through Catching Fire, the second in "The Hunger Game" series. It was a little slow for an adult reader in places (e.g., there was a lot of hand-holding between Katniss and Peeta), but once the big surprise got going about two-thirds of the way through, it was bam, bam, bam in typical Suzanne Collins style. She's so good at getting her readers' hearts racing!

If you haven't read anything about this book, don't know what becomes of Katniss and Peeta, the 17- and 19-year old stars of the show, haven't read the dust jacket summary, then don't go there. Just read the book. If you can preserve the surprise of what Collins does with her people, then that's better for you.


If you haven't read The Hunger Game, read the review a few entries ago, or just read the book. It's designed for mature adolescent readers but adults are welcome.

So I'm afraid that this is the review. No synopsis. No whining over who died. No hint at what the big picture might be.

Enjoy.

P.S. Mockingjay is the third and final volume. I'm hunting, snaring, and tracking down a copy.

Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters

Barbara Mertz, writing as Elizabeth Peters (inspired by her children, Elizabeth and Peter), began her Amelia Peabody series in 1975 with this book. River in the Sky, the 19th book in the series, was published in 2010. There are readers who began reading the series when the first book came out and still eagerly look forward to the next entry. And Amelia Peabody still draws new readers today. That's not a surprise.

After receiving a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, Mertz raised a family instead of taking off for archaeological digs. The character of Amelia Peabody grew out of Mertz's love of Egypt. She began to live vicariously through Amelia, who was a 32-year-old woman in 1884 in Crocodile on the Sandbank. Amelia traveled to Egypt, fell in love with and married Radcliffe Emerson, an archaeologist. The characters age throughout the series. Amelia and Emerson, as she refers to him, raise their son, Ramses, who grows up, marries an Egyptian woman, Nefret, and has a child of his own. Ramses has his own adventures and intrigues in World War I. Eventually the series wends its way to the early 1920s. The Peabody-Emerson family lives a rich fictional life, and their trials and triumphs have won countless accolades and awards for their creator.

Despite having read and enjoyed several of the episodes, I had never read the first book. It was time to remedy that.

Obviously, there were some things that were not a surprise to me. This is the book in which Amelia and Emerson meet, and knowing that they wind up married didn't disturb my enjoyment of the will-they-or-won't-they subplot. It was fun to see Peters  give them their cat-and-mouse relationship without resorting to cute and trite descriptions and dialogue.

And speaking of vicarious … it was tremendous fun to visit an Egypt in which there were still hidden treasures to be discovered and the legendary Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo to stay in, to float down the Nile, and to see Cairo's pyramids surrounded by desert sands, not suburban housing.

Here is the story in a nutshell. Amelia inherits money. In 1884 England, she makes a decision to indulge her desire to travel and her love of Egyptology, which is more than just the current fad to her. On her trip of discovery, she rescues Evelyn, a destitute and disgraced English gentlewoman, who becomes her friend and travel companion. The two women meet the brothers Emerson who are involved in a dig to uncover an ancient, royal tomb. And away they go, replete with mummies who walk at midnight, curses, cobras, chaste romance, and nefarious villains.

Become beguiled by this charming story. Share it with everyone, because it is multi-generationally friendly. It is the ultimate escape.


Barbara Mertz celebrated her 83rd birthday last September. Here's to many more!

In Search of the Rose Notes, by Emily Arsenault ($14.99)

After 16-year-old Rose Banks disappears one day, the children she leaves behind are shaken. Nora and Charlotte are the 11-year-olds she babysat, and eventually the emotions churned up by Rose's disappearance affect their friendship and they part ways. Sixteen years later, a skeleton is recovered. Nora hears about it and returns to her small hometown, to Charlotte and her other childhood acquaintances, to determine what the discovery means to her and the others.

This is not a thriller. There are no shoot-em-ups, wild chase scenes, or crazed murderers roaming the street. There's a lot of introspection and reflection, and there are secrets. Emily Arsenault's book moves slowly as the layers of assumption and mistrust are peeled away. There is a resolution. I was afraid there might not be one, as Nora seesawed between not wanting to know what happened to Rose and needing to clear her conscience from believing that there was something she should have done to save Rose.

It was more confusing than elucidating, but Arsenault intersperses her present-time tale with a flashback of young Nora and Charlotte pouring over the Time-Life series on the supernatural. They and Rose experiment on themselves and have discussions of what the various alleged phenomena might mean. In fact, Nora is discovered to have some sort of psychic "talent," but that wasn't specifically developed, except perhaps in an oblique way. After Rose disappears, the books take on a different meaning. Charlotte plays psychic detective by using the various techniques mentioned in the books to find out what happened to her.


Maybe the girls are supposed to be comforted by thinking that if Rose is dead, she still has a "presence" somewhere or that Rose can still communicate what really happened to her. Or, worse yet, maybe there's a supernatural explanation. Rose believes in aliens, it turns out, and perhaps she has been kidnapped by one.

All in all, In Search of the Rose Notes is a thoughtful book and distinguishes itself favorably from what seems like an onslaught off recent books involving young women with suppressed or forgotten memories from their childhood. 

Deep Sky, by Patrick Lee ($7.99)

I admit to being hampered by not having read the first two books in Patrick Lee's "Breach" trilogy, The Breach and Ghost Country, but Lee explains enough that I wasn't asea when I started Deep Sky.

A breach in time and space has been opened, and a secret, independent organization, Tangent, monitors it. Odd technology erupts from the wormhole every once in a while, technology pretty far removed from what scientists on Earth are capable of producing. There's a suit that can make a person invisible, a tiny cube that allows the user to journey back in time to a memory and to live during that memory's moment, and doodads like that. That's enough to give the idea that this book may not be a typical political thriller, although it starts with the President of the United States being killed by a missile while giving a televised speech.

Travis Chase and Paige Campbell are two members of Tangent, and they soon figure out that whoever killed the president is gunning for Tangent next.

The rest of the book is a cat-and-mouse game between Chase, Campbell, their allies and the shadowy bad guys. The breach is at the heart of the matter, however, so that the ultimate goal is to find out what it is. Why is Tangent protecting it and why do the bad guys want to gain control over it?

Deep Sky was exciting and peculiar. It's plot-driven and doesn't pretend to be anything else, except at the end. Enjoy it for what it is: political thriller and sci-fi in one neat package.