Try Paranormal Mystery Treats for Halloween

Halloween is a perfect time to indulge in mysteries with the extra spice of the supernatural--ghosts, curses, magic, haunted houses and dark forces. I've always had a soft spot for Jonathan Kellerman's best-selling Alex Delaware mysteries set in Los Angeles, so I'll start with The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and his son Jesse. This new contemporary mystery pulls in religious mythology and the supernatural to produce "an extraordinary work of detection, suspense, and supernatural mystery," per Amazon's quote of Stephen King. Solving the mystery of a severed head in an abandoned living room takes burned-out LAPD detective (and rabbi's son) Jacob Lev on an odyssey from Los Angeles to Prague to Oxford and back again. His standard crime-genre investigation is complicated by a mysterious woman and a monstrous being of Jewish mythology (the title's Golem), built to render justice upon the wicked—including serial killers. If your appetite for the spine-tingling is still not sated, read Mateguas Island, a debut novel by Linda Watkins and winner of the gold medal in Amazon's 2014 Readers' Favorite International Book Award Competition for the Supernatural Fiction category. A troubled family comes to a remote island off the coast of Maine, not realizing that their inherited property is steeped in destructive forces. An arcane locked box, a foreboding trail into the woods, a seductive young woman, and tales of a malevolent Native American spirit ratchet up the suspense. Then, for a modern haunted house story, turn to Christopher Fowler, award-winning author of the Peculiar Crimes Unit series. His original thriller Nyctophobia isolates newly married architect Callie in a grand house in southern Spain, a house split between rooms flooded with light and rooms locked away in darkness and neglect. As Callie begins to research the history of the strange house, her nyctophobia (fear of the dark) is awakened, along with haunting secrets. But when it comes to seeing ghosts, hysterical, attention-seeking adolescent girls would seem to be most susceptible. So no wonder the girls at a posh Irish boarding school keep seeing the ghost of the boy victim of an unsolved murder in Tana French's The Secret Place, another installment in the Dublin Murder Squad series. The narrative alternates between flashbacks by clique of schoolgirls and the perspective of a cold-case detective and his partner, who spend a long day and night investigating. As any parent of an adolescent might guess, the private lives of teenage girls, their friendships and betrayals, can be more mysterious and dangerous than the detectives imagine. If psychic sleuths rather than psyched-out sleuths are your cup of tea, then pick up veteran paranormal mystery writer Kay Hooper's Haunted, the latest entry in the Bishop Special Crimes Unit series. For more reviews of paranormal mystery releases, check out http://www.iheartreading.net/genres/paranormal-mystery-mystery-and-suspense-3/

Have You Been Fooled by an Unreliable Narrator?

The popularity of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, now a hit movie, shows that the "unreliable narrator" is still a potent fictional device. The unreliable narrator is a fictional character--sometimes a protagonist, a witness to events or a third-party storyteller--who misleads the narrative audience (and eavesdropping real readers) by outright lies, concealment or omission of information, and misjudgment or misrepresentation, intentional or unintentional, of characters and situations. There have been many famous unreliable narrators in fiction. Children and naifs are naturally chosen for their poor skill at evaluating people and circumstances, a la Huck in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A mentally disturbed narrator creates another type of unreliable voice; consider many Poe stories or Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Characters also mislead to justify or reinvent their actions, like pedophile Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, or the fabulist Pi in Yann Martel's Life of Pi.  There is an obvious utility in mystery writing to an unreliable narrator who can provide clues and red herrings while revealing and obscuring motives, all in order to take the reader the long way through the woods to that surprise turn that reveals the truth. One of the most famous mystery examples of an unreliable narrator is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This year, Sophie Hannah's paranormal mystery The Orphan Choir offers a seemingly unreliable housewife narrator who complains of hearing children singing liturgical music, music that appears to be all in her head--but maybe not. Now if an astute mystery reader wants to avoid being fooled by an unreliable narrator device, there usually are built-in clues. Consider signals such as narrator contradictions, unexplained memory gaps, lies to other characters, and negative reactions or contradicting input by other characters. Be alert when a narrator's story defies common sense, logic, normal experience or probability. But when a mystery is well written, it is probably more enjoyable to take the twists and turns with the unreliable narrator, right to that satisfyingly unexpected ending. For more examples of unreliable narrators in fiction, see http://flavorwire.com/410468/10-of-literatures-most-unreliable-narrators

New Mysteries to Add to Your Holiday Reading

'Tis the season to stock up on mystery novels for vacation reading. Here are a few highlights of my shopping list for anyone planning to cozy up with a good read for the holidays. At the top of my agenda is the best seller The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. The story is set in 1922 London, still reeling from World War I, where an impoverished widow and her spinster daughter live alone in their genteel villa and have been forced to take in lodgers. The arrival of a modern young tenant couple of the “clerk class,” disturbs their lives unexpectedly and profoundly, including a steamy lesbian love affair and a shocking murder. The tale has garnered reviews such as “a tour de force” from The Wall Street Journal, “unputdownable” from The Washington Post and “volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible" from USA Today. Meanwhile, why not try out some debut authors to refresh the genre? For example, Shovel Ready, a debut novel from New York Times Magazine culture editor Adam Sternbergh, is set in a near-future New York City after the explosion of a dirty bomb has driven all but the very rich and very poor out of the city. It's the perfect dystopian hunting ground for the cynical Spademan, a New Jersey garbageman turned hit man (turned anti-hero). In contrast, M.P. Cooley's Ice Shear is a debut with a conventional small-town setting, but her single-mom cop is a refreshing change from hard-boiled bachelor/bachelorette detectives. June Lyons is a former FBI agent who left the Bureau to care for a terminally ill husband. Three years after her husband's death, Lyons is a cop in her upstate New York hometown, where she and her daughter live with her father, the retired local police chief. When Lyons finds a body impaled on Hudson River ice, a body that turns out to be the daughter of a local congresswoman, the political implications bring in the FBI--and Lyons' past with agents who doubt her abilities. Likable mom Lyons soon proves she's tough enough to handle an investigation loaded with surprise twists and gory deaths. No one does mysteries quite like the British, of course. So check out Precious Thing, a debut novel by Colette McBeth, a former BBC crime reporter. The story centers on Rachel and Clara, who met in high school when Rachel was the shy, awkward new girl and beautiful Clara was the popular one. The two disparate teens formed a deep bond that helped Rachel survive her mother’s alcoholism and school bullies. They lost touch after high school, but they've reconnected in their late twenties--only now Rachel is a television journalist with an apartment and a boyfriend and Clara’s life is the one spiraling out of control. When Rachel’s news editor assigns her to cover a police press conference, she is shocked to learn that Clara has been reported missing. Is it abduction, suicide or something else? McBeth's tale twists around stalkers, secrets, betrayals and CCTV images. To add more to your new-mystery reading list, take a look at the 2015 Edgar Award submissions (not to be confused with nominations or finalists) and then check out relevant reviews: http://mysterywriters.org/edgars/currentsubmissions/#novel

In Food Books, 'Healthy' Outsells Tasty Recipes

I've noticed that new best-selling food/cooking books have become less focused on tasty recipes and more on healthy "lifestyle" diets. But it really hit home when I went shopping for holiday gift books for "foodie" friends in September. I started my research with The New York Times best sellers, only to find the food category dominated by books like Grain Brain, Wheat Belly, Practical Paleo, The Doctor's Diet, Eat to Live Cookbook (plant-based) and so on. I don't want to offend true believers in gluten-free, weight-loss, vegan or Paleo diet regimes; I don't know enough to comment. But I wonder whether these diet trends have done more to improve the profits of the food industry and weight-loss firms than the health of their followers. Consider the new gluten-free popularity. According to a 2013 report by Mintel, a leading market research firm, "some 24% of consumers currently eat, or have someone in their household who eats, gluten-free foods," although "75% of consumers who do not have celiac disease or sensitivity to gluten eat these foods because they believe they are healthier, despite the lack of any scientific research confirming the validity of this theory." Mintel goes on to predict that "the gluten-free food and beverage market will grow 48% from 2013-16, to $15.6 billion, at current prices." And what about all the weight-loss schemes? Even if they work, Americans apparently can't or won't follow them because our obesity epidemic is only getting worse. In 1980, 25% of adults in the United States were considered overweight; by 2001, over 66% of adults were classified as overweight. Over a third of the adult population (35.7%) was in the obese (very overweight) category by 2010. Since my gourmet friends prefer books to please the palate, and trying to preach a diet lifestyle is probably not a way to keep them as friends, I went from the best-seller list to Bon Appetit magazine's recommendations for mouth-watering cookbook releases this fall, including: A Boat, a Whale & a Walrus by Renee Erickson (a Seattle chef's seasonal menu); Heritage by Sean Brock (Southern Low Country delights); and Relæ by Christian Puglisi (inspiration from the noted Copenhagen restaurant). For those who do want to stress healthy eating in their book buys, I would recommend first checking out the 2014 U.S. News & World Report experts' ranking of the best diets among weight loss, diabetes control, plant-based, heart health, commercial dieting, healthy eating, or easy-to-follow plans: http://health.usnews.com/best-diet

Reading for Insight on the ISIS Threat

Today's headlines are full of ISIS/ISIL barbarism and American-led coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria. The majority of Americans polled support the current U.S. policy of advise-and-bomb, but the majority also probably have a limited understanding of the region and its players. Unfortunately, I'm not sure policy-makers are much wiser. Indeed it's instructive to read the recently released Before the First Shots Are Fired by retired four-star Marine Corps General Tony Zinni, also honorary chairman of the nonpartisan Middle East Institute. He calls on five decades of military experience and lessons of previous U.S. misadventures to advise on preconditions for successful armed intervention, starting with sound intelligence and analysis. Have we done that? Do we know enough about the enemy and its context for good strategy? To that end, I recommend another recent book by Patrick Cockburn -- The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. The swift and unexpected rise of ISIS should not lead Western powers to assume that its fall will be as sudden, he warns. ISIS, unlike al-Qaida, is a well-run military organization. And, by the way, it should be noted that some current regional "allies" helped birth ISIS, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The ISIS caliphate vision is violently repressive, leading many wishful thinkers to believe local resistance can be mustered if we just guarantee protective air strikes and training. But the opponents of ISIS are weak and crippled by disunity, from Assad's beleaguered regime to Baghdad's corrupt Shi'ite government to separatist Kurds. Plus, there's a method in the brutal ISIS madness. Just consider The Management of Savagery, which is seen by many as an influential guide for ISIS. This aptly titled 2004 handbook for creation of an Islamic caliphate recommends inciting violence between Muslims and also stretching military forces of a target nation by laying claim to vital infrastructure, such as energy sources. The resulting destabilization creates “regions of savagery” where inhabitants willingly submit to a force such as ISIS to end conflict and chaos. The book also advocates use of media and violence as psychological weapons, especially media-broadcast atrocities to instill fear in opponents. The Management of Savagery even anticipates foreign air strikes and urges a response that makes foreigners "pay the price," read journalist beheadings. The goal is to get the enemy to either back off or commit ground troops in an infidel invasion that will bolster the jihadi cause. For more, go to http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/09/10/3565635/the-book-that-really-explains-isis-hint-its-not-the-quran/