Girls Gone Mild, Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad To Be Good, by Wendy Shalit, Random House, non-fiction, 312 pp., $25.95

If you have daughters, toddlers to college age, please read this book. With great depth of understanding and a considerable amount of humor, Shait tackles the really thorny issue of female sexuality today and how young girls are being primed for promiscuity and an unhealthy attitude about their roles in relationships. There’s good news, however, as Shalit reports that the rates of virginity have risen for the tenth consecutive year. This fact, however, is not great news for die hard feminists who seem, as my younger son observed, to want women to be as indiscriminate as some men in their sexual activities.
Some of the material Shalit presents is appalling, and all of it is eye-popping and insightful. Shalit discusses the lack of close female friendships and the reasons for that sad fact. A laughable chapter discusses the emergence of “Cuddle Parties’ where men and women pay a fee to show up in their pajamas and cuddle strangers in a non-sexual way. One of the rules, however, is ‘no dry humping’. There are even ‘hug shirts’ which operate from cell phones. Each person wears a shirt and either can beam a hug over the airwaves which simulate a hug within the shirt. Slogans on baby clothes are sexualized, and teen web sites dealing with sexuality suggest sex with vegetables and even bestiality. What have we come to. Sexual parameters have been pushed so far out that the boundaries no longer exist.

According to Shalit, young girls and women want more. Dating is obsolete. Now there are hookups which are merely sexual encounters. The author points to society’s direction to girls and women to keep their expectations low and to repress their feelings. Girls are urged to view sex as no big deal. So it appears that the feminist movement, with regard to female sexuality, has resulted in sex being even more available at no social or emotional cost to men.

Shalit has done a great thing in writing this book and exposing young women’s need for more in their relationships. She has done this with grace and humor and perspective. I applaud Shalit for her courage and for championing decency and self-respect. Who would have thought decency needed a champion in this country in this day and age.

Innocence by David Hosp, Warner Books, legal thriller, 416 pp., $24.99

Hosp, a lawyer, lives with his family in Cohasset and works in Boston for the law firm of Goodwin Procter, sponsor and coordinator of the New England Innocence Project. It is clear that Hosp is passionate about the project which attempts to free the wrongly imprisoned. Based on a scandal involving the Boston P.D.’s fingerprint lab which was closed for a time and is now run by civilians, the book is the tragic story of an immigrant doctor accused and convicted of attacking and shooting a Boston policewoman who was crippled as a result of her ordeal. The much loved doctor was sent to prison.

Hosp brings back the very interesting Scott Finn, (first introduced in Dark Harbor) once a troubled street kid who fought his way up until he had a law degree and a spot at a white shoe firm. Now Finn is on his own, sharing office space with his able middle-aged investigator Tom Kozlowski and a third year law student, the lovely and foul-mouthed Lissa Krantz.

Finn is approached by a lawyer working pro bono for NEIP who asks Finn’s help in establishing the innocence of Vincente Salazar, an illegal immigrant who fled political reprisals in El Salvador. Salazar, since he could not formally practice medicine here, worked at a convenience store and treated other immigrants for small fees. His fingerprints, however, were found on the gun that shot Madeline Steele. Interestingly, Kozlowski knows about the case from his days on the Boston P.D. and he knows Steele.

So why is he keeping silent as Finn desperately seeks answers.

This book is dynamite, and I dare you to pick it up and then put it down. No way that’s going to happen.

A Welcome Grave by Michael Koryta, Thomas Dunne Books, mystery, 294 pp., $23.95

This is the book that will put Koryta on everyone’s ‘must read’ list.

Lincoln Perry owns a gym in Cleveland, but he also runs a PI agency with his friend Joe Pritchard who took a bullet in the shoulder for Perry and is still in rehab. Perry is a former Cleveland cop who left the job.

When a wealthy lawyer is found dead in a field, having been hideously tortured before he was killed, Perry is the prime suspect. That’s easy to understand since Perry tried choking Alex Jefferson in full view of witnesses after Jefferson became engaged to and later married Perry’s former fiancé. Now Jefferson’s beautiful widow calls Perry to find her missing stepson and tell him of his father’s death and his whopping inheritance, but when Perry locates the young man on an apple farm in Indiana, he kills himself before Perry can tell him anything. His last words indicate that he was expecting someone with even worse news than Perry had to offer. What could have been bad enough to cause Matthew Jefferson to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger? Again, understandably, the Indiana cops have some questions for Perry. Things are looking grim, and Perry knows he has to solve Jefferson, Sr.’s murder in order to clear himself. Normally, Perry can rely on Pritchard, but things have changed dramatically for the old warrior, who for the first time in his life, doesn’t long for the chase.

The action is relentless, but interspersed is the blossoming relationship between Perry and his friend Amy. It’s been a chaste and happy friendship until now.

Koryta is one terrific writer who actually is a private investigator. His characters have depth, and the dialogue is often witty and funny. More than that, however, there’s a wisdom that supports the words, and an outlook that mature is uncommon in someone of Koryta’s youth. If this is what he can do at age 24, I hope I’m still around when he’s 40. Don’t miss this one.

Reduced Circumstances by Vincent H. O’Neil, Thomas Dunne Books, Mystery, 211 pp., $22.95

Frank Cole went bankrupt in Connecticut when his software company tanked and the venture capitalists who financed him got ugly. The judge on his case was unduly harsh, and Cole can only avoid his mammoth debts by earning really small salaries. This he does after he moves to Exile, Florida, a tiny town in the Panhandle, and becomes a dispatcher at Midnight Taxi. Cole earns an additional pittance as a fact-checker for law firms and insurance companies. As he demonstrated in his earlier adventure, Murder in Exile, fact-checker equals sleuth, but he’s a white collar guy in a blue collar world, and that takes some getting used to. Cole, however, lives in hope that his lawyer, his former college roommate, will find just the right loophole for him to crawl through.
This time out a drug bust at a seedy motel implicates one of the drivers at Midnight Taxi. A series of characters appear at Midnight’s headquarters, a cement cube with bullet-proof windows, to find the driver who picked up a runaway kid who is believed to have taken a lot of cash away from the scene of the crime. That simple set of facts is enough to tickle Cole’s interest, but when the kid turns up dead finding the killer is Cole’s kind of fare. In this he is aided by an experienced PI from Atlanta, an elderly neighbor, his crew of sarcastic and funny drivers who include a Chinese cabbie with a deep southern accent, and an aged gang leader from Mobile.

This is an easy, fun read. A little more local color would have enhanced the action, but it’s just fine as it is for a lazy afternoon. The author lives in Cranston.

Jacob’s Ladder by Jackie Lynn, St. Martin’s Minotaur, cozy mystery, 243 pp., $24.95

Rose Franklin’s husband left her for a younger woman, so Rose divorced him. Her part of the settlement was an old trailer which she drove to the Shady Grove Campground in West Memphis, Arkansas. Here she found a home on the mighty Mississippi and a family of new friends who include a Christian biker gang, a cranky Chinese lady, and an older Southern belle with a long string of ex-husbands. Rose also found romance.

Rose has gotten quite comfortable at Shady Grove, even working in the office part-time. Things are quiet until an old Indian arrives on site, parking his camper in a prohibited zone. Before anyone can explain the camp rules to him, Rose finds him dead in his trailer, an obvious homicide. Rose contacts the authorities, but she can’t help but search the area for clues. She finds a bracelet, and for some reason she knows she should keep her discovery a secret, but she has some second thoughts, so one night, very late, she walks to the murder scene to put it back, but instead she finds strangers poking around. Rose hides in the old man’s camper and finds a secret hiding place as the strangers hitch up the trailer and drive it away. Thus begins Rose’s adventure to parts unknown.

This is another easy read, perfect for a hot afternoon in the hammock.

More books…

Fans of Mary Daheim’s long-running B&B series set in California will be thrilled with Scots on the Rocks, Harper Collins, $23.95, the newest adventure of Judith Mc Monigle Flynn and her devoted cousin Renie who travel to Scotland only to find a corpse, castles, crazy rich people, and yet another murder to solve. (available July 31) Here’s something to look forward to. The sequel to Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a novel about the building of a Gothic cathedral in England, World Without End, will be out in October from Putnam.

That’s something to sing about.