This superb debut novel is perfectly constructed and executed by a former producer and television writer. This is the story of Violet Parry, a lifelong sophisticate who speaks several languages, a woman for whom elegance and good taste are measures of worth. She has a faithful millionaire husband who is a genius in the music industry, and a baby daughter whose constant demands are met by a Latina nanny who barely speaks English. They live in an architecturally significant home in Los Angeles where they park their Mercedes and Bentley. Violet spends her days spending, and she is desperately unhappy. Out of work and out of her own funds, Violet, a non-working writer, is on the prowl for more. What she finds is a down and out musician who's missing a significant tooth and who has hepatitis C and a mentally ill girlfriend. Violet finds her grand obsession.

Meanwhile her sister-in-law Sally is plotting to get the man of her dreams, and if he's a bit recalcitrant, no matter, he'll soon be caught up in Sally's delusions.

Violet's husband David is confounded by the changing of his well ordered world. A generous and caring man, he is nonetheless generally dismissive of Violet. He takes her competence and fidelity for granted, but not for much longer.
Is it possible for this trio of the spoiled, shallow, and stunted to gain their emotional footing? Oh yes, and Semple's book illustrates the different paths we take toward growth. For some of us it's God, for David Parry it's yoga and an uncomfortable stint in a sweat lodge. For Violet and Sally, the magnitude of their errors form the broad staircase up to glorious redemption.

This is a smashing novel, memorable and funny, wise and timely. In the end, it is about what love is and what loves does.

How able are we to survive extraordinary crises? In a pleasant conversational tone Ben Sherwood offers stories from people who have not just survived but flourished after horrific experiences. One woman's chest is pierced by a knitting needle, an occurrence which saves her life. There are Holocaust survivors, a woman attacked by a cougar and many more dramatic stories of survival. A woman from Amesbury enters her home and just knows something is wrong. An intruder tries to kill her, but she fights back. An inner city youth hiking at Mount Doublehead in New Hampshire is frightened to death when he encounters a bear. There is the terrible tragedy of the Central Park jogger who was raped and beaten so badly that one of her doctors thought it would be a mercy if she died. So how come some make it and some don't?

People of faith, according to Sherwood, live longer, and faith is one of the key survival tools he lists together with hope, adaptability and others. The more a person attends church, the longer he lives. The book provides a test to measure our chances for survivability. It is interesting to note that the U.S. is not even in the top ten countries for life expectancy, but there are factors like the will to live that can turn tragedies into hopeful tales of survivorship.

Sherwood provides a valuable service by illustrating how fear can work for us in saving our own lives. Even if just reading about others' horrible travails makes you fearful, take heart, because this book is helpful and optimistic. It is an examination of what we're made of emotionally, and how we can use what we have to transcend very bad moments in time.

Truly Plaice was born a giant. Her mother died giving birth to her though she would have died anyway from breast cancer. Truly's older sister Serena Jane, however, was a golden and lovely child, so when their father died Serena Jane was taken in and coddled by the kind but uptight minister's wife while Truly was accepted into a family of dirt poor farmers with a love of gambling and a careworn daughter about Truly's age.

We lumber along through Truly's life as an outcast and aberration of nature. As in any life, however, there are betrayals, disappointments, unavoidable responsibilities, grave decisions, and ultimate triumphs, the rewards received for faithfulness in overcoming monumental challenges. Because Truly is marginalized, she is free to live her life without too much scrutiny, and that may be the only gift she received at birth.

Baker's intriguing debut novel might have veered toward sentimentality for this poor creature, but no, Baker imbues Truly with raw intelligence, warmth, rage, the desires of every woman's heart, and then she sets her down in morally decisive circumstances from which Truly emerges as neither immune nor innocent. Truly Plaice, in the end, is a survivor primarily because the author chose to make her real, a woman who assumed her place in life even if her size caused her to knock a few people out of their seats to accommodate her. What Baker skillfully tells us is that 'different' doesn't mean unworthy; it just means different.

It's embarrassing to admit I've never before read a book by this prolific author, but I'm a fan now.

A young woman asks the police to find her father. The problem is he vanished about 25 years ago during the terrible miners' strike in Scotland in the mid-eighties. Her son is dying of leukemia; there are no bone marrow donors; and she is desperate to find the man who can restore life to her beloved child. Inspector Karen Pirie of the cold case squad takes on the matter, a decision that will take her back in time to a kidnapping gone bad when another child's mother is killed after her wealthy father hands over the ransom cash. No trace has ever been found of the child, a boy.

Pirie is an interesting character, tough and a little dumpy, but brilliant and extraordinarily perceptive. She doesn't care who she offends in her pursuit of the truth. She is enormously appealing, particularly to her very attractive partner.

Mc Dermid offers readers a glimpse into the desperate plight of the miners and the culture of the job. Living in small towns, struggling for every gain, the miners were devastated when the British government broke the power of the trade unions and sent proud men out of the area to work elsewhere as scabs. Because of strong cultural prohibitions against scabbing, they could never return to the villages where they were born. The wives they left behind were forced to deal with shame and deprivation.

Mc Dermid is a master. Her work has depth. She presents her characters within the context of their flaws while eviscerating those unworthy of her compassion. This is a compelling read.

Jefferson Bass is the crack writing team of journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass, founder of The Body Farm, a landmark Tennessee facility that tracks time of death by monitoring the decomposition of cadavers on site. Together they have created a unique series featuring Dr. Bill Brockton (Bass).

This fascinating fourth installment takes readers to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the Manhattan Project. Located 25 miles north of Knoxville, Oak Ridge became a city of science, attracting thousands of workers in this country's ultimately too successful attempt to create the atomic bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A man is found frozen in the pool of a rundown local hotel. Bass takes the corpse to the University of Tennessee's morgue for autopsy only to find the man died from radiation poisoning, leaving the personnel who worked to discover cause of death critically exposed as well.

As Brockton follows leads in Oak Ridge he meets a beautiful, intriguing, and helpful librarian and a very old woman whose memory goes in and out, except perhaps when she speaks with Brockton about her days working on the project. While some of her stories are beguiling, others are not. She tells the story of the ugly segregation of blacks at Oak Ridge and how she penetrated the veil of separation for her own unfortunate motives.

Part of the excitement here is being shown remarkable new technologies that assist crime fighters like an instrument that can sniff out death. It is a tool Brockton will use to unearth a sixty-year old corpse.

Jefferson's writing is fresh and clean. We get a practical perspective of what life was like at mysterious Oak Ridge, the daily grind at the factory of death and destruction.

For forensic science and history buffs, this is nirvana