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To protect a younger colleague from saying something he shouldn't in a case with political implications, Commissario Guido Brunetti fakes a heart condition. To his surprise, he is advised at the hospital to take some time off to recuperate in Donna Leon's 26th novel in the series, Earthly Remains. Brunetti realizes he should take a step away from his work. His wife's family holdings include a villa on one of the largest islands in the laguna. There, he connects with an older man who knew Brunetti's father and who takes him rowing in a boat he built himself. Brunetti and Davide Casati quickly form one of those easy-going male friendships that is respectful of the other's privacy. Casati, the villa's caretaker, spends much of his time rowing and tending to beehives located throughout the laguna. He mourns his wife, who suffered before dying of cancer, and spends some time with his daughter and her family. But it is the rowing, the bees and the mourning that occupy most of Casati's time and heart. It is the death of bees at several hives that appears to be a tipping point for Casati. He tells Brunetti his wife's death is his fault and he is going to go talk to her. Casati disappears. In tracing Casati's life backward from the time he left a factory and became a caretaker and beekeeper, Brunetti encounters other people who together weave a story of legacy. When someone leaves this life, what will be his earthly remains? What of the earth will remain? As Casati asks Brunetti, "Do you think somme of the things we do can never be forgiven?" Leon has a light touch when bringing conclusions into the story. It is the questioning, and the wanting to consider the possible answers to the questions, that form the strong underpainting in her work. As our hero ponders: Brunetti had spent much of his reading life amidst the minds and convictions of people who had lived thousands of years ago, and he had learned not to laugh at their ideas but to try to understand why they thought the way they did. After all, his own world lived in constant discovery of its own ignorance. The contrast in characters, their motives and their fates is fascinating and provokes curiosity. Seeing the choices each character made in the past, and how it has impacted their present and the future of others, is one of the most rewarding aspects of Earthly Remains. The most rewarding aspect, however is the time spent with Brunetti and Paola, Brunetti's colleagues and the Brunetti library.

Excellent series debut with strong lead character and Michael Connelly's terrific plotting and pacing. Hope to see more of Renee Ballard, who knows how to handle bad guys and MCP bosses with equal fiercesomeness.

Lane has put himself on the fast track during his high school career -- AP, power electives, creating clubs that will look good on his Stanford application. That life is rudely interrupted when he goes to a most exclusive private school, one where homework is frowned upon, eating as much as possible is encouraged and getting tired or excited is the last thing that should happen. The school is only for teens with a highly contagious form of TB. They are prisoners, waiting to see if they survive or die. Lane rejects that. He continues to see his sojourn at the bucolic setting as an enforced holding pattern and continues to exert himself in studies. Meanwhile, at the table of kids who appear to shine over the rest, he recognizes a girl from summer camp a few years ago. Sadie recognizes Lane as well, and she doesn’t want anything to do with the boy who caused her greatest humiliation. That's especially true now that she has come into her own. She is no longer one of the awkward kids, the kids who don’t fit in. She is thriving, finding ways to break the rules and stand up to authority. In a story that outdoes The Fault in Our Stars for strong character voice, drama and humor that do not feel manipulative, Extraordinary Means is a most welcome novel for lovers of contemporary YA fiction.

Things are going well for Kristin during her senior year -- she has two solid friends, a dreamy boyfriend, is interested in life and school, and she runs. She and her father are coping with her mother's death from cancer several years ago. Then she discovers everything she knew about herself is not what she thought, and everything changes. When she and her longtime boyfriend finally try to have sex, it's painful. Kristin is smart enough to go to a doctor to see what's wrong. She's surprised to discover she's intersex, with organs of both genders. So at an age when most people are discovering themselves, Kristin is doing so, but starting from scratch. Everything she has thought about herself she now questions. So do other people when the entire school finds out. Debut author Gregorio, who is a doctor, handles Kristin's situation with kindness and from more than one angle. Regular teen complications of finding the right boy, dealing with scorn and discovering who you can really rely on are woven into the novel seamlessly. Because Gregorio writes honestly about sexual matters, but with great taste, this is on the older end of YA fiction. But it is a novel I have recommended for every high school library.

Addie Moore has been widowed for years. Her only son and his family live out of town. She keeps fairly active but she’s lonely. So one day, out of the blue, she calls a neighbor. Louis Waters, a retired high school English teacher, lost his wife years ago. His only daughter lives out of town as well. Since Addie and Louis live in Holt, Colorado, the setting of all of Kent Haruf’s unembellished novels, where people tend to create makeshift families, they won’t be alone all the time in his final novel, Our Souls at Night. The worst part of being alone, Addie tells Louis, is there is no one to talk to at night. So what does he think about coming over to spend the same night, to sleep in the same bed, no obligations, no sex? Well, Louis thinks about it. And he heads over. Their unorthodox relationship has some in town buzzing and others cheering. But Addie says she’s way past worrying about others and it’s time Louis did the same: "I told you I don’t want to live like that anymore -- for other people, what they think, what they believe. I don’t think it’s the way to live. It isn’t for me anyway." Over the course of a summer, they tell each other secrets and stories from their lives, secure that neither will judge the other harshly or wrongly. This includes a huge mistake Louis made and still regrets. He also believes that mistake says something about his character. It’s not something he wishes for his own daughter. He wishes the opposite for her: "I wish you would find somebody who’s a self-starter. Somebody who would go to Italy with you and get up on a Saturday morning and take you up in the mountains and get snowed on and come home and be filled up with it all." When Addie’s young grandson is sent to spend the summer with her, because his parents are fighting, Louis adds wonderful experiences to the child’s world -- watching a nest of newborn mice, learning how to play catch, going camping and having a dog. Trouble could come from many sources -- their ages, their children, even changing feelings. When trouble does arrive, it is infuriating, all the more because it is entirely plausible. Family members don’t always wish the best, and only the best, for each other. This seems especially true when past hurts become deeply ingrained grudges. Some people just don’t get over things. They let their hurts fester until their souls are poisoned. And then, sometimes, they try to infect others with the same venom. Even the people who love them. Haruf gets this across calmly, quietly, letting the characters and their actions speak for themselves without much exposition. This narrative style may seem too quiet and nondescript for some. But when the emotional wallops come, they are all the stronger for the lack of hyperbole. In this, his final novel, Haruf also has a grand meta moment when Addie and Louis talk about dramatic adaptations of stories set in their town by some writer. But they couldn’t be true. They’ve lived in Holt for years and never heard about two old bachelor brothers who took in a young pregnant woman. For readers such as this one, who have adored Haruf’s novels since that story, Plainsong, it was a sweet moment of farewell

For his son, for himself, for anyone who recognizes the world as he sees it and for anyone who is part of that world, Ta-Nesihi Coates has written a masterful, deeply personal and profoundly moving memoir. Between the World and Me is structured as a letter to his son, a young man on the verge of adulthood. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic who has been helping form a national conversation on the state of race relations and the state of blacks in America, takes readers back to what his Baltimore neighborhood was like. He describes the difference between his black blocks and the ones he saw on his television set. Those people on TV are living the Dream. Their white world is not his, even though they could be in the same city and are in the same country. Black kids, he writes, have to be twice as good to be seen as half as worthwhile. Many of their parents treat them harshly out of fear that they will step out of line. Coates could have died as a teen when another boy pulled a gun out of his coat pocket, but he changed his mind and put it away. As he notes: "Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket." In college, Coates found his Mecca at Howard University. The glorious education he had there, in class and by meeting so many others, is brought to vivid life. Anyone who loved their time at university, who had the opportunity to know at the time they were learning about life and themselves, will enjoy this section. Coates does a marvelous job of depicting how important that time was to him, all the more important because it was Howard and all that represents. (Although Coates did not graduate but started carving out a career as a writer, the education he received there was fundamental to his joy in life and his continued search for knowledge. When Coates goes into a history book-recommending mode on Twitter, the depth of his knowledge is tremendous.) Before the tragedy after tragedy after tragedy of the last few years, from Travyon Martin to Michael Brown to John Crawford to Jordan Davis (whose mother Coates interviewed and to which he took his son in a powerful passage) to Freddie Gray, and on and on, a fellow Howard University student was gunned down by a cop. This cop followed Prince Jones out of his Prince George's County jurisdiction and shot him. The description of the man that the officer was looking for was 5 feet 4 and 250 pounds; Prince Jones was 6 feet 3 and 211 pounds. The wanted man had long dreadlocks and Prince Jones had very shortly cut hair. The officer drew a gun on Prince Jones but showed no badge. The officer claimed Prince Jones tried to run him over with his Jeep, the same Jeep his mother bought him for high school graduation. The mother of Prince Jones, herself a doctor and the child of sharecroppers, references Solomon Northrup of 12 Years a Slave in her talk with Coates. And how Northrup's home and work and family did not matter when he was taken. And how, years later and under different laws in the same country, the wealth and respect she built up and the things she gave her children did not matter. The structure Coates uses in what is essentially a long essay (the book is less than 200 pages) is similar to one James Baldwin used in addressing a work to his own nephew. Coates has been tied to Baldwin because of Toni Morrison's advance praise of this work, and both this work and Coates are now established in the line of black Americans writing about themselves and their society, and how that fits into what white Americans see of our society. The title comes from Richard Wright's poem of the same name: "And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me ..." The sooty details of what has happened to the man in the poem, to what happened black people, to what continues to happen to black people, and how their experience continues to be different from others in this country despite any laws, any cultural changes, are what keep Americans separated. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow and has been replaced by housing projects, predatory loan sharks, voting laws, inequitable education and other shams. But it's not just legal structures, or the way banks handle loans or companies hire people without "ethinic-sounding" names. White people still cross the street to avoid black men in suits who are still followed in stores. Black women are told by boutique clerks that they cannot afford pricey clothing. Black people who do not become shining models of making it (Coates calls them the Jackie Robinson elite) are told it's their fault, despite any obstacles in their way. When Coates took his son to a movie on the Upper West Side and they were coming off an escalator too slowly, a white woman pushed the child for going too slowly for her. When Coates yelled at her for pushing another person's child, a crowd gathered and a white man got in his face and, when Coates dared to push him away, was told: "I could have you arrested." Coates writes he felt shame for endangering his child and himself by the act of standing up for them. This is an essential point to this work. Because those of us who are not black cannot have the same experience, any of us who care about the state of the country need to find out as much as we can, to educate ourselves. This is an eloquent, thoughtful and honest work to use in the pursuit of knowledge that may, in time, become wisdom. It is a point on which Coates frames this entire work. His thesis acknowledges that the powerful always work to keep those without power from gaining it. But America, he notes, was supposed to be different. America says so: "Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, ... "I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard." Acknowledging that exceptional moral standard means recognizing that individuals operate under the burdensome belief of American exceptionalism. It also means that those who expound this belief in exceptionalism need to apply it not only to other individuals, but to the society as a whole. For in that application is the possibility of a new understanding of what means to have those sooty details affect every aspect of an individual's life. He quotes Solzhenitsyn in this regard: "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act inconformity with natural law." Coates notes this is the foundation of the Dream that he refers to throughout. It's how a black police officer could shoot Prince Jones, how black officers could take part in Freddie Gray's death. Coates says that he has continued his studies, in part, to try to find the right question to ask. The "gift of study", he adds, is "to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers." That questioning is a gift he passes along to his son and other readers. The killing of Prince Jones, the murders that continue, the sorrow that Coates's son felt when learning that Mike Brown's killer received the same treatment as the killer of Prince Jones, form the backdrop to the final words Coates has for his son. While Coates is reluctant to aspire to hope, expressing the need to be honest, one statement toward the conclusion of this work is something on which hope can be built: "They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people." Taking pride and celebrating that pride sounds like an honest way to live with eyes that can see into and beyond sooty details, not ignoring them, never ignoring them, because, as Coates tells his son: "...there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home."

An integral part of being a woman is the potential to bear children, to nurture and watch the lifelong joys and sorrows of those children’s lives. Two women separated by decades, whose inability to have children affects their lives, are brought to vivid life in Sarah M. McCoy’s The Mapmaker’s Children. In the present, Eden has a good life. She and her storybook prince of a husband have just bought a beautiful old home. But nothing matters to her because years of trying to conceive a child, including fertility treatments, have not worked. Eden can’t get past it. In the past, Sarah Brown overhears that the fever that nearly took her life has taken her ability to have children. She grows into womanhood never forgetting what her mother said: “Who will love her now?” When your worth as a woman depends on the marriage market, that’s a big drawback. When your father is the infamous John Brown, it may be even more significant, depending on the kindness of other abolitionists. Sarah is not the kind of person to look at things that way though. If one avenue to living is closed, she’s going to find another. Her artistic ability helps her father’s work with the Underground Railroad, depicting maps as artwork. Even if it’s supposed to be a secret, Sarah knows she is helping. After her father’s death, she is the only child to not give up on the cause or fall into despair. She grabs any educational opportunities possible and the attention of the son of a southern family that believes in their cause of abolishing slavery. Back in the present, Eden would just as soon spend the day in bed. But her husband gives her a puppy, then leaves for business trips. He also enlist the help of the neighbor girl who is resilient and handy in ways Eden can only marvel at. Finding the head of an antique doll in the house and the arrival of Eden’s musician brother add to the world not allowing her to pull the covers over her head. Whether it’s the onset of the Civil War and its hardships on families in the path of the battles or the ways in which a modern small town struggles to keep up with the times yet not lose its heart and soul, McCoy weaves the tales of Eden and Sarah into their times. But the times do not take over the women’s stories. The focus remains on their hearts and how they are shaped by the ways they make families. Although many novels currently use multiple storylines, McCoy shows how it should be done -- to serve a storytelling purpose that has great heart and uses great skill. The MapMaker’s Children is a novel that is about love in various forms and how one creates a legacy by being true to oneself and what one holds dear. McCoy’s research into Sarah Brown pays off well by bringing this artist and maternal figure back to vivid life.

The story is vague at first, the how and why opaque as the amoeba grows, as the characters take shape and as the outline of what's going on takes its own time to form. It begins before the protagonist is even born. Little Bit is the first child born to a group on caravan that eventually becomes a commune. He knows the memory took place before his birth -- a group of women, including his mother, washing clothes in a cold river, people singing old folk songs, a bonfire and a small caravan on the move toward their eventual home. Before the skeptical reader gives up, know that Bit knows he knows the story because it has been told to him so many times that it feels as real to him as something he actually did experience. So is Bit's own story. He is, after all, "the first Arcadian ever" and his story "is another story so retold that everyone owns it". This communal passing on of a story is the key to Arcadia, the latest novel by Lauren Groff. So is the sense that, while the novel takes place from the 1960s to the next decade, it is timeless, a tale the Grimm Brothers may have heard to pass along: "The forest is dark and deep and pushes so heavily on Bit that he must run away from the gnarled trunks, from the groans of the wind in the branches." The forest and the outdoors are as much Bit's world as the commune. When things appear at their worst, Bit and the readers of his story are reminded we've survived bad things before. Maybe we will this time as well.

Arthur Puskis has devoted his life to the Vaults, the repository of all the official records of The City at the height of its rough-and-tumble, pre-war days. The orderliness, the routine, the proven veracity of his work provides all his existence requires. Until the day he discovers a file has been duplicated. Ethan Poole is a tough guy trying to redeem himself after a crooked career in the ring. Now a PI, he blackmails corrupt city leaders and loves a fiery union organizer. Top newspaper reporter Francis Frings, paramour of nightclub singer extraordinaire Nora Aspen, hears from a top city leader who has had enough and is ready to sing. This is the setup for Toby Ball's fabulous debut novel. The Vaults traces, in these three narratives, events set in motion by that duplicate file, a blackmail case and a corrupt official's decision to come clean. Combine them with a headstrong, flawed crook of a mayor and his efforts to get a group of Polish businessmen to sign a business contract, and the ensuing crosses, counter crosses, last-minute decisions and long-range plans result in an engrossing story that the original Warner Brothers should have had the chance to film in glorious black and white. Ball keeps everything rolling in what could have been a tangled mess. Instead, the three storylines sometimes intersect, sometimes complement each other, to propel the action along. There are poignant moments and acts of great heroism, as well as sorrow and regret. To say more about actual plot points would give too much away, and each one is well worth discovering. But suffice to say that Ball has not only a talented way with plot, but also with characterizations both starring and walk-on. The Vaults is a throwback to a time when snappy dialogue and personal stories combined to tell rich tales of winners and losers. The novel may remind readers at times of Jonathan Lethem and Loren Estleman, especially their Motherless Brooklyn, Chronic City and Gas City. This is a rich story that has room for orphans, stone-cold killers with Achilles heels, loyal union strikers and unlikely farmers. It has the rich and the poor, the eccentric and salt of the earth. The Vaults also has the ability to turn philosophical and ask questions that go to the very heart of what each of the three protagonists holds most dear. The only problem with finishing The Vaults is that I wish I hadn't even started it yet, so I could have the pleasure of discovering it all over again. It's that good.

Men have been many things over the years -- ignorant, greedy, forgetful, inconstant, loyal, intelligent, hard-working and inspired. To the fortunate, their companions have been animals. When that happens, animal companions represent the best of these qualities that mankind wishes or believes it displays. Such is the case with the quiet, stolid Indian elephant Solomon in Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago's last novel, The Elephant's Journey. Saramago, who died this summer, took the true tale of an elephant that was regifted from King João III of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian as a wedding present in 1551, and turned it into a rambling fable of small acts and, when least expected, large emotions. Solomon has been left, forgotten and dirtier by the day, in Lisbon after he and his mahout Subhro became the king of Portugal's property. The king suddenly remembers Solomon and decides he would make a boffo wedding gift to the archduke, whose good side he wants to stay on. Like Dorothy and her friends getting spiffed up before meeting the wizard, Solomon and Subhro are cleaned up and sent on their way with a large entourage. While making slow progress across the Portugese countryside, Subhro and the military leader in charge of the contingent go from uneasy working partners to genuine friends. In the low-key, half sardonic, half old wise grandfatherly way that Saramago tells the story, the friendship has been formed without overt signs pointing to it. But when it's mentioned as they part, it makes complete sense. Not much seemingly happens until that point but Saramago lays the foundation for what will be in the first half of his story. Then the Portugese army contigent and military hotshot Austrian horse guard nearly battle over who will have the honor of escorting Solomon on the rest of his journey. This is when Saramago's asides and ramblings that shape the narrative show their worth, because what happens may not matter to the reader as much as what the events bring to the narrator's mind. And then Solomon bids goodbye to those who will not accompany him farther along his way. Simple, touching and utterly enchanting. Because Saramago has written the novel in a rambling fable style overlaid with the sweetest hint of fairy tale magic, this is where many readers will fall completely in love with this elephant and his story. When the archduke meets his gift, the first thing this bossy royal does is change the names of the elephant and his mahout. Subhro's musing on this turn of events conveys more about the nature of wealth and power that many large volumes. The commentary on power continues when Subhro is tricked into granting the request of a village priest met along the way, and how Solomon plays his role. It's all to do with trying to score a public relations victory over that irksome Martin Luther for the church, and all to do with how a servant knows his place. The name change and priest's request are part of a whole, considering the archduke changes the elephant's name from Solomon, wise king of the Old Testament, to Suleiman, the magnificent sultan of the Ottoman Empire. To have the sultan bowing before the church, and for it to not be a triumph, is all Saramago needs to say about worth of those who command, rather than earn, fealty. Combine the priest's request with Solomon's earlier farewell, and then the understated story of his entry into Vienna and a little girl is all the sweeter. When the contigent meets the Italian Alps, the journey truly becomes epic. This involves great heart and courage. It makes the ending all the more poignant. The Elephant's Journey is not told in a straight-forward style. Its events and characters are described by a know-it-all, rambling storyteller who wasn't even there. Don't expect traditional punctuation. Saramago doesn't even worry about capitalization on occasion. The result is a read that propels itself forward, taking note of what the story's voice relates rather than the conventions of storytelling, and with it a willingness to let one's own mind wander and wonder about what's really important. What comes through is the power of friendship and the strength of loyalty. Solomon's story is both a trifle and a parable, a fable and a legend. It's a lovely way for Saramago to say goodbye.

Among those hit hardest by the current recession are not the ones suffering the most economically. Sure, some have lost their jobs but their spouse remains employed and has health insurance. They are pursuing freelance opportunities. And even though some, such as magazine writer Suzan Colon, acknowledge that they don't have it as bad as some other Americans who are in genuine dire straits, this recession has just about blown their young yuppie minds. Gracious. While still working at her former magazine job, Colon had to economize. No more buying lunch when she could make do with leftovers and sandwiches. After she loses her job and writes from home, she has to choose between a cooler room where the modem is located or going upstairs to the warmth and broadband. That these choices are treated as revelations of character shows how much people forget within the space of time that still exists in the memory of some living folks. (Just ask anyone older than, say 70, about the Great Depression. Or read The Grapes of Wrath. Or for more contemporary times, download Christmas in Appalachia) Still, these forced economies send Colon to her late grandmother's recipe file and readers benefit from the stories about that remarkable lady. Cherries in Winter refers to how important it is to feed one's spirit by occasionally buying a treat. There was a time when fresh fruit, such as cherries, out of season were prohibitively expensive for all but the very rich. But a time when the author's mother bought them remains an episode that nourishes Colon's soul to this day. An earlier ancestor spent a week's worth of grocery money on a pair of vases that the author's mother still has. Although the author's family is filled with women who put this kind of nourishment above constant penny-pinching, it is her grandmother Matilda who best embodies the spirit of feeding the soul. A can-do woman regardless of the circumstances life throws as her, Matilda never grumbles and always keeps on the sunny side. At one point her husband decides to uproot them from New York City to become farmers. Matilda befriends the ladies of the Grange by promising that, if they teach her how to cook, she'll do their hair and makeup. It's a happy arrangement and many of the recipes Colon finds in Nana's file are from those ladies. Cherries in Winter is slim, even with stories from her family's past and recipes. But this is Colon's magazine background showing as much as anything. Instead of going on in greater detail, Colon keeps things as breezy as her grandmother's standard reply of "Fabulous, never better" to the question, "How are you?" Colon's volume is the kitchen equivalent of spending the afternoon at the day spa or a coffeehouse with girlfriends. Cherries in Winter is a frothy entertainment that demonstrates there are worse things that not having money. There are other kinds of poor, and money isn't the solution.

Irene doesn't want to move when her husband, Nate, gets a new law enforcement job out West. Moving from farm country, Illinois, where both their families had lived for generations, to go to the high desert country of Oregon, well, the calendar may say 1983 but it might as well be 1883 to Irene. Still, they and their two children pack up their things and hit the road. Life in Blaine is just what Irene expected -- hard on them. Hardest hit of all is her beloved teenage son Shep, a dreamy young man who loves music. The day Nate finds Shep mortally injured in their home is the day Irene wishes she had died instead. Even as Irene struggles to survive, and her husband and daughter Bliss struggle to be considered as well, a suspect is arrested and sentenced to death. More than 20 years later, Daniel Robbin has faced the end of his time on Death Row. Penintentiary Superintendent Tab Mason gets the orders for Robbin's execution. In the decades between these two events, many of the characters involved go through misery to emerge stronger, calmer and more compassionate toward other human beings. Without giving away the plot, Irene shows an enormous capacity to become far more than the housebound housewife who didn't want to leave family. Her story is a remarkable one that is told with believability and sensitivity. Bliss takes her opportunity to shine and runs with it later in the story, as do Tab and even Robbin. Nate's journey is one that breaks the heart. And although some of the things that happen in the novel strain the suspension of disbelief, the sincerity of the emotions and the willingness on author Naseem Rakha's part to address the issues make The Crying Tree a story well worth reading. Rakha, rather than preaching, shows in her first novel how flawed but decent human beings confront the unthinkable when it strikes and how they live with and through pain.

A lonely boy grows up loving words, becomes a writer, loses his heart and soul -- one to a woman, the other, perhaps, to a fallen angel. Include melodramatic coincidences and inevitabilities, the best used bookstore ever imagined and the fearsome Cemetery of Lost Books, and this couldn't be anything except the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Ever since The Shadow of the Wind swept across the world with its story of love and loss, set against the backdrop of war-weary Barcelona and the threat of totalitarianism, readers have been clamoring for another visit to the cemetery. The Barcelona of The Angel's Game, Barcelona exists years before the first novel. David Martin, an aspiring young journalist, is given the chance of a lifetime when there is no one else to fill empty newspaper columns. His dashing stories of derring-do, with titles such as City of the Damned, soon make him popular and bring him to the notice of a mysterious publisher. But he also has a worldly mentor in Pedro Vidal, who has closer ties to David than he realizes. Both David and Vidal love Christina, daughter to Vidal's driver. But is she the one for David, or will the eventual winner of his heart be the plucky Isabella, daughter to a neighborhood grocer who grew up idolizing him and determined to be a writer just like him? David eventually overdoes it writing the equivalent of penny dreadfuls and, while seriously ill, makes a dangerous bargain with the mysterious publisher, one Andrea Corelli. Good thing David has his dear friends, Senor Sempere and his son, at that used bookstore. And an eventual introduction to that most marvelous of places that should exist, the Cemetery of Lost Books. Because it's not exactly coincidence that Corelli wears a pin that looks like an angel, and that his Paris office does not exist. So when he demands David make good on his end of the bargain, young Martin risks more than a publishing contract. Although the plot climaxes in cinematic excess as OTT as anything in David Martin's own penny dreadfuls, the love that Zafon has for love, art and literature shines in every heartfelt exclamation of his earnest characters. Some readers will not appreciate David's exploits as much as they did the earlier novel, but with the fullness of time both stories feel like different parts of a continued story. A story that may possibly continue to be told today.