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Tommy Collins is the son of Royal Naval Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Collins. Britain is deep in World War II and Lawrence Collins is attending "Most Secret" meetings.  There is rumor that an Allied invasion will be taking place soon.  Despite the active dangers in England, and the sensitive nature of Lieutenant Commander Collins' current work, Lawrence brings his son Tommy to explore Southampton on his own. While doing so, Tommy sees a girl, about his age. She's acting suspicious and speaking German and Tommy is convinced she's a spy. He tries to confront her but she quickly gets the upper hand and then sets him straight ... she's Dutch and she's recently moved to escape the Nazi occupation. Together, Tommy and the Dutch girl, Annike, will root out some actual German sympathizer/spies, just in time to help keep Operation Overlord (the invasion at Normandy) a secret. I found this book to be rather stereotypical of 'educational' adventure tales. Th...

 It is 1942 and Maria Alves is a microfilm expert currently working at the New York Public Library.  She learns of a plan, put together by President Roosevelt, to send librarians and microfilm experts to Europe to search through public records for information that might prove useful to war effort. Eager to be a part of this, Maria finagles a way in to a meeting to offer her talents.  Being a woman, she's initially discounted as one of these types of spies, but her temerity impresses the right people and she's offered a post in Portugal. There, Maria finds some very useful information buried deep in the microfilm files of buildings used by the Germans for ammunition manufacturing.  She also frequents a used book store where she finds useful books that provide a wealth of information.  She becomes friendly, then romantically friendly, with the bookseller, Tiago, who supports her searching. Maria also becomes acquainted with a powerful man, Swiss banker Lars Steige...

Attorney Jason Rich recently won a large court case, his first, really, despite being a lawyer for many years.  He's made his money as an 'ambulance-chasing' accident attorney. His "In an accident? Get Rich!" billboards dot the landscape around his hometown of Guntersville, Alabama. But winning a major case doesn't mean that his life is back on track.  Not giving in to his substance abuse tendencies is still a daily challenge, and he and his 17-year-old niece, Nola, have not been getting along. She's been skipping school or coming to school under the influence of something (alcohol? drugs?) and she's in danger of not graduating.  Jason never expected to act as a parent, but since the death of his sister (the circumstances surrounding the previous case). And to top it off, the woman he was dating , whom he had proposed to and whom Nola had bonded with, left him after he proposed. Now, Tyson Cade, the region's biggest drug dealer wants Jason to repre...

 Esther is a mother and grandmother. Her son has been kidnapped and she's headed to The Beyond - an alien landscape between worlds. Time and space react differently here. The Beyond would be difficult enough to traverse but Esther and her Hex (think 'traveling D&D party of wizards') have been banned from The Beyond the the ruling council, known as The Concilium. But Esther hears the cries of her son, calling out for help, and she'll do anything, go anywhere, face off against anyone, to rescue him. The Concilium isn't the only danger in The Beyond. Dragonlords and Darkness may defeat them before they can rescue Esther's son. Most troubling though is an old crime come back to haunt her - the reason she's been banned from the region in the first place. This is about as average a scifi/fantasy read as you can get. I thought we might get a fast-paced, rollicking fantasy given its brevity (this book is under 200 pages) but I never felt as though I was involved...

 Gilmore (Gil) Crowell is working on his doctoral thesis - and has been for perhaps a bit too long.  He's doing an anthropological study of the prostitutes of Tijuana.  He pays them for their time and then only talks with them, asking questions and recording their responses. To earn money to pay for these interviews, Gil teaches English in a jail. The income does not equal the expenses and Gil struggles to keep up. But at the same time, he is almost addicted to his visits with the streetwalkers down south despite never taking advantage of their professional services. In looking for another method to pay for his visits, Gil builds the workers a website (or, rather, has one built for them since he has no computer skills himself) but the idea is met with much resistance from the girls to whom he offers the chance to 'advertise'. But things go south (metaphorically speaking) for Gil. First with his job when he's fired, then with his dissertation as his one and only supporte...

The Whimbrel House - a once haunted estate in Rhode Island and inherited by Merritt Fernsby. In the previous book (Keeper of Enchanted Rooms), Fernsby acquired the help of an agent from BIKER (Boston Institute for the Keeping of Enchanted Rooms), Hulda Larson.   Now, the home is no longer haunted the way it had been.  In fact, the entity that had been the house is now inside the body of a dog.  But there are new challenges ahead. On the romance scene, Hulda and Merritt are clearly attracted to one another but neither knows how to address this attraction.  Instead they dance around the issue, not sure if the other feels the same way and not sure how to move forward. Hulda has other problems to deal with.  BIKER is being investigated by LIKER (the London equivalent and home office). It seems that Hulda's boss, Myra, may not be operating entirely within the law, so change may be in store for BIKER.  But the LIKER boss doesn't seem to like anyone, especial...

The 1920's and Robert Peaslee has returned from the War to end all wars to his hometown of Arkham. He lands a job on the local police force investigating cases that the rest of the department doesn't want to handle. Arkham, it turns out, is full of hauntings and something dark and supernatural. One day Robert is called to a crime scene where he discovers the body of Megan Halsey - a young heiress he's met before. He'd been inexplicably drawn to her at the time, despite her troubled past. Now he becomes completely invested in solving the mystery of her death. He begins to live her life - going places she visited, meeting people she met with.  Her diary becomes a well he falls deeply into. But before he even gets started Megan's body is missing.  Is she dead?  Is it even possible that she could be alive? What Peaslee discovers is much more than he could ever have anticipated. I started reading this book twice before but only got a few chapters in before giving up on i...

A retirement home in Czechoslovakia with a very eccentric cast of characters is the setting for Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal. Everyone here has a story to tell, but the residents have been together long enough that they've heard each others' stories many times. What's left but die? But no one here, especially our narrator, is ready to just give up. There isn't a lot of story here - this is mostly allegory and reflection on life.  Even the retirement home itself, a former castle, is part of this allegory ... once something grand and opulent now a bit sad but still useful and hanging in there. The language in the book is lovely and lyrical.  But is that Hrabal or is that the work of the translator, Stacey Knecht? While reading this, I was reminded somewhat of John Banville's The Sea , though I'm not entirely sure why (it's been 7 years since I read that book). There's also a hint of Catch-22 in the humor, but it's slight enough not to d...

 There are three robots who lived together in a house in the woods, in the trees. There is Giovanni (AKA Gio) - the father-like inventor and leader of the trio.  There is the nursing machine, Registered Automaton To Care, Heal, Educate and Drill (AKA Nurse Ratched), and there is a hyper-active vacuum robot named Rambo (Rambo the Roomba?).  There is also living with them  a human - Victor Lawson. Victor spends his days digging through salvage and he finds and repairs a machine they come to know as HAP (Hysterically Angry Puppet). HAP sends out a signal that alerts other robots as to the whereabouts of Gio, Ratched and Rambo. Gio has been laying low but now the other robots find him and take him back to the City of Electric Dreams where he once worked. He is now in danger of being decommissioned or given a full memory wipe and reprogrammed.  His only chance at survival is if Ratched, Rambo, HAP, and the human can rescue him.   But it's a dangerous t...

It is the mid-1800's and Merritt Fernsby has inherited a family estate in remote Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. No one has lived there in at least a century, but Merritt, happy to have something of this magnitude, is ready to move in.  But once he's in he can't leave ... the house is holding him there.  Literally. The home on Narragansett Bay, known as The Whimbrel House, is haunted and holding Merritt captive inside. Hulda Larson has seen this before.  She's an agent with the Boston Institute for the Keeping of Enchanted Rooms and she's tamed homes before.  It's her advice to Merritt to first try to get on the house's good side.  Make it an ally rather than an enemy, and then the two can work together to understand where the haunting has come from and how to correct it. That's easier said then done, though, given the house's penchant for throwing tantrums, and so Hulda moves in to the house as well to help. The secrets of the Whimbrel House ar...

 Game Warden Joe Pickett is tracking a wounded elk into the mountains. A massive snow storm is just about to hit so he needs to find it quickly so he can get back to his truck and home before getting stuck. Just his luck, then, to discover a building in the middle of nowhere that he's never seen before.  A building with massive, industrial fans.  With a body that's been partially shoved into one of the massive fans. And when he gets in for a closer look, someone takes a shot at him from the woods. Pickett can't safely get the body out of the woods because of the storm, but does what he can to come back and investigate later.  But when the sheriff's office arrives after the storm, the body is missing, and when Pickett starts his investigation, he finds that no one seems to want him to look into the matter - not the extreme environmentalists in the territory, not the Federal agents who show up, and not even the state governor. Which of course makes Pickett want to dig ...

Sasha Severn was there the moment the world changed for the worse. It was her father, the last beekeeper, who was taken away, put on trial, and locked up for 23 years for his work with bees. And to make matters worse, after he hid his research he made his young daughter (11 at the time) lie at the trial.  It's more than a decade later, the bees have all disappeared and that means there's a food shortage without their number one pollinator. Life has changed greatly and Sasha has decided to return to her family home (having lived with her uncle since her father was sent to prison).  She discovers a group of squatters have taken up residence and, fearing they would run her off if they knew she was the daughter of the last beekeeper, she keeps her identity a secret but asks if she can join them, promising to earn her keep by working. Hesitant (no one trusts anyone these days), they slowly begin to accept her and they become friends over time. For Sasha, one of her reasons for retu...

Nehal is a waterweaver.  She can manipulate water in just about any manner she sees fit. But Nehal has had no training on how to (safely) use her ability.  Her biggest desire is to attend the new Weaving Academy which trains those with weaving abilities and then to use those talents by joining the newly formed all-female military company. But Nehal's parents have other plans for her. Rather than sending her off to school, which is expensive, Nehal's parents have arranged for her to be married into a wealthy family.  Her intended spouse, Nico, is just as uninterested in the marriage as Nehal - he has a long-time girlfriend that he wanted to marry, but her status wasn't high enough for his parents. For Nehal, this works out perfectly ... once married, her parents have no control over her. If Nico will allow Nehal to attend the Weaving Academy, she would allow him to have a concubine, his girlfriend Giorgina. Of course no one asks Giorgina how she feels about this.  Bei...