A KILLER STITCH by MAGGIE SEFTON

A Killer Stitch is the fourth knitting mystery by Maggie Sefton.  In this installment, knitter, accountant, and amateur sleuth Kelly Flynn finds herself drawn into the investigation of the murder of bad boy about town, alpaca rancher Derek Cooper.

Who had a motive to kill Derek?  Pretty much everybody.   Derek cut a pretty wide swath through the women of Fort Connor, several of whom are habitues of the House of Lambspun, the local wool shop and knitting hangout.  In the process he left more than a few broken hearts and dark thoughts of revenge behind.  It's Kelly's job to determine who done the deed, and that job is made harder by the fact that several suspects are friends or friends of friends.

A Killer Stitch  is an adequate cozy mystery.  The Colorado ranch country setting is beautiful, and lovingly described, as are the many colors and textures in the yarn shop.  But, the characters aren't particularly well drawn, the dialog is clunky and unnatural, and the mystery isn't very compelling.

An okay read if it comes your way, but don't rush out and buy it.

JERICHO'S FALL by STEPHEN L. CARTER

As Jericho's Fall opens Rebecca DeForde is navigating the treacherous, wintry roads that lead to the remote compound of her former lover--the "Former Everything" as he is often known, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not--Jericho Ainsley.  The former Director of Central Intelligence, Secretary of Defense, White House National Security Advisor--well, the Former Everything--is dying, and despite their having shared only 18 months together, 15 years earlier, Beck is rushing to his side.

Ainsley having many, many years earlier honed his paranoia (as so many in the intelligence business do) to a fine, sharp edge, Rebecca is not surprised to find that Stone Heights, "Jericho's pretentious name for his mountain redoubt," is even more of a fortress than it was when she last saw it.  She quickly slips back into habits learned at his feet, when she was a 19 year old undergraduate and he the professor who gave up everything to have her, looking for spooks lurking in all the shadows, suspicious headlights in the rearview mirror, and potential hidden meaning in every conversation she has.  It doesn't help that her cell phone keeps ringing, despite there being no service in the mountains, sometimes broadcasting a high-pitched tone when she answers it, sometimes a phantom voicemail from her daughter.  Hey, just because  you're paranoid doesn't mean everybody's not out to get you, right?

And she's not wrong.

Jericho is dying, and although he's been out of the business for a very long time, he's got something, it seems, that everyone wants.  Secrets, are what he has, the stock in trade of agents and spies and bad guys the world over.  The secrets are in his mind, of course (the brilliant mind which may or may not have been slipping since even before Rebecca met him, she's told by his oldest friend--or betrayor?--Phil Agadakos) but surely Jericho would have some physical evidence squirreled away somewhere.  Wouldn't he?

Rebecca must sift through the elusive clues that Jericho drops in their conversations, references about their past that are just slightly off and may be intended to lead her to the evidence...and may just be the product of the cancer that has metastasized to Jericho's brain.  She has to figure out first what the secrets he's holding are about--matters of national security? shenanigans in the financial world he joined after he left academia?--and then find the evidence without leading the bad guys to it.

Paranoia and perfidy abound in this delicious espionage thriller.  Stephen L. Carter has taken a completely different tack from his previous novels, which were elegant but slow-moving, and crafted a fast-paced, seriously violent--but still elegant--thriller.  One character after another is first a friend, then a potential judas, then a friend again, then, in some cases, dead--the head spins trying to keep up with it all.  And in the end all we learn is that there are bad guys and then there are bad guys, and that sometimes it's a victory when it's just the bad guys--no italics--who win.

GRAVE SECRET by CHARLAINE HARRIS

Grave Secret is the fourth Harper Connelly paranormal mystery from Charlaine Harris.  For the uninitiated, Harper Connelly, after suffering a lightning strike at the age of 15, has the ability to sense the dead and to know how they died.  She and her brother--that is to say, her stepbrother, Tolliver, who is also her manager and business partner--make a living by traveling around the country consulting for local police departments and people who want to learn the truth about the death of their loved ones.

At the end of last installment, An Ice Cold Grave, Harper and her brother--um, stepbrother--had finally acknowledged the nature of their love for one another, overcome the ick factor, and become partners in all senses of the word.  In this latest, everything they do is informed by this development in their lives--they're telling everyone they know, and most everyone is as skeeved and intrigued by the situation as I was.  Some are downright disgusted, and it doesn't help matters that Harper frequently still refers to Tolliver as "my brother."  And, although Harper and Tolliver don't share any blood, they do share two half sisters, the children of his father and her mother.  Why, it's a regular old Southern Gothic!

Grave Secret neatly dovetails the current case, that of a wealthy Texas family that wants to learn the details of their grandfather's cause of death eight years earlier, with the trauma that drives them, the disappearance of their--rather, Harper's--sister Cameron nearly a decade before.  Tolliver's father, Matthew, has been released from prison, and although his desire to connect with the son he abandoned for drugs many years earlier is both obnoxious and suspect, it helps steer the lovers closer to an understanding of the truth.

Charlaine Harris is a master craftsman, and endlessly creative (although she juggles four different series, each is distinct in tone, voice, and story from the others).  She brings together the paranormal, the Gothic, and the crime aspects of her story neatly, and in a most satisfying way.

PLUM PUDDING MURDER by JOANNE FLUKE

Life in a small town.  It's all so complicated.

Hannah Swensen is the owner of the Cookie Jar, a delightful small town bakery.  Hannah dates Norman, the local dentist.  Norman and Hannah were once engaged, but due to her fascination with another local boy, Detective Mike, she broke it off.  Now she dates both men, in a squeaky clean, crime-solving, sexless way.  They don't mind, because they both love her (and her cat Moishe).

Now, Norman's mom, Carrie, and Hannah's mom, Delores, are partners in the local antique shop, Granny's Attic.  Lately, Carrie has been blowing off friends and family--breaking dates, not showing up to work, signing up for a small business class and not attending--and everyone's worried.  So, Norman and Hannah begin their sleuthing, to determine what's going on in Carrie's life, and to make sure she's not in any trouble.

And, oh yes, round about page 170, there's a murder.

As always, with these coziest of cozies, the murder in Plum Pudding Murder isn't the main thing, nor is the solving of the murder, or the fact that Hannah almost gets killed in the thrilling chase at the end.  No, the main thing is small town life and the people who make it that way.

And the food, that's the other main thing.

Ah, the food.  Read just the names of these recipes (a mere smattering of the many that appear throughout the book) and tell me that you're not beginning to feel at least a little peckish.

Hot Fudge Sundae Cakes
Orange Julius Cookies
Chocolate Raspberry Truffles
Fudge-Mallow Cookie Bars
Chocolate Chip Pretzel Cookies

How is it possible that every one of the people in these books doesn't weigh 300 pounds?  In addition to what she creates at her bakery, Hannah bakes at least one batch of cookies or other tasty treats every single day at home.  Every day!  And she and all her friends eat them.  All of them.  Every day!

And how do they ever manage to get any sleep?  Now that's a real mystery.  The coffee pot goes off on a timer at 3:45 every morning, coffee is drunk constantly throughout the day, and the last pot of coffee is usually put on--and drunk--at 9:30 or 10:00 at night.  No wonder there are so many murders--everybody's nerves are constantly a-jangle from all that caffeine.

Here's the thing about Joanne Fluke's Hannah Swensen mysteries.  They're light and fluffy and they make you feel good.  The writing is sufficient, the plots are okay; it's that darn feel-good factor that keeps me coming back for more.  And as far as I'm concerned, that's enough.

UNDER THE DOME by STEPHEN KING

Under the Dome is Stephen King's everything--including the kitchen sink--novel.  It's got horror.  It's got sci-fi.  It's got corrupt small-town politics--the kind with the smiling-in-your face backstabbers King does so well.  It's got well-realized kid characters, flawed good guys, beautiful on the inside heroines, and not one but two important dog characters.  It's also got the expected amounts of blood, bile, urine, shit, and vomit, and enough dead bodies lying in pools of one or more of these substances to make even the strongest stomach quail at least a little.

In short, Under the Dome is Stephen King doing what Stephen King does best, namely, positing a what if situation and running like hell with it. He draws on all of our most basic fears (fear of the dark, of enclosed spaces, of abandonment, of death, of being different, of outsiders), throws in a double handful of paranoia, adds a dash of conspiracy theory, salts liberally with alcohol, marijuana, and meth, and stirs violently.

So, what if an invisible, indestructible dome were suddenly to drop down around a typical small town in America?  As the novel opens we meet a doomed housewife having her first--and only--flying lesson.  Yup, she and her flight instructor crash spectacularly into the dome.  We are momentarily inside the consciousness of a woodchuck contentedly plodding along the road, just before--and just after--he is bisected by the dome dropping down.  And we meet Dale Barbara--Barbie to all who know him (and yes, there are more than a couple "Where's Ken?" jokes)--as he is unceremoniously stopped by the dome as he's leaving town after suffering a beating at the hands of a group of young toughs.  Barbie is the hero of the novel, the Stu Redman, to make the inevitable comparison to The Stand.  The comparison is a valid one.  But where The Stand is apocalypse writ large--millions dead, cities crumbling, good and evil vying for the very soul of humanity, Under the Dome is apocalypse under glass, more like a science experiment, or even more accurately like a badly maintained Habitrail.

There is so much juicy, sexy, gross, touching, and obscene stuff to discover in this giant, thousand plus page behemoth of a novel that attempting to synopsize wouldn't do anybody any good.  Suffice to say it's one of King's best.  His genius for picking at the psychological scabs of the human race until they bleed, and then letting them crust up and doing it all over again has been given full rein, and it gallops from page one to page one thousand seventy two.

THE POWER OF THE DOG by DON WINSLOW

Don Winslow's third book, after The Death & Life of Bobby Z and California Fire & Life, moves him resoundingly into the realm of writers like Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, George Pelecanos, writers who practice their craft within the strictures of a certain genre but who through their artistry soar above the genre.  Don't get me wrong--I'm no snob; I love genre fiction, go for weeks at a time reading it exclusively.  I revel in it, I appreciate it for what it is, and sometimes I mainline it, like a drug.  All of this makes me appreciate it even more when someone like Winslow takes it to the next level.

The Power of the Dog is a novel about the rise of the Mexican drug trade, from the seventies up to the present day.  It is as much driven by character as it is driven by action--but believe me, there's no shortage of action.  We watch as the American DEA in its early years unwittingly lays the groundwork for a thriving Mexican drug underworld.  Mexico is divided up into three main areas, each run by its own crime boss, all of whom are ruled by an American-style entrepreneur, schooled in the ways of American big business, running his crime world like a corporation.  It's a chilling world in which the logical conclusion of any given business or personal transaction is the one which yields the most money or power, even if that road runs red with the  blood of family and friends, as well as the blood of enemies.

The Power of the Dog is a book that will haunt you for days afterward, both by the power of the story told and the beauty of the words used to tell it.

OVERHEARD IN THE BOOKSTORE

Harried suburban dad, "I'm looking for two books by George Orwell. 1984 and, um, Funny Farm."

Funny Farm, huh? Loved the movie--Chevy Chase, right?