Sharpshooter is the first of Nadia Gordon's three (so far) Sunny McCoskey mysteries set in Napa Valley, and it is the second one I've read. (I read Death By the Glass first and reviewed it here.)

Sunny McCoskey is the owner and chef of a small restaurant, Wildside, in a small Napa Valley town. When one of her closest friends is arrested for the murder of a young wine baron, she turns sleuth, investigating the terrain and asking questions that, frankly, might be considered pushy and slightly unbelievable. But the story and the characters pulled me in such that I was willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of finding out who did kill the arrogrant Jack Beroni.

The title is a play on words: the sharpshooter killed a man at night with a rifle from about a hundred yards, and the glassy-winged sharpshooter is an insect that could destroy the vineyards -- and becomes a political issue that underlies the murder.

More than the characters and the setting, I enjoy Gordon's details, what she has McCoskey noticing about the quality of the night air, the scents of vineyards, the feel of water. I also like the dynamics of the friendships in that small Napa Valley town that bring these characters to life.

I have already checked out Gordon's latest Sunny McCoskey mystery, Murder Alfresco. I recommend these mysteries as hearty and satisfying side dishes to your more serious (or heavy) reading.

Rollins delivers another high energy suspense thriller, The Judas Strain , about a virus that changes friendly bacteria into killer bacteria. As with most of his novels, Rollins provides very human characters with extrodinary abilities.

Sigma force once again saves the world while tracing the mystery virus along the route Marco Polo followed on his return from China. An implausible but rivoting story, the plot commands the readers attention to the final page. A great read for a summer afternoon.

There is nothing like spending the aftertoon with Sigma's commander Gray Pierce as he once again thwarts the designs of a murderous female assassin to ultimately partner with her in this astonishing quest to save Mankind.

Looking for a gripping yarn on adventure? Thought no one cared about teenage boys and heroes within them? Try Only The Brave Dare, a new Australian novel by Christopher J. Holcroft which is aimed specifically at teenage readers.

Imagine a group of Venturer Scouts on a Christmas holiday and they go to explore the hulk of a wrecked submarine. The night before a Russian mother ship drops off a load of heroin around the boat. A group of land based Russian mafia go to retrieve the drugs ready to flood Australian capital cities. They intercept the boys and end up taking them prisoner. The boys are locked up in a convict jail with a lighthouse on top. The most unassuming boy escapes and turns the lighthouse into a weapon against the Russians.

Only the Brave Dare is available through Posidon Books at http://www.poseidonbooks.com/

Christopher J. Holcroft

Warren Adler creates a well-imagined setting - the Catskills resorts of the late 30's and the mafia that populated them - with his historical novel, Funny Boys.

The story ostensibly centers on Mickey Fine, a tumler - or entertainer and activities director - at the Gorlick resort whose job is to keep the guests laughing and amused. Since the guests throughout the week are primarily the wives and girlfriends of the mafia (who come up on weekends after a tough week of breaking kneecaps and teaching lessons), Fine is constantly reminded to keep his shmekel in his own trousers and out of trouble.

Ya don mess wid da goils of mobstas, to employ Adler's sometimes excessive use of dialect for dialogue.

And the jokes, the clichés! Did these ever sound fresh and new? It's hard to imagine these zingers ever eliciting a genuine snort of laughter much less a guffaw, but I'm giving Adler's historical perspective the benefit of the doubt, mostly because I enjoyed the story of the naïve Brownsville goil wid da cinematic fantasies. Instead of accepting the given fate, the usual path of marriage right out of high school - "You're 18! Marry the decent but boring Henry already! Ya wanna end up a spinsta?!" - Mutzie Feder transforms herself into a Jean Harlow replica and catches the eye of the handsome sociopath, Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, or Pep as he's known in certain circles.

As Pep's numbah one goil, Mutzie is treated to status and presents and a summer at the Gorlick Resort where, on weekends, obediently accompanying Pep, she studiously ignores the conversations she overhears and all the other signs that maybe the company she's keeping ain't too good faw huh healt, ya know whaddye mean?

The title is Funny Boys, but the story really gets going when Mutzie realizes that she needs to escape Pep and enlists the tumler's help. Turns out Mickey Fine had fallen in love with the young beauty from da day he laid eyes on huh, and now he gets to play knight in shining armor.

It's easy to imagine this story as a movie, especially with the heavyhanded use of "da dialeck" and with the usual actors playing the usual mob roles. Tip: I found the book easier and more fun to read if I read the dialogue out loud.

Overall, I recommend Funny Boys, cos it's a good Summer weekend read with sufficient suspense and entertainment to keep you turning the pages.

I saw this movie, Bagdad Cafe, about 20 years ago, and like its theme song, it has haunted me in a subtle way. The movie starts out like the song:

A desert road from Vegas to nowhere
Some place better than where you've been
A coffee machine that needs some fixing
In a little cafe just around the bend.

A marital argument ends with a German tourist couple giving up angrily on each other, the wife, Jasmin (played by Marianne Sägebrecht), grabbing her suitcase and walking down a hot, lonely highway; her husband driving off in the other direction.

Nearby, another argument splits another married couple, and the husband takes off in his car, leaving his fed-up, yelling wife, Brenda (CCH Pounder), on her own to run the Bagdad Gas & Oil Cafe, a faded and dusty outpost in the Mojave Desert that's already a beat-down relic 20 years ago when the movie was new.

That's when Jasmin shows up, face glistening from the hot desert sun beating down hard and the exertion of pulling her suitcase on its little wheels. She's wearing a skirt and jacket, low-heeled pumps, and a hat -- definitely not from around here. She rents a room for the night... and ends up staying a while.

There are no car crashes, no chase scenes, no huge spectacles here. There are just these two women, circling each other.... Brenda, whose life is rooted in Bagdad and whose children are out of her control, becomes suspicious of Jasmin, and Jasmin has nothing in Bagdad and  nowhere else to go. Jack Palance plays Rudi Cox, an artist from Hollywood (where he used to paint scenery) who falls for the stealth charm of Jasmin. The characters are treated with warmth and a compassion infused with humor. And there's even magic. This is one of those quirky movies that gives "quirky" a good reputation.

If you've ever suffered from either a rut or felt the tug of wanderlust calling you, see if you don't end up longing for a little Bagdad Cafe in your life. You can get a taste of it from the South San Francisco Main Library's DVD collection.

Sixteen year old Miranda wants a date for the prom. She wants to ace her tests, and to figure out why her former best friends Megan and Samantha are acting so strange. What she gets is an asteroid collision with the moon and a disaster on earth. Miranda keeps a journal describing her family's adjustments as food, water, fuel and even sunlight become scarce in her small Pennsylvania town. Miranda's concern with grades and friends evolves day by day into a desire to survive, with her family, for another month, another week, another day. The sense of her world becoming small and claustrophic is clearly imagined, as the whole family moves into the one room  that still has heat, thanks to her brother Matt chopping wood every day. Miranda is a realistic teen, who fights with her mother and brothers, while knowing how much she loves them. She longs to experience normal life before everyone dies. The situation is dire, but Pfeffer keeps hope alive. The companion title is The Dead and the Gone, the story of Alex, who experiences the disaster in New York City.

The Tree of Death, love potions, and rare wines are all elements in Nadia Gordon's second Napa Valley mystery, Death By the Glass, featuring small-restaurant owner and chef, Sunny McCoskey. It doesn't surprise too many people when one of the owners of the popular Vinifera restaurant dies of an apparent heart attack. Nathan Osborne was known to have lived passionately, as his closest friends say. But Sunny, who had not even met the dead man, was puzzled by the broken bottle of rare wine found near his body, and it's this curiosity that drives her to find out how Nathan Osborne really died.

What the reader will enjoy as Sunny dons her amateur sleuth cap is the snappy yet believable dialogue and insight into the wine industry. This was a page-turning mystery that I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. (Yes, that is an endorsement!)

I did not read Gordon's first mystery, Sharpshooter, but I already have placed a hold on it and on her third Sunny McCoskey mystery, Murder Alfresco, and look forward to reading them and getting to know Sunny McCoskey better.

This new teen novel by Sara Zarr is as appealing as her National Book Award finalist, Story of a Girl. Sweethearts is the story of two elementary age misfits, Jennifer and Cameron. They are best pals and stick up for each other when the bullies at school torment them. They also spend a lot of time together after school when Jennifer’s single-mother is unavailable because of long hours working. One day they share a scary experience involving Cameron’s father and then Cameron just disappears. The mean girls at school tell Jennifer that Cameron died. Her mother does nothing to refute that story so Jennifer slowly accepts that she has lost her only friend. She is determined to change herself so that she can fit in at school even if it means completely remaking herself. Fast forward eight years when Jennifer – now known as Jenna – has a completely different life with a lot of friends and new boyfriend and has adjusted just fine as long as no one finds out what she used to be like. Then Cameron walks back into her life, which forces both of them to reexamine who they were back then and who they are now. Zarr continues to establish herself as a teen author to watch.

Full disclosure: I know Greg Nagan. We are friends. However, even if I didn't know Greg Nagan, I would consider The 5-Minute Iliad one of the sharpest, funniest treatments of some of the Western Canon's most revered literary classics.

The full title of Nagan's book is The 5-Minute Iliad and Other Instant Classics: Great Books for the Short Attention Span, which is funny right there, because the title for a book about condensing "great books" is not very condensed.

Nagan begins the book with a "Five-Minute History of Western Civ," which neatly summarizes everything you need to know about... Western Civilization. Here is a snippet from the middle:

After all the excitement of the Big Scary Monsters, Hell, and the Crusades, things slowed down for a while and Western Civilization became bored. Whole centuries passed while people tried to think of something to do. Finally they decided to chuck it all and start from scratch, resulting in the Renaissance, which was a Very Good Idea.

Following this enlightening and context-providing introduction, Nagan gives us fifteen Great Books distilled through his brilliant filter of humor and intelligence.

Instead of translating Dante's Divine Comedy: Part I in Dante's invented and complicated form of "terza rima," Nagan chose the more accessible and venerably American form of limerick. And "where it was hard to rhyme," he writes, "I made up words." No other translation does this! (Which is a point Nagan makes clear in a footnote about translating the entire Inferno into one canto.)

His version of John Milton's Paradise Lost is inspired; his take on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol will make you laugh out loud (if you're like me); his "translation" of James Joyce's Ulysses is enough to make English majors cheer; and his Jack Kerouac's On the Road is eight pages long... and one sentence. If you're a Kerouac fan, as I am, Nagan's homage might give you gooseflesh at the end.

The blurb on the back cover sums it up nicely: [T]hese fifteen parodies provide a riotous romp through Western civilizaton... from Homer to Kerouac, from Ancient Greece to Postwar America, from the Lyrical Epic to the Breathless Gush.

If you aren't familiar with these Great Books before you read Nagan's deft handling of them, you will be after you've read this book. And it'll be painless, I promise.

I picked up James Sallis's Cypress Grove when I went into the Mystery stacks looking for books by Georges Simenon. I can't explain what about the title or the spine or maybe the author's name compelled me to pick the book off the shelf and read the blurb on the inside cover. But I did. And the following sentence tugged on my imagination: "The small town where Turner has moved is one of America's lost places, halfway between Memphis and nowhere."

Turner, an ex-cop, an ex-psychotherapist, and an ex-con, is a quiet man looking for peace in a small, unnamed Tennessee town. When a particularly gruesome murder occurs, Sheriff Lonnie Bates shows up with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a request for help.

Although this novel is found in the mystery genre at our library, Sallis has revealed more about the mystery of an individual human being, and I found myself more interested in how prison affected Turner than in solving the murder (and then there was a second murder). Sallis writes from Turner's point-of-view:

Doors slamming shut and locks falling: you never forget that sound, the way it makes you feel. That was something waiting in my own future, something I'd get used to, inasmuch as one ever does. Looking back even now, a familiar horror clutches at my throat, squeezes my heart in its fist.

If you've ever been haunted by a person or an event, you might appreciate what Turner has described about sound.

Being a city gal, I am sometimes pulled to the mystique of small towns, which, probably folks from small towns would laugh at, probably say that there is no "mystique," that the whole point of a small town is that there is no such thing as a secret. Even so, I enjoyed Sallis's story, and if Turner becomes a series character, I will read those books.

I liked Cypress Grove -- and, in particular, James Sallis's prose -- so much that I am going to check out his other books. I did a search of his titles in the PLS catalogue, and you can see those results by clicking here .