5. The Book of Fires by Jane Borodale

The sights, sounds, and smells of a gritty London in 1752 come alive in Borodale’s enchanting debut. Agnes Trussel is 17 and living with her impoverished family in the English countryside of Sussex. Her mother is downtrodden with numerous children that she can barely feed, and her father is constantly drinking and out of work. When Agnes discovers she is pregnant by a village boy that she has no desire of marrying, she knows she must flee her family before she disgraces them. A chance discovery of a dead neighbor and a secret stash of coins helps Agnes to London, where she takes a job with a fireworks maker, Mr. Blacklock. While fearful of her employer finding out about her pregnancy and theft, Agnes can’t help but get drawn into Blacklock’s quest to put color into fireworks.

Borodale does a marvelous job at creating a creeping sense of foreboding and tension about what will happen to Agnes and her child. Agnes is a sympathetic character and readers will soon be caught up with her plight, which Borodale neatly sums up at the end. For anyone who has walked along the Thames, Borodale’s description of a crowded and loud area full of busy markets, rotting food, rowdy pubs, and crime will make people see it the area it used to be. Details about the world of pyrotechnics of the time were fascinating and add to the historic feel of the novel. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction.

4. The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch

Sitting in the Byram Hills Police Department, Nick Quinn knows that he didn’t just kill his wife, Julia, in their upscale home. The only problem is that the police have an antique gun with his fingerprints all over it and gun powder was found on his hands. When a mysterious man enters the police interrogation room and offers Nick a pocket watch, and a chance to turn back the previous twelve hours of the day, Nick knows he has a chance to save his wife.

Readers must suspend belief a lot in this time travel suspense story. The premise is a great one, and at the hands of a more skilled writer, this book would have been fun to read. There are great setups to the story, including a town in disarray after a plane crash where all on board are killed, and some truly frightening bad cop villains, but readers also have to suffer through some hokey dialogue and convenient justifications on how Nick can suddenly have access to cell phones, computers and more when the town is without power. New Line Cinema have purchased the film rights, so this may be coming to a movie theatre soon, where I have a feeling it would work better.

3. The Blackberry Farm Cookbook by Sam Beall

Perched in the hills of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, Blackberry Farm is one of the leading small hotels and restaurants in America. With 9,000 acres and a working farm, the inn has been noted since the 1990’s as the leaders of “Foothills Cuisine” and cutting edge Southern cooking. While famed cookbook author Molly O’Neill writes in her introduction to this cookbook that “Foothills Cuisine” means the flavors and cooking of the mountainous south, Blackberry Farm also believes in artisanal food, extensive research, commitment to local and heirloom produce, as well as seasonal eating. Since most of us can’t afford the average $1,000 - $4,000 nightly stay at the Farm, this cookbook gives readers a glimpse of their stunning creations.

The cookbook is arranged in four sections – summer, fall, winter, and spring. Each section has numerous recipes, and sometimes numerous recipes for one dish (there are five recipes for fried chicken, and three for barbecue sauce – peach, blackberry, and coffee barbecue sauce). Interspersed among the recipes are not only pictures of the food, but beautiful photos of the Farm and Tennessee area. Old fashioned, family-style recipes that are historic and not seen in other cookbooks are included, such as the addicting sounding Apple Stack Cake and Skillet Slaw. Many recipes including blackberries are also included for blackberry fans. Due to the fantastic photography included, this is a large cookbook, more oversized than most, and retails higher than most cookbooks. Think of this as more than a cookbook, but also as a coffee table-style art book of the South. Highly recommended for those who love to read and collect cookbooks.

2. Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

On a cold winter night outside of Ystad, Sweden, a horrific crime is committed against an elderly couple. When police get to the scene, Johannes Lovgren has been beaten and stabbed, and his wife, Maria, has a noose tied with an unusual knot around her neck. Later at the hospital, she murmurs the word “foreign” before she dies, which leads police to think the crime was linked to foreign murderers. Racist hate messages grow in the area, and suddenly a Somali at a refugee camp is shot. Are the crimes connected?

Kurt Wallander is the detective who is in charge of solving the crimes in Henning Mankell’s first Wallander mystery series. Wallander is a striking character, who wrestles with his own personal demons including a failed marriage, a distant daughter who has tried to commit suicide, and a father struggling with the beginning stages of dementia. He struggles not only with trying to solve the murders of the Lovgrens, but with the news that Johannes Lovgren was not the simple farmer that everyone thought he was. Hidden wealth and long buried family secrets could have tempted someone to kill Johannes.

Throughout this skilled thriller, the beautiful and sparse setting of a Swedish winter is always present, drawing readers into a different world. Mankell’s writing about isolation and sadness is extremely effective in describing Wallander’s background, and Mankell also brings attention to refugee and hate crime problems in modern Sweden.

I am a huge fan of Swedish and Norwegian novels, but for some strange reason had never read Mankell. It wasn’t until I saw the Wallander television series that I got hooked and wanted to read them. I definitely plan to finish the books and for those interested in the television version, the Library owns the DVDs. If you enjoy Swedish mysteries, other authors to try are Ake Edwardson, Hakan Nesser, Asa Larsson, and Mari Jungstedt.