May 15, 2008

	Mummy Dearest by Joan Hess On a honeymoon trip to Luxor, Egypt, with her new husband, Lt. Peter Rosen, teenage daughter Caron, and Caron's best friend Inez, Arkansas bookseller Claire Malloy suddenly finds her honeymoon turned upside down when the two girls are chased through back alleys by unknown pursuers and a blonde college student is kidnapped by two young men on horseback. [Also available in book-on-cd format.]
	Organize Your Corpses by Mary Jane Maffani Charlotte Adams is a professional organizer. Nothing is out of place in her closets--but her life's a mess. So she's dumped her cheating fiance, moved back home to Woodbridge, New York, and started making up to-do lists--some of which include solving the occasional murder. This first title of a new series featured tips on getting organized.
	A Deadly Yarn by Maggie Sefton Knitter Kelly Flynn is thrilled that her friend Allison is joining a New York designer's studio. But when Allison's new life ends before it even begins, Kelly starts to unravel Allison's messy, fast-track social circle. Includes a knitting pattern and recipe.
	The Anatomists by Hal McDonald If they want to truly learn about the human body, London medical students Edward Montague and Jean-Claude Legard have no choice but to become common criminals. The authorities have long looked the other way as budding anatomists dug up fresh graves. But Edward and Jean-Claude still greet the task of defiling the final resting place of Abigail Darcy with unease, especially when they discover that the cadaver stolen from the graveyard is not the late Mrs. Darcy but a man—and that he's been murdered!
	A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley In the aftermath of the murder of an anonymous victim, assistant superintendent David Bengu begins his career on Botswana, where his convivial passions and determined methods earn him a local nickname that likens him to a hippopotamus.
	The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil Puckish and erudite, Kurzweil's new novel is a book about books, and about people who live through books. Henry James Jesson III, the kind of wealthy eccentric who seems to exist only to send other men on wild-goose chases, hires Alexander Short, a down-on-his-luck librarian, to help solve the mystery of an eighteenth-century cabinet of wonders that is missing one of its objects. Eager to escape his problems with his wife, a French artist and pop-up-book designer, Short discovers that the missing item is a fantastically precise timepiece that allegedly belonged to Marie Antoinette, and he is soon consumed by the quest for the watch. Kurzweil's intricately constructed novel has no shortage of esoterica, and the author's fondness for sexual comedy supplies a welcome counterweight. -- from The New Yorker
	The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster It all begins when a Vermont English professor, paralyzed with grief over the loss of his wife and young sons in a plane crash, sees a clip of silent film star and director Hector Mann’s witty shtick on television and laughs for the first time in months. David embarks on an intense study of Mann’s nearly forgotten work, an arduous quest given the fact that Mann disappeared at the peak of his powers, then ends up embroiled in Mann’s complicated and tragic secret life after a woman with a prominent birthmark and a gun takes him to New Mexico. Auster limns Mann’s many-layered cinematic and earthly worlds in mesmerizing and voluptuous detail within an artful, poignantly metaphysical, and delectably Hitchcockian tale of mayhem, murder, and myriad illusions within illusions. -- from Booklist Review [Also available in unabridged audiotape format.]