It has been a while since I shared what is on my night table, so here are a few of the books I have been spending time with.
Since the weather has turned rather toasty here (we just had the hottest day of the year so far), it's always nice to reach for a book that is the seasonal opposite. I am (armchair version) in France at the moment, so I decided it's time to spend some time with Inspector Maigret. I always love a good Georges Simenon novel and the settings are always very evocative. I could find one with a sultry summery setting, but one that begins in the cold, dead of night with a chilly wind and rain hitting the pavement is very appealing. I am midway through Maigret in Montmartre. The story begins with an exotic dancer showing up at the police station telling of two men she overheard planning a murder. Then she turns up dead.
Comfort reads are a necessity these days. I want a story I can lose myself in and as I have a stack of books by Beatriz Williams and she has been a reliable and entertaining storyteller for me, I have been reading The Summer Wives. Summer (really any time in the year) is when I love to spend a little time at the seaside. Set on an island off the coast of New England this is the story of a woman returning home after nearly two decades away. It is a bit of a mystery as the events of that fateful summer in 1951 sent her away, and a man she had fallen for jailed for a crime. He has escaped just as she returns to the island, so the story moves back and forth in time as the mystery of that summer unravels. I like how many of her books overlap with a minor character in one book showing up as the main one in another.
I am nearly finished with Attica Locke's suspenseful novel The Cutting Season. Her writing is every bit as good as everyone has said and why did it take me so long to read her? This is a mystery novel set on a former Louisiana plantation, which has been renovated into a venue for weddings and other social events. Caren grew up on the plantation where her mother was a cook, and which she now runs. One morning as she makes her daily rounds of the grounds she discovers a woman's body, a migrant worker from the neighboring sugarcane fields. As a single mother trying to safeguard her young daughter she is put into difficult situations and some of the choices she makes means a precarious relationship with the local police. So many layers to this story.
This is my year of graphic novels and memoirs, so I am always on the lookout for a particular kind of story. I find that lately I prefer graphic novels over comics. I like one complete story rather than the serial style of storytelling. While I am not always a fan of classic novel retellings in the form of graphic novels, when I spotted The Great Gatsby, illustrated by Aya Morton and the text adapted by Fred Fordham, I snapped it up. I have read the classic several times but it has been ages since the last time, though I might need to go back to the original text when I finish this one. It is the gorgeous illustrations that initially drew me to the book. As a matter of fact I like her work so much I have ordered another book she illustrated.
One last mention-I picked up library books over the weekend-braving the heat because I was so excited to get my hands on The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor, a mystery set in Dublin. Maggie D'arcy, a detective in Long Island, gets pulled back into a missing person investigation. Her cousin went missing in Ireland 23 years before, never to be seen again and presumed murdered. When another woman goes missing and Erin's scarf is found Maggie returns to Ireland to try to find out what happened all those years before. I have only just started and so far it seems quite promising to be a very good read indeed. The author has written a few installments in a previous mystery series set in Vermont, of which I read the first one ages ago and perhaps it is time to revisit it as well.
Are you reading something really good at the moment? Or waiting for something really good to be released (I have a healthy list of forthcoming books that I am in line for at the library personally--will tell you about them soon)?