Great summer books you’ll want to take to the beach
A comfy chair sunglasses an Arnold Palmer and these books are your ticket to a great season Endling By Maria Reva Set in Ukraine in Reva s magnificent Endling follows Yeva a rogue conservationist trying to rescue endangered snails She lives in her mobile lab financing her work via the shady romance tour industry Needing more funds Yeva reluctantly agrees to help two sisters aiming to kidnap a group of Westerners on one such tour and then Russia invades The story is riveting heartbreaking and darkly humorous and Reva who was born in Ukraine pulls off the neat meta trick of inserting herself into the story without losing her compelling narrative thrust Undoubtedly one of the best books of the year Midnight at the Cinema Palace By Christopher Tradowsky Set in San Francisco in the early s this coming-of-age novel shines with a heady nostalgic glow while never ignoring reality Fresh out of a Midwestern college movie-besotted Walter Simmering arrives in the city as the AIDS epidemic continues He falls under the spell of Cary and Sasha a stylish charismatic couple who bend gender norms in solutions he has never imagined Cary and Walter want to write a noir screenplay that pays tribute to San Francisco s past glamour but sex love and discovery are powerful distractions and Walter begins to realize paradise can t last forever Vera or Faith By Gary Shteyngart Narrated by a precocious part-Korean part-Jewish part-WASP -year-old Shteyngart s sharp ironic novel takes place in a near-future in which liberties are vanishing and old loyalties are shifting The endearing Vera is not old enough to understand the nuances why her Russian publisher father is suddenly relevant he thinks in the new American world order or why he and her progressive stepmother seem unable to stay together She also wants to solve the mystery of her missing birth mother Through Vera s eyes Shteyngart creates a comic masterpiece that questions everything from politics to the way we adapt to change Etiquette for Lovers and Killers By Anna Fitzgerald Healy Murder is an etiquette nightmare Just ask Billie McCadie in this charming rom-com mystery Raised to know the difference between a fruit fork and an oyster fork Billie s sure the knowledge has done nothing to bring excitement into her life Billie wants excitement And romance She wants to be in a Jane Austen novel But in the resort of Eastport Maine in the s the struggle for both is real When Billie receives a love letter addressed to Gertrude and the next day discovers Gertrude murdered at a lavish ball Billie asks What would Jane Austen do and follows the trail of gossip Fast Boys and Pretty Girls By Lo Patrick Stated in a sharp self-deprecating first-person point of view this small town Southern mystery packs a big wallop The story shifts between narrator Danielle s reckless young adulthood as a so-so model in New York her youth in Pressville Ga a place where like Walt Whitman it was us and the leaves of grass and her return to her family s abandoned house to raise her own family When her daughters find a body in the woods the narrator knows it s part of her past one she s buried as if for decades a heavy wire has kept her mouth clenched shut Salt Bones By Jennifer Givhan El Valle is a place near California s Salton Sea where daughters disappear Mal a mother of two daughters and the sister of a disappeared woman has held onto her family s pain like a birthright Her sister s scenario was never closed but it d never really opened either because Indigenous and Latina communities in El Valle are not a police priority When more daughters go missing and the mythical La Siguanaba a horse-headed woman rides into Mal s dreams it s an omen Mal can t ignore good or bad Givhan s prose is lush lyrical and deeply visceral This is a piercing and perceptive psychological thriller She Didn t See It Coming By Shari Lapena Reading Lapena s terrific twisty novel felt like taking apart a Russian doll One character s lie opens up to another character s and so on until each lie exposes a different motive for the disappearance of Bryden Frost One afternoon Bryden left her keys her purse her daughter her husband and vanished Her husband is distraught and the first suspect Lizzie her sister is distraught and obsessed with true crime Paige her best friend is distraught and moves up to help Detective Jayne Slater is sympathetic but really suspicious Soon everyone could have had something to do with Bryden s disappearance Tribune News Organization
