 So summer’s just a calendar page away, and you think you’re pretty well prepared. Got a new bathing suit. Got a week reserved at that sweet (and delightfully inexpensive!) little resort in the mountains. Already nailed down a sitter for the June 12 opening of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Your faithful TiVo is going to record Harper’s Island (cheesy but fun), and you’re fairly sure you can score tix to see Green Day, or maybe John Mellencamp, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson. And then you realize you never planned your summer reading schedule! OMG! Uncle Stevie to the rescue. There’s not a dog in the bunch, I promise — well, there is one, but he’s on purpose.
SHATTER by Michael Robotham
Gideon Tyler, the deranged villain of this exceptional suspense novel, is a devil so persuasive he’s able to talk his victims into killing themselves. His opposite number, psychologist Joe O’Loughlin, must match wits with Tyler to save his wife and child from deaths almost too horrible to contemplate. Don’t get into the second half of this book before that Green Day concert, or you’ll end up staying home to see how it all comes out.
QUICKSILVER by Neal Stephenson
Swashbuckling pirates with candles in their beards, a smart and beautiful young woman liberated from slavery, kinky sex, sword fights, double-dealing…and a stirring account of how rational scientific thought was born. All told with a sense of humor. Very cool. And you can follow Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse, and ”Half-Cocked Jack” Shaftoe through two more fat volumes in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Lucky you
THE TOURIST by Olen Steinhauer
Here’s the best spy novel I’ve ever read that wasn’t written by John le Carré. Milo Weaver is a CIA floater agent — a Tourist. His mission is to track down a brilliant hired killer code-named the Tiger. Milo succeeds, but’s that’s just the beginning of his problems. It’s a complex story of betrayal anchored by a protagonist who’s as winning as he is wily.
LITTLE DORRIT by Charles Dickens
His most sentimental, absorbing, delightful novel…and yes, you will like it. Dorrit is as easy to read as any current best-seller, and more rewarding than most. Also, it explains the whole Bernard Madoff mess. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. While we’re on the subject of Dickens…
DROOD by Dan Simmons
Simmons is always good, but Drood is a masterwork of narrative suspense. It’s a story of Egyptian cults, brain-burrowing beetles, life-sucking vampires, and an underground city beneath London…or is it? Maybe it’s all in the drug-addled mind of Dickens contemporary Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone), whose poison jealousy of the Inimitable becomes more apparent as the story nibbles its way into the reader’s head.
DOG ON IT by Spencer Quinn
Fans of both Marley & Me and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency are going to fall head over heels in love with this hard-boiled detective novel, which is narrated by the PI’s smart (if sometimes forgetful) mongrel sidekick, Chet. The story — long on suspense, refreshingly short on bloodshed — is involving, but the real treat here is the point of view. Quinn has invented a new genre — call it canine noir.
HANDLE WITH CARE by Jodi Picoult
You men out there who think Ms. Picoult is a chick thing need to get with the program. Her books are an everyone thing, and the current offering — about a little girl whose bones are so brittle that they break almost at a puff of wind — is her best since My Sister’s Keeper. It’s a legal/medical thriller, but at bottom it’s a story about the American heart of darkness: a small-town marriage under stress. Picoult writes with unassuming brilliance and never descends into soap opera.
Okay, you’re hooked up and booked up for your summer vacation. And hey — don’t forget the suntan lotion.
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