Don't Forget Father's Day is June 15

Need a gift for Dad? Would you like to treat him to new mystery every month for the rest of the year? Then we have the perfect gift for you, a gift that lasts the year though.

MYSTERY-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

With this club there is no single selection. Instead we collect a member profile and match it. The monthly selection can be tailored to any taste and budget. It can be a paperback or a hardcover. Can be monthly or bimonthly. In fact there are few limitations. Selections can be from the ranks of the traditional mystery or any other genre the recipient would prefer.

This club makes a terrific gift idea: once a month a book and shipping is charged to the giver’s card and the selection is then mailed to the recipient. While most often membership is a gift, some people enroll themselves into this premier club to get a regular, hand-picked, surprise treat!

Contact pat@poisonedpen.com or phone (888 560 9919) or (480 947-2974)

Or good book makes a great gift and Andrei Cherny had the forsight to drop by and sign his book, The Candy Bombers, early so we could offer it for father’s day. It’s the perfect book for Dad. Indeed I’m getting mine a copy.

So who were The Candy Bombers?
Well, they were a group of airmen during the Berlin Airlift who followed the lead of a young 27-year-old pilot and started dropping candy tied to little parachutes to the children of Berlin.

"On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, Andrei Cherny tells a remarkable story with profound implications for the world today. In the tradition of the best narrative storytellers, he brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat, but changed how the world viewed the United States, and set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and America’s victory in the Cold War."

If you’d like to meet Andrei Cherny he signs The Candy Bombers , Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 07:00 pm

Alan Furst's.The Spies of Warsaw (Random). Shifting his focus to 1937 Poland, and envisioning 20 spies at work in Warsaw, Furst continues his epic evocation of a Europe hurtling towards war, confused loyalties, self-interest at war with idealism, minor and major sins, wrenching love stories. Starred from Publishers Weekly
Furst (/The Foreign Correspondent/) solidifies his status as a master of historical spy fiction with this compelling thriller set in 1937 Poland. Col. Jean-François Mercier, a military attaché at the French embassy in Warsaw who runs a network of spies, plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with his German adversaries. When one of Mercier’s main agents, Edvard Uhl, an engineer at a large Düsseldorf arms manufacturer who’s been a valuable source on the Nazis’ new weapons, becomes concerned that the Gestapo is on to him, Mercier initially dismisses Uhl’s fears. Mercier soon realizes that the risk to his spy is genuine, and he’s forced to scramble to save Uhl’s life. The colonel himself later takes to the field when he hears reports that the German army is conducting maneuvers in forested terrain. Even readers familiar with the Germans’ attack through the Ardennes in 1940 will find the plot suspenseful. As ever, Furst excels at creating plausible characters and in conveying the mostly tedious routines of real espionage.

Or If Dad is a fan of the open range give him a copy of Craig Johnson’s new mystery, Another Man's Moccasins


When the body of a young Vietnamese woman is found alongside the interstate in Absaroka County, Wyoming, Sheriff Walt Longmire is determined to discover the identity of the victim and is forced to confront the horrible similarities of this murder to that of his first homicide investigation as a marine in Vietnam. To complicate matters, Virgil White Buffalo, a homeless Crow Indian, is found living in a nearby culvert and in possession of the young woman's purse.

There are only two problems with what appears to be an open-and-shut case. One, the sheriff doesn't think Virgil White Buffalo—a Vietnam vet with a troubling past—is a murderer. And two, the photo that is found in the woman's purse looks hauntingly familiar to Walt.

I really enjoyed this fresh mystery.