Some Shocking Information From Author Leighton Gage

Leighton was recently at our store to sign his first book Blood of the Wicked.

Here is a startling article from him:

"How many fiction titles did you go through last year? For most people reading a book a year seems to be too much:

• 80% of American families didn’t buy or read a single book last year. The remaining 20% are classified as “regular readers”.

• Of all readers, only a little more than half read fiction.So, if you haven’t already done so, give yourself a pat on the back. As a “regular reader of fiction”, you’re a member of an elite group that doesn’t exceed 10% of the U.S. population. And to be “a regular reader of fiction”, you only have to read a single book a year. It gets worse. If you’re reading a book a month, you’re reading at what one scholar called a “hugely disproportionate” level. Sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it? Statistically, though, he’s right..."

Wow, I guess I am a book geek, and have always been one, I'm glad to say. The fact that my children also read makes me even gladder still since it seems the general population has not discovered the power of fiction. I mean, who doesn't want to be that gardener who digs up the body or the cook who trips over the corpse? On Sunday the store was packed with sci-fi fans who came from all across the state to meet their hero, Jim Butcher. Sigh, it makes me sad to think the majority has not discovered the magic of fiction...

Kate Mosse's Sepulche signed

Kate Mosse author of Labyrinth ($15) Is signing her new book Sepulchre ($26) with us on April 09. Mosse embraces history in her “fragments tossed by the tide.” Her inspiration is the poem Sépulture by Charles Baudelaire and the fragments in a tale that moves back and forth from 1891 to 2007 include composer Claude Debussy, the Vernier Tarot, the landscape of Rennes-les-Bains, not far from Rennes-le-Chateau (and the demon Asmodeus) highlighted in Dan Brown’s work. The lovely and innocent young Leonie, her enigmatic brother, Anatole, and her beautiful and frankly notorious widowed mother Marguerite, mistress of a general, a riot at the Paris premiere of Lohengrin staged by French nationalists still angered by the Franco-Prussian war, a syphilitic Victor Constant, and a vaster cast and panorama. It all devolves upon Meredith Martin, a modern woman seeking the key to her own complex legacy by researching a biography of Debussy. A big, leisurely, rich read.

Death in Venice

The Veneto on the mainland across from Venice is a beautiful area with some extraordinary architecture. While you are waiting for Donna Leon's latest novel (see below), why not visit it in its Baroque glory? The wonderful mysteries of Beverle Graves Myers depict the 18th Century Venice, past its heyday as a mercantile empire as trade has shifted to the Atlantic, but still a maritime power, a city of luxury and culture, a city loving opera. Singer Tito Amato is able to move through the strata of society easily, his passport being his golden soprano voice. So when a wealthy couple—the wife has social pretensions—decide to stage an opera in their Veneto country mansion, Tito is a principal singer in the cast.

The set-up for Iron Tongue of Midnight(Poisoned Pen $25 Signed) is thus that of an Agatha Christie country house murder: a party assembled, motives galore, a crime, a circle of suspects, alibis, and a sleuth among the guests (Tito). Myers is a great admirer of the work of Robert Barnard who you may recall wrote three mysteries centered on Mozart under the name Bernard Bastable. So there's a bit of Barnard here, too. I like the importance of the bell—hence the title and its "iron tongue."

Tito's adventures began in Interrupted Aria ($15), a book praised by Ross King and set in Venice's theaters. for me on these levels.

. The Painted Veil ($15) takes you into the city's ghetto, that old iron foundry girdled by canals where some of Europe's Jews were allowed to settle, as Tito not only solves a murder but falls in love with a rebellious daughter of the Ghetto. In Cruel Music($15), Tito is blackmailed by the Doge into joining the household of an influential Cardinal in Rome in hopes of influencing an imminent Papal election. The hold over Tito is his brother Alexander, a trader who has been illegally dealing with the Golden Porte in Istanbul (treason by Venetian law). Other series characters include Tito's sister, his friend an English painter, who evokes that whole Grand Tour concept, and rival artists.

I read the Thomas Mann novel as part of a course on the Modern Theological Novel as an undergraduate, one of the most amazing literary journeys I ever took, and side by side with an entire quarter on Goethe's Faust taught by an exceptional German scholar. While I read for entertainment, I read for style, which both German gents had in spades, and for content, for a trip inside a world I might not otherwise enter, to learn new things, to be made to think.

The work of Donna Leon, 25 years an American passionate for opera residing in Venice, works for me on these levels. Girl of His Dreams ($40, Grove Atlantic $24 May), her latest case for Commissario Guido Brunetti, a survival (so far) of the bureaucracy and politics of the city's police, takes readers out of Venice once or twice and over to the mainland, the Veneto, into the gypsy camps. A girl has died of a fall in Venice, a girl engaged in robbing a residence. Who pushed her, if anyone? Her youthful companions in crime? More to the point, and more tragically, who will miss her? Leon's mystery becomes a voice for throwaway children. One reason to admire Brunetti is that despite the necessary compromises of the job, and some cynicism, he cares.

The island of glass, Murano, is easily reached by vaporetto from the city. At one time its foundries were central to Venice's economy. Today they are aimed more at the tourist trade. For two wonderful looks at Murano today, bearing its past in mind: David Hewson, The Lizard's Bite($6.99) and Donna Leon's Through a Glass Darkly(7.99). Both are highly recommended, even better if read together.

Hewson earlier penned a today-and-then literary mystery filled with Vivaldi in Lucifer's Shadow ($14).

For an aesthete's look at modern Venice, Fulbright scholar/novelist/ university lecturer Edward Sklepowich's Frail Barrier
(Severn $28), latest for literary biographer and amateur sleuth Urbino Macintyre and his dear friend Barbara, the Countessa Capo-Zendrini,

And for a truly chilling look at Venice's World War II history, you cannot do better than Joseph Kanon's espionage gem Alibi($14) and its record of betrayals. Kanon, like Alan Furst, has a genius for recreating the era and a grasp of its politics, ideals tarnished and bright, loyalties and agendas, that truly make you feel like a citizen of the time.

Mo Hayder's new book Ritual

When police diver, Flea Marley, discovers a severed human hand in Bristol's floating harbor she joining forces with DI Jack Caffrey, (Hayder’s character from Birdman and The Treatment) recently seconded to the Major Crime Investigation unit. Jack is still attempting to come to terms with the murder of his young brother, by a neighborhood pedophile. The severed hands are those of a young heroin addict who has recently gone missing from the Bristol drugs scene and it appears that they were removed while he was still alive. Jack and Flea form an uneasy alliance, and delve into a an investigation that lead them into Bristol’s underworld, where drug addiction is rampant, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil prowls the night feeding off the fear and flesh of others.

Ritual ($42)is the opening novel in Mo Hayder’s Walking Man

Jim Butcher Signing Small Favor, Dresden Files Book 10

Sunday April 6th at 2 pm
Jim Butcher Signing Small Favor , Dresden Files Book 10 Butcher pits Harry Dresden, a Philip Marlowe for today (OK, think Buffy the Vampire Slayer a bit), against a nightmarish foe. It’s all thanks to Harry’s debt to Mab, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, the Queen of Air and Darkness. She’s calling in her marker for just one small favor….

Jim says, "Small Favor. Because, y'know, Harry still owes two."

No one's tried to kill Harry Dresden for almost an entire year, and his life finally seems to be calming down. For once, the future looks fairly bright. But the past casts one hell of a long shadow.

An old bargain has placed Harry in debt to Mab, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, the Queen of Air and Darkness-and she's calling in her marker. It's a small favor he can't refuse...one that will trap Harry Dresden between a nightmarish foe and an equally deadly ally, and one that will strain his skills-and loyalties-to their very limits.

It figures. Everything was going too well to last...

This is a new Hardcover from Roc publishing, April 1st, 2008.

Murder in the Modern West

McManus, Patrick. Avalanche (SimonSchuster $14).

Humorist McManus stole all our hearts with The Blight Way ($14), a romp filled with quirky characters, ready and rowdy wit, and a cast who made perfect foils for an outrageous plot. Sheriff Bo Tully, his father and predecessor in office Pap, can't really draw a line between the good guys and the not so good in Blight County, Idaho. Nor can they observe the niceties of police procedure, especially when a body turns up at the ranch of a family of ex-cons.

PW noted that "behind his hayseed cop exterior, Bo is smart, sneaky and relentless. Add lots of quirky suspects, criss-crossing motives and artery-clogging meals at Dave's House of Fry, and McManus delivers a brisk, hilarious smalltown cop mystery."

Avalanche is more a confederacy of dunces than a whodunit. Bo goes up against frat boys, and old flame, and a batch of blue bloods when all of them are trapped in a remote mountain lodge by an avalanche. Their cabin fever makes solving the murder of a fellow guest a welcome distraction….

Miller, Susan Cummins. Hoodoo (Texas Tech $25 Signed April 4).

The history of Geronimo and the Apaches of the Chiricahua mountains is a major trope in a novel that plays nicely off Massai Point and the special geology – the hoodoos – of this part of Arizona, and the Masaii tribe in Africa. Together, they form an unusual, imaginative spine for the story. It all begins on a geology class field trip conducted by MacFarlane.

Miller, who holds degrees in history, anthropology, and geology, and an M.S. in Geology, is a favorite with me and will appeal to readers of Sarah Andrews and Nevada Barr and Sandi Ault as well as Michael McGarrity and Elizabeth Gunn. And in Hoodoo, Tony Hillerman.

Frankie's crimesolving in Quarry ($7.99) won Miller the Turquoise Award, and a Gold Award from Foreword Magazine, plus it was a 2007 Finalist for the Willa Award.