February 2010

April 2010 - In February I didn't find many new authors or places, so it was mostly back to familiar names, and mostly in the United States. I picked up some older books that I had missed (Elmore Leonard in Florida, Earl Emerson in Seattle, and Michael Connelly in Los Angeles) and a second book by Kathleen George, who I first read in January. George's Fallen moves back and forth between Pittsburgh and Athens, Ohio. In Leonard's Cat Chaser, Emerson's The Million-Dollar Tattoo, and Connelly's The Black Ice, each author is on familiar ground and reliably good reading.

In Nine Dragons, Connelly's Harry Bosch goes to Hong Kong, where his sense of place is much less convincing than on his home ground in California. Mark Mills, in The Savage Garden, features an English academic visitor in Italy. And Bernard Schlink's detective Gerhard Self is very much at home in contemporary Germany (Self's Deception).