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Favorite Paperbacks of 2011

You can download a pdf of this list by using the link at the bottom of the page.

We are thrilled when we find a book that just rises above the rest. However,  there were so many books we enjoyed this year, it was hard to choose the best of the best. In fact, in prior years, people often liked one of our “also recommended” books better than the top picks! We also reserve a soft spot in our mysterious heart for local authors, and we’ve also enclosed a list of some outstanding titles by them.

Carolyn chose:

The Lock Artist ($14.99), by Steve Hamilton, is compulsive reading. The main character, a mute teenager who is a genius at cracking locks and safes, is so different, and that difference is compelling. Who is he? “I was the Miracle Boy, once upon a time. Later on, the Milford Mute. The Golden Boy. The Young Ghost. The Kid. The Boxman. The Lock Artist. That was all me. But you can call me Mike,” states the narrator. Mike was traumatized as a young boy, but what happened isn’t revealed for quite a while. In the meantime, we learn that he lived with old Uncle Lito after the tragedy, that he managed to get into small-time trouble as a teenager – which led to big-time trouble – and that he is writing his story from prison. Throughout all of this, he has remained mute, a silent witness to human deficiencies and defects.
Hamilton teases out his various storylines with excruciating slowness, but it’s never annoying. He has a wicked sense of timing and knows how to draw the reader forward. Mike is sweet and sympathetic. His girlfriend, Amelia, is sweet and perceptive. Together they are indomitable. This won the Edgar Award and is an MBTB starred book. (Barbara & Jean also acknowledge this as one of the year’s best.)

Bury Your Dead ($14.99), by Louise Penny, is infused with Penny’s signature quiet style and subtle movement, but she has added more depth to her characters and plot than in her other books. Only one of her three storylines in this novel takes place in the quirky village of Three Pines, the most prominent setting in her series. At the end of her prior novel, The Brutal Telling, one of the resident eccentric characters was imprisoned for murder. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, our thoughtful and cast-against-type hero – he is often described as resembling a professor more than a police chief – has reconsidered whether the prisoner in fact is guilty. He sends Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command, to surreptitiously investigate.
Why isn’t Gamache himself reviewing the case? He is in Quebec City visiting his mentor, and recovering from physical and psychological wounds received in a police action gone wrong. The cause of Gamache’s injury is slowly revealed throughout the book. Although Gamache is on leave and his mentor is retired, they both become involved in helping to solve the murder of Augustin Renaud. Renaud was a true eccentric, a Quixote trying to find the burial site of Quebec’s founder, Samuel de Champlain. Perhaps he had come too close to uncovering a nasty secret along with Champlain’s body. This book is a moving virtuoso performance by Penny. This is an MBTB starred book. (Jean also picks this as one of the year’s best.)

Hypothermia ($15), by Arnaldur Indridason: The Icelandic setting and somewhat mordant police Detective Erlendur continue to offer a gripping look at crime and punishment in the far north of the world. In this case, Erlendur finds he cannot accept a verdict of suicide in the death of a woman found hanged in her holiday cabin, so he continues to investigate in the hopes of finding evidence of another sort.
Erlendur’s character is deeply drawn, his integrity as well as his flaws. He continues to struggle with his grown children whom he has mostly never known and with his continuing quest to find the body of his younger brother who was lost in a blizzard as a boy.  He is often haunted by unsolved cases from the past and feels he owes the survivors answers to their pleas.
A landscape of great beauty is often dangerous and unpredictable, as Indridson knows well, and one of his narrative abilities in pursuit of the truth is to portray both these aspects at the same time.  His prose is unsentimental but empathetic, and this particular work is both heartwarming and chilling.

Iron River ($14), by T. Jefferson Parker, is the third in his Charlie Hood series and features a really lurid cover. Iron River is an amazing piece of writing about gun-running and drug smuggling – topics that most readers, including me, shudder through in their papers. But Parker’s storytelling is so compelling and his characters so beguiling that I, for one, cannot pull myself away.
Currently, Charlie is assigned to the ATF and located along the Mexican border to help stem the flow of arms FROM the U.S. TO narcotrafficantes in Mexico. From the ATF sharpshooter who is kidnapped not just once, but twice, to the brave Mexican officers who live in fear for their families as well as their lives, to the gunsmith who hungers to see his radical weaponry design in manufacture, to a mysterious meddler with law-enforcement connections whom Charlie thinks is provoking an arms trade for reasons of his own – Parker captures them in all their humanity with his piercing acuity and splendid prose. 
As Parker himself has pointed out, Charlie is a wonderful witness to the events that transpire around him, and I would add that Parker is a near-perfect guide to the maelstrom along our southern border and to the consequences of ignoring it.

Carolyn also liked: 
Snow Angels ($14) by James Thompson and Red Wolf ($15) by Liza Marklund, both set in the far north, the first in Finland with a small-town police chief investigating murder and the second following a journalist’s investigation into a long-ago attack on an isolated air base in Sweden.  

Barbara chose:

Love Songs from a Shallow Grave ($14), by Colin Cotterill, contains two alternating stories set in 1970s Laos. The main story finds Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country’s only coroner, contemplating the strange murders of three women who have been skewered by fencing swords. Although each of the young women had studied in another country, in the end the clues don’t really point to an outsider. Rather, the noose may tighten on a member of an elite community of Communist politicos who reside in a former American compound. Dr. Siri and his crew must tread with light toes on rice paper.
The other tale, scattered in pieces throughout the main story, is the inner musings of a prisoner being held in Cambodia in wretched conditions. It gradually unfolds that the reign of terror of the infamous Khmer Rouge has caught someone near and dear to us readers: Dr. Siri. The tale of how Siri wound up in Cambodia and why he is in captivity is a three-hankie tale. So, as the fencing tale unfolds into clarity, the Cambodian tale sinks into darkness. This is an MBTB starred book.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter ($14.99), by Tom Franklin, is a mystery birthed in the languid, humid cauldron of the South, and set free by quick and sensitive writing. (The title refers to the chant that children use to learn how to spell Mississippi.) It is to a small Mississippi town that Silas “32” (for his high school baseball team number) Jones returns after wandering the world and trying to escape his impoverished Southern roots. He is now the constable of that tiny company town. His current case concerns a young woman who is missing. This eerily mirrors a crime committed years ago when Silas and his friend Larry Ott were 17. Larry was the prime suspect in the disappearance of that young woman, but a body was never found, so Larry was never charged.
Now Larry and Silas are both 41 years old, and Larry has been living a hermit’s life, shunned by the community, but nonetheless is tied to it because of his incapacitated mother. Larry and Silas’ surreptitious friendship had begun to fracture when they were teens, fostered in part by Larry’s cold and callous father as well as his overly protective mother. It also didn’t help that Silas was black and Larry was white. In a style reminiscent of another fine writer of Southern-inflected mysteries, Thomas L. Cook, Franklin slowly reveals Larry and Silas’ true story, sometimes in flashbacks to when they were young. This is an MBTB starred book.

County Line ($15.95), by Bill Cameron, is a thriller that makes you want to turn the pages faster and faster. But it’s also a sensitive story about a young girl from a dysfunctional family who has more troubles than someone her age should have. Ruby Jane Whittaker, both as the eccentric coffee shop owner in Portland and especially in the tale told of her as a young girl from a crazy family in rural Ohio, sparkles on the page. Something terrible happened when Ruby Jane was a teenager. That something has been nipping at her heels all these years, and now it has taken a big bite. That Ruby Jane should have turned into the self-confident business woman in Portland is a miracle. That the past is now haunting her is a deadly burden.
Skin Kadash is a retired cop in Portland. When he allows himself to think about it, he realizes he is in love with Ruby Jane. When she disappears and he finds the body of a dead bum in her bathtub, he heads off to find her. And save her.
This is an MBTB starred book. (We all agree this is one of the year’s best.)

Barbara also liked:

October Killings ($14.99), by Wessel Ebersohn, is set in present day South Africa, where institutionalized racism has been abolished but where there are still many problems stemming from that apartheid past. The unlikely duo of a young black woman, Abigail Bukula, and an older white prison psychologist, Yudel Gordon, fights to learn the identity of a serial killer. In the process we learn about their lives under apartheid.

Rogue Island ($14.99), by Bruce DeSilva, involves Liam Mulligan, a reporter for a Providence newspaper, joining his childhood friend Rosie Morelli, a batallion fire chief, in stopping an arsonist who has caused several deaths.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag ($15), by Alan Bradley, stars 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, who is charming, eccentric, and knowledgeable beyond her years. In 1950, when a famous puppeteer dies in her small English village, Flavia succeeds in figuring out, à la Sherlock Holmes, that it was murder. For all her acuity, Flavia is still a child, and her heart yearns for her dead mother, kindness from others, and a grace that is missing from her life.

Started Early, Took My Dog ($14.99), by Kate Atkinson, is the latest clever novel by the British author. A mall security agent who finds a lost child, P.I. Jackson Brodie who is looking for a woman’s long-lost mother, and an actress who is affected by Alzheimer’s find their lives and stories intertwined. It’s a comedy and tragedy of near misses until the ending reveals how all  these stories are related. Recently the other books in Atkinson’s series were presented by “Masterpiece Theater” under the title, “Case Histories.”

Jean chose:

An Ordinary Decent Criminal ($14.99), by Michael van Rooy, features career criminal Montgomery Uller Haaviko, who is trying to make a new life for himself and his family. He served his time for an assortment of crimes, legally changed his name to Sam Parker, and is searching for a job in the straight world. Within the first fifty pages of the book, Monty kills three men who break into his house, has a confession beaten out of him by the police, and is sent to the hospital. To add insult to injury, an old prison buddy tries to kill him there. Monty’s “to do list” just keeps getting longer: get a job to support his family, work on his marriage, be a good father, stay clean, stay out of prison, and stay out of the way  of Winnipeg’s criminal kingpin.
Sometimes it’s hard to say what exactly makes a book “work” for a particular reader. I know that my tastes have changed over the years and that although I still enjoy reading familiar authors, I love to discover someone new. With this gritty and by turns violent and darkly humorous story, enriched by touches of family life, I found an author with a fresh voice and a complicated main character who combines his identity as a career criminal with his desire to be good at something besides that.

Faithful Place ($16), by Tana French, takes place in Dublin, on a run-down street called Faithful Place. When Frank Mackey was a teenager, he planned to elope to London with his sweetheart, Rosie. When she didn’t show up at their rendezvous, Frank assumed she had abandoned him. Frank left home that night, and twenty years later, he is a Dubin police detective – readers of The Likeness will remember him. Now a suitcase belonging to Rosie has turned up in a derelict building on Faithful Place. To find out what happened to her, Frank must finally return to his dysfunctional family, most of whom he has not seen since that fateful night, although they have all been in Dublin.
The place seems even more rundown than Frank remembers, and his many brothers and sisters are scattered not too far away. Frank’s father has been slowed by age and a life of hard drinking, but his Ma remains as she always was, greeting her son, whom she has not seen since he was a teenager, with, “Francis, could you not be bothered putting on a decent shirt even?”
Faithful Place is a well written, complex mystery with a great sense of place and characters that ring true. For me what really sets it apart is the way the author explores how bonds are forged within a family and a community, and what happens when those bonds are tested. (Barbara also liked this book.)

Jean also liked:

The Night Season ($7.99), by Chelsea Cain, is set in Portland during a period of heavy rain and impending flooding. Police detective Archie Sheridan is investigating a series of apparent drownings, while reporter Susan Ward is looking into remains that have been uncovered by the storms that are pounding the city. With an extremely creepy killer, descriptions of Portland, and bits of very black humor, you hardly notice that the villainous Gretchen Lowell (a prominent character in the other books) is largely absent.  

The Ice Princess ($7.99), by Camilla Lackberg: When author Erica Falck returns to her hometown in the tiny village of Fjallbacka, Sweden, she is already dealing with a loss. Both of her parents were killed in an accident, and she has come home to settle their affairs and work on her next book. When she discovers the body of her childhood friend, Alex, an apparent suicide victim, she abandons her previous work and begins writing about Alex’s life instead. What she uncovers soon puts herself and another childhood friend, Patrik Hedstrom, in danger. Lackberg’s descriptions of Fjallbacka in winter made me cold enough to need a cup of hot tea and a blanket while I was reading. 

Nick chose:

Dove Season by Johnny Shaw ($13.95):  “There is something about the desert that pisses everything off…in an environment where nothing is meant to survive, life seethes.” Bang! With a few good lines, Johnny Shaw’s first book – subtitled, “The First Jimmy Veeder Fiasco” (of many, we hope) – hits the ground running and does not stop, not even at the Mexican border. And what it delivers is a fast, funny, off-beat crime story that worries less about who done it and more about what Veeder’s going to do about it.
Veeder has gone home to the Imperial Valley, California, to spend time with his dying father, who has a request: find Yolanda the Mexican prostitute. Sounds straightforward enough. So with the help of some friends, he sets out to find her. Needless to say, things go south from there.
The characters are fantastic – Bobby, Buck Buck, Snout, and Squatty, just to name a few – and drawn from the author’s pool of boyhood friends. The setting is hot, dry, barren, and pervasive; throughout the book, place is truly a character.  And the lines are eminently quotable.  Example:  “I had never been afraid of dying, but I was scared s***less of becoming a corpse.” (We all endorse this one!)

Strip by Thomas Perry ($14.95):  Revolving around three main characters – Manco Kapak, a strip club owner afraid of losing his grip on his own criminal apparatus when his organization is robbed of its night-deposit; Jo Carver, a violent loner who gets blamed for the robbery, which he did not commit; and Nick Slosser*, a police lieutenant who must investigate the case, even as he worries about paying the college tuition for his two oldest kids, one from each of his two bigamous marriages – Strip tells a complicated and surprising story of move and countermove, punch and counterpunch. But when the real culprits decide to steal from Kapak again, and Kapak’s own security people begin to hedge their bets with outside alliances, then the real fun begins. Perry (author of the Jane Whitefield series) delivers a fast, quirky, and satisfying crime story that could have been plotted by Charles Willeford or Elmore Leonard.  
*Oh yeah, and it stars MBTB’s own Nick Slosser. I mean, what more needs to be said? (Except that everything Perry says about him is a damn lie!) (Ed. note: Perry on purpose named one of his characters after MBTB’s Nick Slosser.)

Chuck chose:

Once a Spy ($7.99), by Keith Thomson: When inveterate gambler Charlie Clark discovers that his estranged father, former appliance salesman Drummond Clark, suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and needs his only son to take over with power of attorney, Charlie mostly sees this as an opportunity to get the bookies and loan-sharks off his back.  But after a few nearly fatal “accidents” pursue them in rapid succession, and then his father’s moments of apparent lucidity seem weirder and weirder, it gradually dawns on Charlie that someone is actually trying to kill them.
  You’re not alone if you don’t typically think of Alzheimer’s disease and nail-biting espionage action as going hand-in-hand, but debut novelist Keith Thomson mixes them to humorous perfection in this page-turner. A bullet-paced novel delivered with punchy prose, plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, and brisk chapters so short you can’t read just one, Once a Spy will keep you awake well past bedtime and make you miss your bus stop if you’re reading it on the commute. Like Johnny Shaw’s Dove Season, this year’s other stand-out debut, Thomson’s novel displays some of the best smarty-pants prose stylings since Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper from a couple years ago. You’ll find you have favorite lines you want to remember and share with others. That’s good writing.

Bonus (great books by local authors -- how lucky are we?):

Buyer’s Remorse - Lori L. Lake
Crashers - Dana Haynes (& Breaking Point - hardcover only)
Land Sharks - S. L. Stoner
The Last Run - Greg Rucka
Robopocalypse - Daniel Wilson (hardcover only)
Supreme Justice - Phillip Margolin
Vanishing Acts - Phillip Margolin & Amy Margolin Rome (hardcover only)
Wire to Wire - Scott Sparling

We hope this list will provide you with many hours of good reading in the new year. And here’s to a bounty of good books in 2012!


If one of these reviews makes you think about buying the book ...

Think about buying the book from MBTB!

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