Echo park
Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is still on the job, working out of LAPD's Open Unsolved Unit, and despite his best efforts at holding his antiestablishment impulses in check, he's in trouble again. This time the problem is an unsolved case that has haunted Harry since 1993. Now it appears that the killer has been caught, apprehended by chance and connected to a string of nine additional murders. As cops and prosecutors debate a plea bargain the killer will confess to the murders if he can avoid the death penalty it is revealed that Harry and his partner may have missed a crucial clue back in 1993 that could have solved the case then and prevented the later murders. But something doesn't feel right. As in The Closers (2005), Harry once again may be the victim of a politically inspired conspiracy, or high jingo in cop talk.
M/Connelly, also available in Large Print and on CD
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The foreign correspondent
Alan Furst
Furst's reputation as one of today's best writers, in any genre, is further solidified by this gripping historical thriller with echoes of Graham Greene, which opens in Paris in December 1938. Journalist Carlo Weisz, an expatriate Italian who's half Slav, is fighting the Mussolini regime by writing for the Paris-based underground opposition newspaper, the Liberazione.
F/Furst, also available as eAudiobook
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Free fire
C. J. Box
Box set the standards so high with his Joe Pickett series that, once in a while, he’s had a hard time getting over the bar himself, as with In Plain Sight (2006), where he just tripped it with his toe. In Free Fire, however, he gets over cleanly. Pickett, having been fired as a game warden, is working as foreman of his father-in-law’s ranch when Wyoming’s loose-cannon governor, Spencer Rulon, reinstates him—not to work his old district but to investigate, without official support, a crime in Yellowstone National Park.
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THE GATHERING
Anne Enright


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The meaning of night : a confession
Michael Cox
Resonant with echoes of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, Cox's richly imagined thriller features an unreliable narrator, Edward Glyver, who opens his chilling "confession" with a cold-blooded account of an anonymous murder that he commits one night on the streets of 1854 London.
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Vicious circle
Robert Littell
Littell’s latest brainy thriller probes very near the heart of the time-worn conflict over a land made and kept holy through regular libations of martyrs’ blood. All the world holds its breath (including the second President Clinton) when—only nine days before an unprecedented Arab-Israeli settlement that will establish an autonomous Palestinian state and de-escalate tensions between East and West—Rabbi Isaac Apfulbaum, an extreme Zionist, is taken hostage by an Islamic Fundamentalist doctor...Littell presents a physical and mental landscape of stark beauty and ugliness, spinning a tale fit to hold its own with Eric Ambler’s The Levanter, John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, David Ignatius’ Agents of Innocence, and Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate. Must reading for fans of high-end thrillers.
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Winter's bone
Daniel Woodrell
Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly has a plan. She's going to join the army as soon as she can free herself from her complicated family obligations. Unfortunately, her father, part of a large extended Dolly family crystal meth enterprise, is missing. Her mother's mind is gone, and two little brothers worship at Ree's feet. Ree gets word that her father has skipped bail; if he doesn't meet his court date, the family loses its home, and there's nowhere to go. Ree begins a journey through the savage poverty of a brutally cold Ozarks winter to deliver her father before his court date. Woodrell's captivatingly resourceful protagonist both enchants and horrifies with her fierce determination to get to the truth of her father's disappearance and to protect her brothers.
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The Yiddish policemen's union
Michael Chabon
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Chabon, Michael (author). May 2007. 432p. HarperCollins, hardcover, $26.95 (9780007149827). REVIEW. First published March 1, 2007 (Booklist). Like Haruki Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), Chabon plays with the conventions of the Chandlerian private-eye novel, but that’s only one ingredient in an epic-scale alternate-history saga of Jewish life since World War II. The premise draws on an obscure historical fact: FDR once proposed that Alaska, not Israel, become the homeland for Jews after the war. In Chabon’s telling, that’s exactly what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn’t gone as planned: the U.S. government now has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced son of Sitka’s most powerful rabbi.
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The zero
Jess Walter
Real-life events still strive to catch up with the imagination of Franz Kafka. Here, Walter has NYPD member Brian Remy awaken not as a bug but as the victim of an unsuccessful attempt on his own life, commemorated by a suicide note reading in its entirety, Etc. He comes to in the nightmare of post-9/11 New York City, where his body is failing, his sight is afflicted by floaters, and his memory is subject to significant lapses. He is, in short, a mess and also an all too representative inhabitant of this brave new world, where the nation has morphed into a public relations firm and The Boss is determined to fight back, even at the cost of having each and every American sit through Tony and Tina's Wedding. Following his Edgar Award winning Citizen Vince (with its alternate take on the Carter-Reagan debate), Walter goes from strength to strength, establishing himself as the current master of fractured U.S. history with all of the surrealism and black humor necessary for such an undertaking.
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