The Noon God, by Donna Carrick (on Nook)

OK, a quick and cheap Nook purchase that had a great story outline, but was a little light in editing and those sorts of niceties. Still, a good story, fast-moving and clever, though I knew who the murderer was after about 25 pages.

The Gospel in Brief, by Leo Tolstoy

Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy became interested in 'freeing' the scripture from the layers of religiosity inside of which he felt the Orthodox Church had encased it. So he retranslated and paraphrased the gospels as he felt they should read. This was happening in the midst of the great German discourse on who the historical Jesus really was, so Tolstoy had lots of people to help him over the translation problems since I doubt he learned Biblical Greek and/or Hebrew.

Fascinating that whenever someone decides to do this sort of project, it ends up creating a clearer picture of the person doing it than it does of Jesus.

In any case, I read about 1/3 of the book and the copy I had turned out to be defective--50 missing pages--and I just never got back to it; I sort of feel like I got the gist of it.

No Rest for the Dead (ed. by Andrew F. Gulli and Lamia J. Gulli)

This is one of those serial novels that I'm such a sucker for: each chapter written by a different author, including some Big Names along with some folks I've never heard of. The story centers on the execution of a woman convicted of murdering her husband ten years ago by stuffing him into an Iron Maiden. And again we have the necessary suspension of belief, because there is no way a wealthy woman with no skeletons would lose every appeal on a case like this and be executed inside 2 years of her crime being committed.

BUT ANYWAY. Her husband was a skunk, a womanizer, a thief, a con-man...definitely deserved to die. But from the beginning you're sure she didn't, couldn't, do this. So, what really happened? Ah, that's what these 26 authors duke out in the pages. Pretty fun.

Detective Fiction, by M. Lee Alexander (on CD)

I think I've read too many mysteries in my life. All I could think about while listening to this course was how many authors were not mentioned. Still there were a lot of insights here that I was interested to discover, some I'd noticed and others that I hadn't.

Making Mischief : A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, by Gregory Maguire

A lovely book of reproductions of Sendak's artwork arranged by topic and by which artists and artworks influenced him. Nice.

The Burglar in the Rye, by Lawrence Block (on CD)

Girl Sleuth : Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak

Hoodwink, by Bill Pronzini

Another Nameless book, in which he goes to a pulp magazine convention which instigates two locked-room murders. And he gets shot at. And he figures everything out, of course. Oh, and he moves his office to a nicer building and gets a new girlfriend.

The Common Bond, by Donigan Merritt

(picked up at ALA, read in proof...good, very very good)