Starvation Lake

Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley is a great mystery.  He's a new author, local to Chicago, and if the rest of the series he's promising after this book is as good, he's going to be very popular.  He's very Harlan Coben/ Denis Lehane, but with Hockey, and I love Coben and Lehane.  Gus, the editor to the small Pilot newspaper in his home town after being forced to leave Detroit when his career suddenly collapses, isn't thrilled to be home with his old friends and family.  His old hockey coach apparently drown several years ago, but when his snow mobile is found in the wrong lake, Gus finds himself trying to figure out the secrets his entire town has been keeping for years.  It's really really good if you like murder mysteries.

The Help

  The Help by Kathryn Stockett is being compared to the Secret Life of Bees and several other southern books dealing with race issues.  It's not a bad comparison, but I think Stockett is a better writer than those she's being compared to. The Help follows three very different women in 1960's Jackson Mississippi.  Two are black maids working for rich white families, the last is Skeeter (why would you allow your child to grow up with that nickname?), a young white woman who has just graduated from college and returns home.  Skeeter, after discovering her beloved maid has disappeared, beings to see the way things are in her home town.  She enlists Aibileen and Minny to help her write the true stories of the maids, even though they all know it will be a dangerous and difficult project.  I was incredibly impressed with the way Stockett created three such distinctive voices, and a very interesting and real story.