Obedience - Will Lavender

I know this story, and you will as well if you choose to pick up the book. It starts out rather interestingly with a mysterious logic professor at an Indiana University teaching the course with a case study centered on a missing girl that will be murdered if not found by the end of the six-week term. Certainly this requires the reader to suspend disbelief and accept that this exercise has anything to do with a logic class, and the reader probably shouldn't question the six-week term either. Regardless, the story begins to weave the case study with the actual disappearance of a girl some twenty years earlier, and many of those involved seem cross between fiction and reality. For the lead characters, this confusion (and indeed, there will be confusion for the reader as well) causes predictable dysfunction in the final pages. The story starts strongly, but diminishes as the author forces the result, and I figured out where it was going very early in.

Secret Histories - F. Paul Wilson

Okay, this is technically written for teens, but as it returns to the boyhood days of one of my favorite fictional characters, Repairman Jack, I had to buy it. And heck, it still counts as a 2008 book! It never dawned on me that Jack was a teenager in the early eighties, and I recognized quite a few of the cultural influences from my own teen years. The author did a fine job of showing Jack's background before even Jack knew what was in store, and managed to introduce a bit of the paranormal that follows Jack through life. This was a fun read and a good story while I wait for this June's next Repairman Jack novel.

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw - Bruce Barcott

As a parrot owner (or as one owned by a parrot), this title jumped off the table at Borders. This book tells the story of a dam project in Belize that threatens to wipe out the last natural habitat of this beautiful bird. Sharon Matola, nicknamed the Zoo Lady for her creation and operation of the Belize Zoo, spearheaded a movement to block the dam and its negative impact on the jungle environment, but faced government corruption at every step along the way. The author describes the graft inside the Belizean government, the false environmental impact statements, and the pressure tactics undertaken (including the attempt to locate a landfill directly next to the zoo) to silence what the government termed an ecolonialist, a "outsider" attempting to overrule sovereign law. This is a fantastic, and unfortunately true, story of a government knowingly seeking to move public money into private pockets with absolute disregard for the people or the environment. Anyone interested in parrots or the environment will enjoy this book.

Napoleon's Pyramids - William Dietrich

Sometimes a stretch of imagination becomes a great adventure story, and this is one of those cases. Ethan Gage, an American apprentice of Ben Franklin, wins a medallion in a card game in France, and within twenty pages is pursued by the Egyptian Rite and framed for a prostitute's murder. His friend, a journalist, finds him passage as a savant on Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian invasion to temporarily escape criminal charges, and en route to the ship, is saved from a coach attack by a band of gypsies and an English spy. Once in Egypt, Gage enslaves, and eventually befriends, two others in battle, and the trio seek the secret of Thoth across the desert, pursued by a madman assassin, the Egyptian Rite, and Napoleon's army. I greatly enjoyed this book, and was thrilled by an ending that tells me that I'll see these characters again!

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

I don't know if I liked this book. At times, it was funny and the characters in the book are the people we see for eight hours a day with all the usual quirks and dysfunctions. The story is centered on a troubled advertising agency in Chicago that is rapidly running out of work and dismissing staff members. The employees are preoccupied with claiming the left behind furniture and trinkets of their departed colleagues, and frankly, it's just not funny or dramatic. It just is. It is difficult to classify this book, and as I neared the end, I realized that the few moments of humor or excitement were vastly outweighed by the mundane. There are better books out there.

The Appeal - John Grisham

For the first 40 pages, I felt like I had read this story before, as the case being tried echoed that within A Civil Action. Indeed, there were times I could have substituted a few names and it would have read like the earlier book. After this point, however, the case becomes a background issue, eclipsed by a story of big business attempting to buy a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court in an effort to shut down large verdicts. Several cabals of business leaders manage to find a candidate to support and finance a campaign that preys upon the typical devices of election time (guns, same-sex marriage, trial lawyers) and labeling sitting judges as being against the common man. The characters in this story are relatively flat, but the plot is one that lurks just at the edge of reality, as we've seen this type of campaigning in recent Ohio Supreme Court elections. It was good to see John Grisham writing a story with a lawyer in it again!