Graeme Simsion's "The Rosie Project" -- When Opposites Attract

The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion

There's a moment in the first chapter of The Rosie Project that pretty much tells you what it's all about. Don TIllman, professor of genetics, gets roped into giving a presentation on the autism spectrum to a support group. Forgetting the first rule of presentations, "know your audience," he prepares a highly technical discussion. The parents become restless at terminology that's over their heads, but the Asperger's kids in the room home in on him like one of their own… which he apparently is.

Don Tillman is handsome, fit, highly focused, intelligent, and has a good job; at age 39 a prime candidate for marriage. He's also obsessive and startlingly inept in any remotely social situation, which pretty much offsets those good attributes. When he decides he needs a wife, Don approaches the problem the same way he approaches any undertaking: he creates The Wife Project, complete with a questionnaire to screen out unlikely candidates.

A New Leaphorn-Chee Novel from a New Hillerman: "Spider Woman's Daughter"

Spider Woman's Daughter - Anne Hillerman

The death, in 2008, of New Mexico author Tony Hillerman left fans of his Leaphorn-Chee mystery series bereft. The eighteen Hillerman novels featuring Navajo tribal policemen patrolling the vast, dusty emptiness of the Four Corners region sold millions of copies over more than thirty years, terminating with the publication of The Shape Shifter in 2006. Hillerman passed from pulmonary disease two years later.

After five years, Hillerman's daughter Anne picked up his pen - and his characters - with the release of Spider Woman's Daughter.  Fans will be glad to know the younger Hillerman continues the setting and the sensibilities of her father's story-telling, a gentle treatment of the native American elements. As one might expect, however, Tony's daughter chooses to emphasize a different character; Bernadette Manuelito.

For Navajo Tribal Policewoman Bernie Manuelito, there will always be "what-ifs": what if she'd been a few seconds earlier? What if she'd been a few steps faster? But she will never know: all she knows is that she saw a man she respected shot down in cold blood: the Legendary Lieutenant, Joe Leaphorn. All she saw was the shooter's hoodie and the escape vehicle

Although placed on leave while her husband, Jim Chee, leads the investigation, Bernie can't help picking at the case like a kid with a scab. While visiting Leaphorn in the hospital, she follows up on a consulting case the retired cop had undertaken for a museum in Santa Fe. Meanwhile, Chee and his team are tracking down leads related to the car used by the shooter; all dead ends.

These Navajo cops are a canny bunch, though, prone to contemplation and insights beyond those of city cops. They will get their man: count on it…

Charlie Hood Reaches a Conclusion... Or Does He? T. Jefferson Parker's "The Famous and the Dead"

Charlie Hood is finally back on the border after mounting that harrowing rescue mission in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, the LASD deputy still assigned to the ATF's Buenavista, California, office. The hostage he snatched free, Erin McKenna, is hugely pregnant and living at his adobe near the border. Erin's husband, super-dirty deputy Bradley Jones, makes the occasional visit Erin is righteously pissed at him after being kidnapped by a rival cartel. It's a complicated situation…

That's the home front: at work, Charlie's infiltrating a trio from Missouri (two of them dirty cops) who've arrived in town with a truck full of weapons they've diverted from a seize-and-destroy program; tipped off by the gutsy Mary Kate. On the opposite side of town, a mysterious "Dr. Strenn" has a sit-down with bipolar drifter Lonnie Rovanna, who's currently off his meds, apparently to return his confiscated firearms - or at the least to give Lonnie one of the infamous Love 32s. Lonnie, it's a safe bet, is about to make trouble for Hood, not to mention a passel of innocent bystanders; trouble that will reach not only into local hospitals but all the way to Congress. Mike Finnegan is in town, but this time Charlie may have an Angel on his side: I kid you not…

Scarpetta Develops Clairvoyance for Patricia Cornwell's "Dust"

Over almost a quarter of a century, Kay Scarpetta (MD, Attorney, would-be chef at a posh Ristorante Italiano) has seen her career steam merrily ahead, crash and burn, turn into a gun for hire, and - finally - culminate in her appointment as chief of a high-tech crime lab (associated with what? one wonders) in the middle of metropolitan Boston. Nice work if you can get it.

In the same twenty-four years, Scarpetta's relationship with Benton Wesley (or is it Wesley Benton? I always forget) has progressed from "the other woman" to lover to quasi-widow to a print version of Pam Ewing waking up to find Bobby in the shower to who's-his-face's happily-married spouse. She's dragged her anti-authoritarian lesbian paranoid genius niece, Lucy, and the brutish cop Marino every step of the way.

To all that, I say, "Give it a rest, Kay!"

Marisha Pessl Returns, and We're Glad She's Back: "Night Film"

Scott McGrath blew it. Big time.

Five years ago, the investigative reporter announced that his next subject would be an exposé of uber-reclusive film director Stanislas Cordova. After an anonymous source claiming to be Cordova’s chauffeur whispered, “There’s something he does to the children,” McGrath went all Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’s-sofa on an episode of Nightline. Within days, he’d been served by Cordova’s lawyers and fired from his job; all that against the backdrop of a messy divorce and a highly unfavorable custody arrangement for his daughter Sam. Blew it. Big time.

Just last week Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley committed suicide. What better reason could there be to re-open his aborted investigation based on notes a half-decade old? Drawing heavily on a purloined case file (a cool three grand paid to his source at the cop shop), McGrath picked up the young woman’s trail through NYC. On his first two stops he collected his investigative team, much in the same sense that a dog collects burrs when running through tall grass. To his Woodward there came a Bernstein in the form of Nora, all of nineteen and freshly arrived in Manhattan from sunny Florida. Next, he added the Columbo-like Hopper, eternally clad in that gray overcoat and those dirty Converse sneakers. Hopper, he would discover, had his own secrets…