Mysteries and Other Good Reads from the Far West

Two of my cousins are as crazy about books and book groups as I am, and I recently spent several days with them, picking their brains about what their groups are reading. The photo was taken from the dock on the lake near Spokane, WA, where their parents bought a cabin decades ago.  It's still a lovely place to visit....and read.

Peggy is a member of a mystery reading group, begun 21 years ago at the college where she taught.  Recent reads include books by Laura Wilson, whose most recent crime novel available  in  North America is A Capital Crime; Norwegian  Karin Fussum, whose most recent is The Caller; Attica Locke, most recent The Cutting Season; and Chris Pavone, The Expats.   Another of  her groups liked Maria Doria Russell, whose Doc was one of The Washington Post's  Best Books of 2011, and M.L. Stedman's The Light Between the Oceans.

Cathy also gave high marks to The Light Between the Oceans, but said that the best discussions in her group were  prompted by The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton and The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle.  She also recommends New York Times columnist Timothy Egan's The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.  She had just begun Egan's biography of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: looks good, she said.

With the exception of T.C Boyle--and I think The Tortilla Curtain is terrific--I've not read any of these authors.  How nice to have recommendations of other book lovers whose reading follows paths a little different from my own.