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Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I met Britt-Marie in another Fredrik Backman novel. I didn't particularly like her in "My Grandmother asked me to tell you she's sorry" because we mostly saw her fastidious busybody side, but there were a few hints of her big heart. It's the heart that wins in this sequel. Britt-Marie has left her cheating husband and taken a job as caretaker of a soon-to-be-closed rec center in a dying town. Everything is crumbling around her so badly that she makes friends with a rat as her dinner companion. There are real threats like drugs and unsupervised children, but somehow Britt-Marie straightens it out the same way she rearranges messy silverware drawers. Ya gotta love her.

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We would never elect a psycopath president, would we?

 

Blowback: A Thriller by James Patterson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James Patterson is the best and this is a lots-of-twists thriller with believable characters. An autocratic, rules-don't-apply-to-me president has decided the enemies of America must be punished so he sets up his own CIA operations, foreign and domestic, without messy approval of congress or cabinet. He's about to burst into World War III but since we all survive we know somebody, somehow stops this maniac. The details in his operations are amazing. The believability is part of what makes it so scary.

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Who? dunnit

 

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are moments -- comments from the retirement home heroes, or the interaction between the romantically attracted investigators -- when this book is spot on. Too funny for words. But as a puzzle mystery this tale fails all the tests. There are plenty of twists and turns, just when you think it's all resolved there's another turn and then another. The ultimate culprits are least suspected, which is always good, but the motives are related to secrets that are not revealed until way too late. It's as if the murders happened in another book and the reader only hears about it second hand. Mystery readers long for that ah ha moment when they realize the clue was right in front of them all along not when the writer pulls out back story in the final scene that was never hinted at before. And the humor is Sooo British like a confession during a chess match when both players are more interested in the game moves than reacting to life and death revelations.

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