Book Reviews

Be prepared to be amazed. This should have been the instruction given to Professor Jeremy Logan when he agrees to help treasure hunter Porter Stone unearth ancient Egyptian artifacts in the Sudd, a marshy no-man’s land in Sudan. Of course, Jeremy is used to amazing discoveries in his profession as an enigmologist or someone who is skilled at solving bizarre and incomprehensible mysteries. Porter Stone is convinced that the Sudd holds the real and secret tomb of Narmer, an early Egyptian pharaoh who was born 3100 years before Christ and is considered by historians to be the first pharaoh of United Egypt. Stone’s research has suggested that the secret tomb was deliberately located in an area that would be flooded and covered with vegetation, keeping it concealed for eternity. He also believes ...

Julie Berenson deserves more out of life than she’s been given, but that does not deter her from being a good and compassionate friend, a hard worker and a responsible dog-lover. Abandoning her abusive family at age 16 and forced to live on the streets, she maintains her integrity and virtue and finds ways to make enough money to eat. Her luck turns from tolerable to abundant when she meets Jim who finds her a job, a place to live and who falls in love with her and marries her. After just a few happy years together, Jim dies, leaving her a Great Dane puppy named Singer and the promise that he’ll always look after her—be her guardian. After having survived abuse and homelessness, Julie becomes a young widow at 25. When the story opens she is 29 and is beginning to think about dating again. Jim’s best friend, Mike Harris is her go to guy for handyman and automotive work, but she can’t imagine him as a suitor after knowing him as Jim’s friend. Mike has loved Julie ...

“Now as then, true believers loathe the moderates in their midst.” Even as a young girl, Karen Hollander proved herself to be a true believer and she surrounded herself with others who shared her ideals, but now as an esteemed 65 year old law professor she feels compelled to reveal a criminal past that came about as a result of those passions. In doing so, she will ruin not only her reputation, but those of some of her oldest, closest friends. Karen, Alex and Chuck, junior high school friends in the early 60’s, shared an obsession with everything James Bond. They devoured all of Ian Fleming’s Bond books, becoming experts on the characters, their motives and the trivia surrounding them. Their teenage exploits included assuming roles of the Bond characters and conducting spy missions in and around their suburban Chicago neighborhood, hoping to thwart Cold War enemies. The precocious trio continued their alliance when they were accepted at ...

Rocky Mountain High turns into Rocky Mountain Low for Madeline Dare, when she and her husband Dean move to Boulder, Colorado. At first, the former New Yorker is intrigued and enchanted by the relaxed, wholesome pace of the bucolic town, but she soon finds herself dissatisfied, lonely and bored. As the stay-at-home mom struggles to raise their one year old twins, Dean travels the world, eating in fine restaurants and leaving Madeline to share too many mac and cheese dinners with the twins. Convinced that she needs to get out of the house and try to regain some of the feelings of self-worth she had when she was working, she accepts a job writing an occasional restaurant review for a local newspaper. Her editor asks her to expand her writing duties by covering fires set by an arsonist and Madeline is drawn into dangerous territory. While she enjoys the opportunity to interact with adults, her devotion to her twins never falters. Since she’d never bothered to get a Colorado driver’s license, she carts them from home to stores and doctors’ appointments in a red wagon, seeing that they are impeccably dressed and fully supplied ...

As many as 1.5 million Armenians died in the early 20th century in the Armenian genocide, but this is a largely unknown part of modern history. Chris Bohjalian’s poignant tale of love and survival puts human faces on some of those Armenian victims and on the humanitarian workers who tried to help them. The story is told from two points of view and during two different periods of time—at the time of the actual atrocities and in the present. Laura Petrosian, a novelist of Armenian descent has always viewed her grandparents as ordinary, if a bit eccentric. She is aware that her grandmother, an American, married her grandfather, an Armenian, after serving as an aid worker in ...

Did you ever have one of those days where no matter how much good you thought you were doing, your life swirled deeper and deeper into the toilet? For Officer Nestor Camacho that day turns into weeks as he goes from being a hero to an outcast in performing one act of bravery after another. Prior to saving a Cuban refugee by gripping him between his short but powerful legs as he carries the man down the 70 foot mast of a swaying boat in Biscayne Bay, Nestor’s claim to fame was his meticulously groomed and toned physique. The young policeman who’d been the respected son of his Cuban community in Hialeah, instantly becomes a pariah when his incredible feat results in the refugee’s arrest and imminent deportation. Nestor’s family disowns him and the police department, embarrassed by the uprising in the Cuban community censures him, leaving him homeless, friendless and in danger of ...