Tourist Season is laugh-out-loud funny, but it's also macabre. Carl Hiaasen's classic whodunit is a dark tale of man-eating alligators, crazy journalists, a wannabe terrorist, a millionaire Seminole and a beauty queen. The bad guys get it in the end, but you'll find yourself wondering what's worse— people who kill a few tourists or developers whose greedy voraciousness is destroying the natural splendor of southern Florida.

Megan

Peter Mayle is best known for his memoirs of life in Provence, but Hotel Pastis is just as good. It's the engaging story of a London advertising executive who, world-weary and recently divorced, gives up his jet-set career to revamp an old police station in southern France into a "boutique hotel." A second plot revolves around the escapades of an endearing gang of robbers who plan a complicated bank heist and end up kidnapping of the son of an American billionaire by accident. In addition to a delightfully woven story and an elegant cast of characters, Hotel Pastis serves up food descriptions so vivid you can probably gain weight just by reading them.

Megan

Winterdance was recommended to us by a bookstore owner who said it was one of the best books she had ever read. A comment like that should be taken seriously, we thought. We bought ourselves a copy, and now we, too, mention it as one of our all time favorites. Author Gary Paulsen set out to run the Iditarod, and the remarkable fact is that he actually survived his training and even finished the race. Winterdance is so vivid you'll feel as though you covered a thousand miles in Alaska yourself, but the only pain you'll really suffer will come from laughing yourself sick. Paulsen's prose is truly wonderful.

Megan

One for the Money is so entertaining it took us on an unintentional thirty-six mile detour. It's the first in a series that features Stephanie Plum, a New Jersey babe who finds herself working as a bounty hunter in Trenton. Janet Evanovich's hilarious prose is wonderful read out loud with a New Jersey accent, but even if, like me, you can't manage one, the ambience comes through anyway. Stephanie Plum keeps you laughing; the mystery keeps you hanging-- you'll want more, but it's no problem. Evanovich is now working on the tenth in the series!

Megan