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Attention Mystery Lovers!

Stop, You’re Killing Me! is a resource for lovers of mystery, crime, thriller, spy, and suspense books. They list over 3,400 authors, with chronological lists of their books (over 38,000 titles), both series (3,800+) and non-series. Use the alphabetical author and character links or the special indexes.

New York Times Literary Treat of the Week......

Pyne, Stephen J. Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery.

Budget cutbacks have for the moment shelved the American manned spaced program. Ray Bradbury, who recently turned ninety, has denounced President Obama for turning away from the next goal of visiting Mars. Yet after the Apollo mission ended the U. S. was able despite money considerations to launch in 1977 the long planned-for Voyager probes. Profiting from an alignment of the planets only available every 176 years, Voyager 1 and 2 have bounced via gravity from one sphere to the next mapping the universe. Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University, compares this exploratory saga to previous eras where political, economic, military, and scientific climates lined up to make possible the great discoverers of Earth. The irony regarding the unmanned Voyagers is that unlike Columbus and Magellan there is no one who will come back to interpret the data gained from the galaxies and say how it will bear on the future.


Revieved by Bob.

New York Magazine's most anticipated fiction and nonfiction of fall.

1. Our Tragic Universe
by Scarlett Thomas (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
2. Zero History
by William Gibson (Putnam)
3. The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
by James Ellroy (Knopf)
4. Ape House
by Sara Gruen (Random House)
5. C
by Tom McCarthy (Knopf)
6. Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
by Donald Sturrock (Simon & Schuster)
7. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
by Danielle Evans (Riverhead)
8. Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert, trans. Lydia Davis (Viking)
9. Untitled on the Obama Administration
by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster)
10. By Nightfall
by Michael Cunningham (FSG)

"The Help" by: Kathryn Stockett

The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in Mississippi-native Stockett's ambitious first novel.Still unmarried, to her mother's dismay, recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with her friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth's seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she's been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen, mourning her son's recent death and devoted to Elizabeth's neglected young daughter, is careful what she shares. Aibileen's good friend Minnie, who works for Hilly's increasingly senile mother, is less adept at playing the subservient game than Aibileen. When Hilly, an aggressively racist social climber, fires and then blackballs her for speaking too freely, Minnie's audacious act of vengeance almost destroys her livelihood. Unlike oblivious Elizabeth and vicious Hilly, Skeeter is at the verge of enlightenment. Encouraged by a New York editor, she decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen's help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town's social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter's dangerous naïveté. Skeeter's narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie's heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won't hurt its appeal and probably spells big success.Author events in the Southeast.

New York Times Literary Treat of the Week.....

McFadden, Bernice L. Glorious.

There may be a female equal to the main African-American character of Ralph Ellison’s classic “Invisible Man.” Her name is Easter Bartlett, and just like her male counterpart she is also “kept running.” What spurs Easter on is fleeing from racism beginning with that in her 1910 Georgia hometown that raped her sister and quickened her mother’s death. She joins a backwoods entertainment troupe and falls for the lead dancer who proves racially hostile. Easter eventually joins the Harlem Renaissance of Langston Hughes and Fats Waller becoming a noted poet. Yet she soon recognizes that African-American writers of that period needed wealthy white benefactors to champion their works. McFadden even includes empowerment leader Marcus Garvey and an attempt to assassinate him in the rich historical backdrop to Easter Bartlett’s continual flight.

Reviewed by Bob.

New Audiobooks!

At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The 'casting director' told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next eighteen months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, leaving behind her East Village apartment, and trading her friends for a coterie of backstabbing beauties




A lively and surprising story about a Japanese woman with a closely guarded secret, the American daughter who strives to live up to her mother's standards, and the rejuvenating power of forgiveness.










This myth-shattering book reveals the methods Roubini used to foretell the current crisis before other economists saw it coming and shows how those methods can help to make sense of the present and prepare for the future.





In London's Pimlico neighborhood lies a tenement described in architectural guides as "a building of no interest whatsoever." But the residents of Corduroy Mansions--including a literary agent, a wine merchant, a thoroughly unpleasant member of Parliament, and a vegetarian dog--are a rather fascinating lot.