Title: Coyote Dreams
Author: C.E. Murphy
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Luna
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0373802722
Pages: 408
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 25 November, 2007

Third in the Walker Papers series of urban fantasies.

Joanne Walker discovered six months ago that she's a powerful shaman, and she's not happy about it. She's an officer in the Seattle Police Department and a former mechanic, and being a woo-woo shaman does not fit with her self image. She's contrary and stubborn and her determination not to accept her new state leads to big problems.

The people that she's close to are going into comas. In her blundering ignorance when she first came into her powers, she unwittingly awakened an ancient power that wants to bring the world to an end. Joanne has to start accepting her shamanism if she's ever going to save her friends.

Meanwhile, the new boyfriend who seems too good to be true is too good to be true. And her love-hate relationship with her boss, Captain Morrison, becomes even more complicated.

Entertaining.

Title: Folly
Author: Laurie R. King
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0007111347
Pages: 400
Keywords: fiction, suspense
Reading period: 22-24 November, 2007

Rae Newborn has struggled with depression for decades. The death a year ago of her second husband and their young daughter drove her to attempt suicide. Now she's moved to Folly, a small island in the San Juans that she inherited from Desmond Newborn, her grandfather's brother.

Desmond went off to the First World War and came back broken by shell shock. He bought Folly in the 1920s and built a house with his own hands, then disappeared after the house burned down.

All alone on Folly, Rae starts rebuilding the house and finds herself retracing the events of Desmond's life. The parallels become stronger when she finds his skeleton in a cave and reads his journal.

As we learn her story, we find that she has reason to be fearful. It's not just in her head; there really is someone out to hurt her. The construction is therapeutic: as she rebuilds the house, she begins to rebuild her life. She starts to repair the relationship with her long-estranged elder daughter and draws closer to her beloved granddaughter.

The ending was a little too neat and pat for my liking, but otherwise I greatly enjoyed this book.

Title: Wilt in Nowhere
Author: Tom Sharpe
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Arrow
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0099481731
Pages: 278
Keywords: humor, satire
Reading period: 19-21 November, 2007

In the Seventies and Eighties, Tom Sharpe was a bestselling author in Britain, pumping out a dozen hilarious satires, marked by their savagery. His particular targets were apartheid, the British class system, and political correctness. Then he dried up, producing only three books in the last twenty years.

Wilt in Nowhere is his fourth book about Henry Wilt, a lecturer at a third-rate community college, married to the formidable Eva and father of four ghastly quadruplets. Eva takes the girls to America to stay with her rich uncle in Tennessee. Henry goes on a walking tour of England. He inadvertently gets caught up in a case of arson, while she somehow becomes the focus of a narcotics investigation.

This is fairly funny, but nowhere near as good as I remember his earlier books.

Title: 1634: The Baltic War
Author: David Weber, Eric Flint
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 141652102X
Pages: 728
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 18 November, 2007

The latest book from the 1632 series; this one is the long awaited sequel to 1633. The premise of the series is that through some mysterious alien event, a small West Virginian town is sent back to Germany in 1631, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, utterly changing the course of history. The Americans ally themselves with King Gustav Adolf of Sweden, forming the United States of Europe.

The authors adeptly juggle a series of plots that were set in motion in the earlier book. The town of Luebeck is besieged by the French and the Danes. A diplomatic party has to be broken out of the Tower of London. The American-built "ironside" battle ships have to float down the Elbe and sail into the Baltic. The power of the Spanish in the Netherlands has to be broken.

One of the better books in the series. The authors have fun exploring the ramifications of such a world-changing event as the effects continue to ripple through Early Modern Europe.

Title: What Came Before He Shot Her
Author: Elizabeth George
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0060545631
Pages: 722
Keywords: fiction, mystery
Reading period: 11-17 November, 2007

In Elizabeth George's previous book, With No One As Witness, a senior police officer's pregnant wife is gunned down in London by a 12-year-old boy in an apparently random act. This book tells the story of how that shooting came to happen.

The three Campbell children are abandoned on their aunt's doorstep by their feckless grandmother, months before the shooting. They are mixed-race children with deep-seated damage: their alcoholic father was killed in front of them a few years ago and their mother has long been in a mental hospital. Ness, 15, is deeply alienated and truant, and quickly becomes a drug dealer's girlfriend. Toby, 7, is mildly retarded and attracts bullies. Well-meaning, eleven-year-old Joel is his brother's protector. Their Aunt Kendra is wholly unprepared, emotionally or logistically, to become a mother to these troubled children.

Joel, Ness, and Kendra all proceed towards tragedy, through a combination of bad choices, poor options, inadequate coping skills, grevious miscommunication, and events that are beyond their control.

George paints an unsettling picture of a family at the edge. Each of the principals is strongly drawn, each one's actions makes sense of a sort, each one's demons compels them to fuck up. We know that ultimately Joel will kill a woman and we watch despairingly as he makes the choices that box him in to his destiny.

Not easy reading, but compelling.

Title: Paula Spencer
Author: Roddy Doyle
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Viking
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0670038164
Pages: 288
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 2-11 November, 2007

Roddy Doyle has visited Paula Spencer twice before. First in The Family, a BBC TV serial; then in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Ten years on from the last book, Paula is a recovering alcoholic who only recently crawled out of the bottle. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger have passed her by: Paula continues to clean Dublin offices and houses for a living. Her youngest two children are still at home. Jack is fine but Leanne is heading towards alcoholism herself. Her other son, John Paul, is estranged and a former heroin junkie, and her oldest, Nicola, worries about her.

Paula is pulling herself together, but it's not easy. She is emotionally volatile and insecure, afraid of being rejected by her children, and sometimes only a hairsbreadth away from taking another drink. But she hasn't lost her sense of humor. She's a sympathetic character, not a whinger.

This is vintage Roddy Doyle and it's both very funny and emotionally true, an unsparing but affectionate portrait of a flawed heroine.

Recommended.

Last week was the second anniversary of my brother Mark's wedding to Lizzy.

Next week will be the first anniversary of my sister Michelle's wedding to David.

The day after that, my parents will be flying to Egypt to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their first date.

And Emma and I just got back from a three-day weekend in Astoria, Oregon, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our own first date.

Sheesh!

Title: Knights of the Black and White
Author: Jack Whyte
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Jove
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0515143332
Pages: 749
Keywords: historical
Reading period: 28 October-1 November, 2007

The first book in a trilogy that tells the fictional history of the Templars.

The Order of the Rebirth in Sion is a secret society whose roots go back to Jerusalem before the time of Christ, whose members are drawn from French noble families. When the Pope starts the First Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Muslims, a handful of the Order tag along in the hopes of discovering their order's secrets in the long-lost Temple of Solomon. Under the guise of warrior-monks protecting the bandit-infested roads, they dig deep beneath the Temple on the Mount and find the treasure they have been looking for.

A rather hokey potboiler. Occasionally entertaining, but much too long.

Title: The Monster of Florence
Author: Magdelen Nabb
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Arrow
Copyright: 1996
ISBN: 0099489899
Pages: 485
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 22-27 October, 2007

Nabb's recurring character, Marshal Guarnaccia, is a non-commissioned officer in the carabinieri, the Italian military-style police, who is stationed in Florence. Guarnaccia is a slow, dogged plodder and a wallflower, who is largely overlooked by those who encounter him, but who nonetheless gets to the bottom of mysteries.

An old case, involving a series of double murders over a twenty-year period, has been reopened for political reasons. Several police officers, including the Marshal, have been seconded to a task force. The Marshal is troubled by what is clearly an attempt by the prosecutor to put an unsavory pedophile into the frame, in order to close the case quickly, and he starts digging around, finding evidence that had long been overlooked or never gathered.

Somewhat confusing. I had a hard time keeping track of Sergio and Silvano and Flavio and Fabio.

Title: The Clan Corporate
Author: Charles Stross
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0765348225
Pages: 300
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 20-21 October, 2007

The third book in the Merchant Princes series.

Miriam Beckstein, is a tech journalist in Boston, who discovered in the first book that she was born in a parallel world, and that she and some of her relatives hold a rare gene that allows them to step between worlds. In her feudal home world, her relatives have become merchant princes, wielding enormous power over the local economy.

Miriam, thoroughly American, doesn't fit in well in that other world, and resents becoming a pawn in her family's dynastic games. Meanwhile, back on our Earth, the U.S. government has become aware of the Family and considers them dangerous narco-terrorists.

Very entertaining, but best read in sequence after the first two books.

Title: Mr. Vertigo
Author: Paul Auster
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 1994
ISBN: 0140231900
Pages: 293
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 14-20 October, 2007

Walt the Wonder Boy can walk on air. Really. He was a nine-year-old orphan pulled off the streets of 1920s St. Louis by Master Yehudi and taught in a long, grueling process to levitate and walk through the air. Walt becomes a huge hit and he and Master Yehudi travel around America, pulling in the crowds. It can't last of course and Walt loses his ability once puberty strikes. Master Yehudi dies and Walt settles into a second career as a small-time crook and club owner in 1930s Chicago. He goes through several more changes, which are dealt with briefly, before ending up as an old man in the 1990s.

Walt's a firecracker kid with a smart mouth and a product of his times. I could easily see him played by Mickey Rooney. Tragedy strikes him again and again, but he overcomes most of it.

This book is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Title: Bulletproof Web Design, second edition
Author: Dan Cederholm
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: New Riders
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0321509021
Pages: 312
Keywords: css, web
Reading period: 10-29 October, 2007

Cederholm clearly explains the CSS techniques required to build a "bulletproof" website: one that is robust in the face of text resizing, window resizing, disabled images, etc, with minimal, semantically correct markup that works across all the major browsers.

Anyone who's serious about building a modern website should read this book.

Cederholm builds up his examples, one step at a time, in a clear manner. For the shorter examples, he tends to show the entire CSS or XHTML again and again, with the latest changes highlighted in orange. I would have preferred him to strip out the unneccessary repetitive material. Otherwise, great book.