'Evidence of Murder' By Lisa Black

Reviewed By Oline H. Cogdill
Miami Herald

In her second novel about Cleveland forensic investigator Theresa MacLean, Black constructs an involving plot that seems to have no clues. No matter how Theresa approaches her latest case, she cannot find any evidence that would reveal how a young woman died in the woods. Nothing suspicious was found near Jillian Perry's body, and forensics tests yield nothing.

A former escort with an adored 5-month-old baby, Jillian apparently had finally found happiness with Evan, her husband of three weeks. Evan and his business partner had just developed an innovative video game that was likely to bring them wealth -- and a bit of fame.

Continue here...

'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' By Shahriar Mandanipour

Reviewed By Trenton Daniel
Miami Herald

In his first novel to be translated into English, Shahriar Mandanipour sets out to write the story of young lovers struggling to consummate their prenuptial passion under the eyes of the Iranian morals police. They hang out nervously in Internet cafes, dark movie houses and on the jammed and smoggy streets of modern-day Tehran.

The clandestine courtship comes at a time when university students protest, and vigilantes watch out for transgressing neighbors. A war with U.S. troops and suicide bombers rages in next-door Iraq.

Telling amorous tales in post-Islamic-revolution Iran is tricky, if not downright dangerous, but a fictional writer named Shahriar Mandanipour, is up to the task. ''I am an Iranian writer tired of writing dark and bitter stories, stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction,'' writes the alter ego of the real-life Mandanipour, a Harvard visiting scholar and former writing fellow at Brown.

To continue please click here.

Will electronic devices make books obsolete?

BY JOHN WENZEL
The Denver Post (via the Miami Herald)

Like a lot of readers, Kimberly Field likes and laments her new Kindle.

On one hand, the in-demand electronic device solves a problem common to fans of novels and nonfiction: too many books, not enough bookshelves.

''I was about to resort to the Fahrenheit 451 method of book management'' joked the Denver author, referring to Ray Bradbury's cautionary tale about book-burning.

On the other hand, its convenience has removed the tactile sensation from a treasured hobby.

``I prefer turning the pages of a book because I like touching it and flipping back to reread passages. You don't get that with Kindle.''

While readers are torn over the merits of literary toys like Amazon's Kindle, the iPhone and Sony Reader, there's no doubt they have overwhelmingly embraced them.

This year, electronic books sales are up 150 percent and analysts predict the number could triple by December. That comes in a year when sales of traditional books are down four percent.

The publishing industry is scrambling to keep up with -- or take advantage of -- the interest in electronic reading. Ailing magazines and newspapers, hungry for a delivery system the public will like, are hopeful. Brick-and-mortar bookstores are hoping they don't become obsolete.

Continue here...

'The Winner Stands Alone' By Paulo Coelho

'The Winner Stands Alone' By Paulo Coelho

Review By CAROLYN SEE
Miami Herald

I used to know a guy who hated daylight saving time. Every time it rolled around, he devoted a week to denouncing it, along with corporate greed, artificially fertilized lawns, the American highway system and white bread. When his wife bought a loaf to make the kids' lunches, he hung it out the kitchen window with a rope. He wouldn't have it under his roof. I agreed with him on principle. There are plenty of things to dislike about our culture.

This guy would have loved Paulo Coelho, although he might wonder about a novelist who deplores glitz and glamour even as he devotes more than 300 pages to evoking glitz and glamour in all its distasteful excess. Coelho takes for his subject the Cannes Film Festival, which, in his opinion, stands on shaky moral ground. ''In Cannes,'' an assistant remarks, ``there's no such thing as friends, only self-interest. There are no human beings, just crazy machines who mow down everything in their path in order to get where they want or else end up plowing into a lamppost.''

Coelho disapproves mightily of the human folly on display in Cannes: the unbridled ambition, the thirst for fame, the lure of haute couture and ostentatious jewelry. He hates dark glasses, because ''in a celebrity town like Cannes, (they) are synonymous with status,'' and he loathes cellphones, which are ''leading the world into a state of utter madness.'' He posits a small group of people whom he dubs the ''superclass,'' which has all the power, all the limos, all the private jets; those who dress in high fashion, swill champagne, drive Maybachs and who, if they're women, get regular injections of Botox. But he isn't fond of ordinary people either, who do silly things like wear neckties or eat three meals a day whether they're hungry or not. In short, while he compares Cannes to Sodom and Gomorrah, he's not prepared to let sinners of any social class off the hook, quoting Solomon's ''Vanity of vanities, all is vanity'' more than once and apparently meaning it.

So. Igor, a psychotic Russian phone executive with his own private jet, comes to the film festival in pursuit of his ex-wife, Ewa, who has run off with Hamid, an Arab clothes designer also with his own private jet. Igor aims to kill a few people and notify Ewa on her cellphone, hoping this will motivate her to return to him. Over a period of about 24 hours, he does indeed manage to suffocate a young street vendor using the Russian martial art Sambo and off an important movie distributor using a needle soaked in curare, which Igor blows through a cocktail straw. He spends the afternoon stabbing an independent film director and leaving a hermetically sealed envelope filled with hydrogen cyanide under an unknown person's door.

Several unsuspecting women move through this corrupt and glittering landscape: a 25-year-old model who yearns for a chance at the big time, a 19-year-old model from Africa and that director who has spent her entire adult life making a film for which she seeks distribution. Through them, the author visits the worlds of moviemaking. (Will it surprise many readers to learn that the writer is the least well-paid participant in any project?) And we are told that Los Angeles is ``really a large suburb in search of a city.''The world of fashion is also held up to scrutiny, its sins too numerous to mention.

Continue here...

"Dead Silence" By Randy Wayne White

"Dead Silence" By Randy Wayne White

Review By Randy Wayne White
Miami Herald

It's a long way, literally and figuratively, from the funky fictional marina at Dinkin's Bay on Florida's southwest coast to the Hamptons of Long Island, but these two disparate settings form the backdrop for the latest -- and extremely engaging -- thriller from Randy Wayne White.

The book, of course, features the complex and enigmatic Doc Ford. For the uninitiated, the un-hip and the uninformed, Dr. Marion Ford is a marine biologist with a dark and secret past. Essentially he was a black-ops assassin, and that past -- as it has done in each of White's 15 previous Doc Ford novels -- threatens to come back to bite him in Dead Silence.

The story opens with Ford dispatching an ex-NFL player who has murdered a friend of Ford's. Doc swims out to the man's anchored boat, then bodily tows him out into the Gulf and dumps him. Cut to the Explorer's Club, where Ford is meeting up with another ex-clandestine agent with the aim of getting back into the business and -- not coincidentally -- to meet Sen. Barbara Hayes-Sorrento. While waiting, Ford witnesses her attempted kidnapping from a taxi out on the street. He intervenes, saving her with an axe he plucks from the hallowed club's walls (once used by Edmund Hillary) but the kidnappers escape with the senator's passenger, a teenage Native American who won a trip to New York in an essay contest.

Complicated enough already, but of course, the plot thickens quickly. The senator, a friend and potential paramour, heads a committee looking into an extraordinary cache of memorabilia, documents and treasure compiled by the recently expired Fidel Castro, and the early conjecture is that the kidnappers are Castro loyalists intent on ransoming for the warehouse full of Castro's stuff.

The hitch is they may have gotten more than they bargained for by taking the kid, Will Chaser, who not only seduced, then blackmailed his Minnesota teacher into writing the winning essay, but is one resourceful, bad-ass little dude.

Ford gets the go-ahead from the senator, the FBI, and his old black-ops boss, and after a trip back to Florida to arm himself and pick up his old friend Tomlinson, a clairvoyant, hippy, Zen-master doper, he tracks the bad guys to a horse farm in the Hamptons, which just happens to be right in Tomlinson's old neighborhood.

Continue here...

'The Daily Coyote' By Shreve Stockton

'The Daily Coyote' By Shreve Stockton

Reviewed By Susan Salter Reynolds
Miami Herald

A few years ago Shreve Stockton drove across the country on her Vespa to start a new life in New York after two years in San Francisco (oh, to be young and footloose!). On the way, she passed through Wyoming and fell in love with the landscape, especially the Bighorn Mountains. When New York City didn't click, Shreve lit out for the territory, landing in the tiny Wyoming town of Ten Sleep.

Soon, she met a rancher who offered her a rustic cabin on his property, Shreve's dream cabin (also Shreve's dream rancher -- oh, to be young and footloose!). One day the rancher, who also worked as a trapper for the U.S. Department of Agriculture killing coyotes, brought home a coyote cub. Reluctantly, Shreve took in the cub, fed him from a bottle, let him sleep in her bed, named him Charlie and gave him the run of the cabin and her life.

Shreve started a blog, ''The Daily Coyote,'' which became an overnight sensation in the nature-starved Web world. In its prime, the site received more than a million hits a month, some of it judgmental. In the 18 years he'd had his job trapping and killing coyotes, Mike the rancher told Shreve, nothing like the impulse to save this cub had ever come over him. The Daily Coyote is an insight into the boundaries between wild animals and humans.

''I had made it a point not to own him,'' Shreve wrote after Charlie inexplicably bit her one day, ``and to coexist without ever being the boss of him.''

Continue here...

Battling killers and cheats in Miami

Nick Stone gives us plenty of action and an authentic vision of South Florida in the days of cocaine cowboys and riots.
BY OLINE H. COGDILL

THE KING OF SWORDS. Nick Stone. Harper. 576 pages. $24.95

The Miami of the early 1980s has become an almost mythical place, an era steeped in the lore of Miami Vice and Scarface and seen as the epicenter for drugs and the glamour of a new South Beach. Nick Stone captures that reality in his gritty, brutal and expertly plotted The King of Swords, offering an authentic vision of South Florida along with plenty of hard-boiled action.

A few scenes of bizarre South Florida behavior crop up, but Stone uses them not for comic effect but to emphasize a society on the cusp of change. The King of Swords works equally as a police procedural, a thriller and an examination of multidimensional characters.

Stone's second novel is a prequel to the superb Mr. Clarinet,'' released in the United States last year after it had debuted in England. There Stone introduced Max Mingus, whose search for the son of a wealthy white Haitian family led him to his old nemesis -- Solomon Boukman, a drug baron with a far-reaching influence.

The King of Swords shows where the story began for Max, a detective sergeant on the elite Miami Task Force. The book is set in late 1980, wrapping up one of Miami's most tumultuous years that included the Mariel boatlift and the riots following the trial of the cops involved in the Arthur McDuffie beating. An influx of cocaine has given Miami an ``off-the-chart-and-still rising homicide epidemic.''

Max and his partner detective Joe Liston are called to the scene of a bizarre death in a primate park in Miami. But this isn't just one of those only-in-Florida crimes: The victim's entire family also has been killed, and the King of Swords tarot card is found in the man's body.

As 1980 folds into 1981, Max and Joe uncover a link to Boukman, a ruthless drug lord whose voudou practices that include human sacrifice have become legendary. Many fear him, but few people have seen his face, ``an ambiguous silhouette in the feeble light.''

Click here to read the entire review.