20. The Fire, by Caroline B. Cooney
This is third book in the Losing Christina trilogy, Cooney's first horror novels. The main character, Christina, is a 13-year-old 7th grader who lives on an island off the coast of Maine and has come to the mainland to go to middle school. She and some other kids from Burning Fog Isle are boarding with a couple, the Shevvingtons, who are prominent educators in the town. They are also secretly extremely sadistic, taking great pleasure in driving the most innocent to madness, and Christina is their target.
Christina is something of a Mary Sue, with brown, gold, and silver hair that practically has its own personality. Also, adults are useless -- no one believes that the Shevvingtons are evil. The author obviously didn't spend a lot of time around middle schoolers. Still, the book was entertaining, and when school starts again, I will have to read the first two books in the series (which are in the library).
21. Daddy's Gone a Hunting, by Mary Higgins Clark
A dark secret from a family's past that threatens the lives of two sisters, Kate and Hannah Connelly, when the family-owned furniture firm in Long Island City, founded by their grandfather and famous for its fine reproductions of antiques, explodes into flames in the middle of the night, leveling the buildings to the ground, including the museum where priceless antiques have been on permanent display for years. The ashes reveal a startling and grisly discovery, and provoke a host of suspicions and questions. Was the explosion deliberately set? What was Kate—tall, gorgeous, blond, a CPA for one of the biggest accounting firms in the country, and sister of a rising fashion designer—doing in the museum when it burst into flames? Why was Gus, a retired and disgruntled craftsman, with her at that time of night? What if someone isn't who he claims to be?
I noticed some scientific discrepancies that one would think a long-time writer of murder mysteries would know better than to be promote (no, hair and nails do not continue to grow after death), but I found the book entertaining anyway. It isn't great literature, but it is brain candy, and sometimes that's what you want to read.
22. Dave Barry Talks Back, by Dave Barry
This book is a compilation of some of Barry's humor columns from the late 80's and early 90's. Like most of what he's written, this stuff is hilarious. (BTW, did anyone know that Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize winner for social commentary?)
23. Live Right and Find Happiness (although beer is much faster), by Dave Barry
In brilliant, brand-new, never-before-published pieces, Dave passes on home truths to his new grandson and to his daughter Sophie, who will be getting her learner’s permit in 2015 (“So you’re about to start driving! How exciting! I’m going to kill myself”). He explores the hometown of his youth, where the grown-ups were supposed to be uptight fifties conformists, but seemed to have a lot of un-Mad Men-like fun, unlike Dave’s own Baby Boomer generation, which was supposed to be wild and crazy, but somehow turned into neurotic hover-parents. He dives into everything from the inanity of cable news and the benefits of Google Glass (“You will look like a douchebag”) to the loneliness of high school nerds (“You will never hear a high school girl say about a boy, in a dreamy voice, ‘He’s so sarcastic!’”), from the perils of home repair to firsthand accounts of the soccer craziness of Brazil and the just plain crazy craziness of Vladimir Putin’s Russia (“He stares at the camera with the expression of a man who relaxes by strangling small furry animals”), and a lot more besides.
Though he has long since retired from writing for the Miami Herald, Barry is still funny, and this book is no exception.
