Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice is science fiction of the highest order: a meditation on man’s place in the cosmos, an examination of the limits of our knowledge, and a scathing condemnation of how politics influences the practice of science. Originally published in 1967, this title, along with a number of Lem’s other works, was reissued in 2020 by MIT press.

The opening chapters provide a brief backstory. Australian scientists, granted access to the Palomar Observatory, spent two years studying neutrino emissions raining down from space. Nothing came of their work, and they left behind only the computer tapes containing recordings of the emissions.

The Hiding Girl begins with an ominous scene. Two men, whom our gut tells us are not to be trusted, approach a woman and her daughters as they carry groceries into their isolated country home. Twelve-year-old Emily has the same foreboding instinct as the reader. Something bad is about to go down. But her mother is too trusting and her sister is too young to share her concern.

Something bad indeed goes down, and Emily is the only one to escape alive. Traumatized, hyper-alert, and stuck in survival mode, she goes on the run. She knows her family’s killers are aware that she escaped, and she fears they’ll come after her. She also wants revenge.

Margaret Millar’s 1957 novel has a simple setup: a bunch of men in their late thirties are meeting for a weekend away from the wives and kids at a remote country lodge to fish, play poker, and drink. Only one of them never arrives. The boys call the wives, and together they reconstruct a picture of where Ron Galloway was last seen and where he was headed.

Millar’s novels of the mid to late 1950s are brilliant studies of what actually goes on under the surface of middle-class American and Canadian life. (This one happens to take place in and around Toronto. Millar herself was from Kitchner, Ontario.)

Usually, when I finish reading a book, I write a thousand-word review. I can’t do that with a book as deep, thoughtful, and moving as this one. There’s just too much there. This will be one of those rare books I’m still digesting months or even years after finishing. This is also one of the few that will go onto my re-read list.

For the first 90 pages or so, I felt the book was going nowhere, and I would have given up if not for the many glowing reviews. The Door is a social study, a psychological study, a study in religion, a character study and a profound and visceral meditation on the meaning of existence. In a book like this, the character under the microscope has to be interesting. For the first 90 pages or so, Emerence just wasn’t interesting enough.

My designer, the brilliant and stunning Lindsay Heider Diamond , has come up with yet another excellent cover for my next book. We hope to have this one out sometime this summer.

Charles Brandt, an attorney from Delaware, spent years interviewing Mafia hit man Frank Sheeran. Sheeran was one of the prime suspects in the disappearance of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, but because of all of the suspects refusal to talk, neither the local police nor the FBI could ever gather enough evidence for a conviction.

After decades of investigation, the FBI closed the case and left it unsolved. Brandt, who had extensive experience in criminal law and who helped win Sheeran’s release from prison on medical grounds, thought he could draw a confession from the elderly Sheeran who had begun to reconsider his life as he approached death.

I finally got around to reading this, three years after it was recommended to me by a pair of retired federal agents who had spent much of their careers pursuing drug runners in South Texas.

No Country for Old Men opens with Anton Chigurh, one of the most pitiless and chilling figures in modern fiction, escaping a police station after his arrest. From the ease with which he kills the deputy, it’s clear that local law enforcement in South Texas in 1980 isn’t prepared to handle such ruthlessly efficient criminals. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the only first-person narrator in the book, spends a lot of time ruminating on what kind of world would produce this new breed of criminal, and on the destructive effect of having such evil at large in society.

Bob Hartley’s North and Central opens in a bar in a working neighborhood of Chicago in the late 1970s. Andy, the bartender/narrator serves a clientele of factory workers, drunks, neighborhood characters and cops, many of whom are as brazenly corrupt as the city’s infamous politicians.

From the opening chapter, which depicts the bar’s collection of oddball regulars exchanging crude insults, you might get the sense that this book is going to be something like Animal House meets Goodfellas. It’s not that at all. This is one of those rare volumes that deeply rewards a reader’s patience.

In the opening scene of Charles Willeford’s Pick Up, counterman Harry Jordan is wrapping up a long day’s work in a San Francisco diner in the early 1950s. One last customer straggles in around 1:00 a.m. Helen Meredith is drunk, seeking a cup of coffee. She’s well dressed and obviously better off than Harry, who lives in a boarding house and has trouble keeping a steady job.

When it’s time to pay for her coffee, Helen confesses she’s lost her purse and doesn’t have a dime. Harry pays for her coffee and the two leave together to retrace her steps through the bars in search of the lost purse. As they walk, Harry confides to himself, “Gin was my weakness, not women, but with a creature like her… well, it was enough to make a man think.”

Published in 1966, One Fearful Yellow Eye is the eighth book in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. This one takes place mostly in Chicago, where McGee has travelled to help an old friend. Gloria “Glory” Doyle was one those “broken birds” McGee had taken in and for a period of healing after her life had gone wrong. Her happily-ever-after came in the form of marriage to the good and caring Dr. Fortner Geis.

This story opens with a call from Glory. It seems someone had been extorting the late Dr. Geis in the final year of his life, draining his savings bit by bit until there was nothing left of the substantial estate his family had expected him to pass on. Dr. Geis’ children from his first marriage, Heidi and Roger, despise Glory for marrying their father, an older widower, just three years before his death. They see her as the gold digger who stole all their money, and she wants to clear her name.