When Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole scaled the peak of Yosemite’s El Cap Mountain with the women they were going to marry three and a half decades ago. It had been the highlight of their lives but the tale didn’t end happily ever after. Fast forward to the present finds both men unhappy. Hugh’s wife is gone and Lewis’s is asking him for a divorce. With things going so badly, the men decide to relive their greatest triumph and climbe El Cap again, but what they encounter is a harrowing adventure more than the nostalgic trip they had been hoping for. They stumble across the corpse of a climber who fell, encounter a wild caveman who steals the corpse, and meet up with a suspicious-acting mountain guide whose fiancee is missing. All of this, and there’s a fierce storm heading their way.
Read a review of Wall here.
Philip, Gilbert, and Claire are a trio of writers get a chance at biting the Hollywood apple when they seal a deal to write the screenplay for a big Hollywood flick in this LA glitz and glamor parody. They encounter far more than that when they also end up getting a deal to write the tell-all memoirs of a fading Hollywood starlet, which ruffles more than a few feathers of those who are worried about the secrets she has to tell. Things quickly spiral out of control, involving bordellos, male prostitutes, blackmail, videotapes, and vindictive DAs. This fun and bitchy satire comes from the comedic genius mind of Joe Keenan, a staff writer for Frasier.
The Ruins of California is a coming-of-age story about young and precocious Inez Ruin, whose surname may have a lot to say for her family. Her father Paul is maddening and intriguing, charming and self-obsessive, brilliant and unable to stay in a monogamous relationship. He divorces Inez’s mother Connie and inevitably, a long string of girlfriends comes to fill his life. Inez is forced to grow up in two worlds, the stable one provided by her mother and Grandmother, both hardworking Peruvian-born women, and the world of her father and Grandmother Ruin, old money and just as old traditions including horse riding, tea parties, and lessons in refinement. On top of this, Inez must navigate the Californian highschool landscape of sex, drugs, art, surfing, Nixon, and the ultimate goal of not making a big deal out of anything. The climb to maturity is a long and difficult one; Inez finds that while she may have the strength to make it, her beloved half-brother may not.
Read a review of this book here.
Detective Francis X. Loughlin’s first big case was solving the death of a female doctor, but unfortunately, Julian Vega, the convicted killer, got his release on a technicality just a few years later after a string of appeals. Inevitably, another murder arises bearing remarkable similarities with the case from twenty years ago so that Julian is the first man Loughlin suspects. However, thanks to advancements in DNA technology that hadn’t existed back then, evidence points in an impossible direction — the blood belonging to the woman Julian supposedly had killed in 1983 — and forcing Loughlin to rethink years of certainty. Now, Julian’s the only one who can help Loughlin solve this puzzling mystery and get to the truth of the matter.
Read a review of Slipping into Darkness here.
