My Summer Reading Collection

You never know where you’ll find a great book. I found the first one on the Friends of the Library sale shelf. The second book, I’ve on my own shelf waiting to be read, the same with the last on the list. But the two in between came to my hand in a less common way. I was in the Dollar Tree store, wandering down an aisle and saw a shelf of books. It’s hard for me to pass any collection of books, so I pawed through the pile and picked two. Boy, am I glad I did.

Starting in June I read Oxygen by Carol Cassella. When I realized this book is about an woman anesthesiologist, written by a real life anesthesiologist, I knew the medical side of the story would be accurate. In the story, Dr. Marie Heaton, a tightly wound doctor, is sent into a tailspin when a child under her care unexpectedly dies while under anesthesia. Struggling to cope with the disaster that follows, she finally rallies and is determined to discover the underlying cause of the death. Ultimately she is lead to realize she’s been betrayed by the person she would least suspect. Highly recommended.

Memories Can Be Murder by Connie Shelton. I’ve enjoyed a number of Shelton’s Charlie Parker series. her characters are like real people, and I like the way she plots her stories. In this one Charlie finds a notebook of her father’s which opens old wounds and sends her on a quest to find out what really caused the plane crash that killed her parents.

The Striver’s Row Spy by Jason Overstreet. This book is an interesting peek into the post-WWI era of black America. The protagonist, Sidney Temple, a man of color in 1919, is tapped my J. Edgar Hoover to be one of the 1st African-American agents. His assignment is to move into Harlem, and infiltrate the organization of Marcus Garvey, a man who is advocating that the colored population relocate to Liberia. Hoover wants Temple to find and report incriminating evidence against Garvey.

Zodiac Station by Tom Harper. This is a tale of sabotage, suspicion, and paranoia among a group of scientists on a remote Arctic island of Utgard. It’s a good book to read during the hot summer. The description of Arctic cold and the difficulties of living in that sort of climate almost make you shiver. The science and the puzzle are fascinating.

Night Passage by Robert B. Parker is the first Jesse Stone novel. While reading this book I kept hearing Tom Selleck’s voice. He did such a great job of portraying Stone’s manner of investigating in those movies about corruption in the small New England town of Paradise.

Hope you find something here you'd like.