Tea and Primroses, by Tess Thompson

Booktrope, February 2014

Constance Mansfield, reclusive bestselling author, is killed suddenly, struck by a car while riding her bike from her home into the little Oregon town of Legley Bay. This is shock enough for her daughter Sutton, and their little circle of friends as close as family, but it's not the worst.

The worst is that it appears to have been no accident. Constance was run down intentionally, deliberate murder.

With this startling opening, the book proceeds to ex;lore relationships among Sutton's generation, most critically her relationship with Declan Treadwell, son of her mother's friend and housekeeper Roma, who also died in a car accident some years earlier, and Constance's own unsuspected past.

On a Pale Horse (Incarnations of Immortality #1), by Piers Anthony (author), George Guidall (narrator)

Recorded Books, ISBN 9781449844493, July 2010 (original publication October 1983)

Zane is a failing photographer in a world in which science and magic both work. On a very, very bad day, he wanders into a magic shop and makes a deal with the proprietor which winds up making his day even worse, and decides to kill himself.

In the apartment from which he is about to be evicted, he prepares to shoot himself, and is in the act of pulling the trigger when he is interrupted by Death.

The actual personification of Death.

Startled by the interruption, he moves while his finger is still pulling on the trigger, and accidentally kills death, instead.

Underdog (Melanie Travis Mysteries #2), by Laurien Berenson

Kensington, ISBN 9781575661087, November 1996

After the summer's entirely too exciting events connected to the theft of Melanie's Aunt Peg's prize standard poodle, Beau, Melanie herself is now the owner of a standard poodle puppy named Faith, whom Peg expects her to show to her championship. While she begins to enjoy dog ownership along with her five-year-old son, Melanie is also taking dog show handling classes with a well-known handler, Jenny Maguire. Melanie and Jenny are becoming friends, and when Jenny tells her that Ziggy, Jenny's much-loved mini poodle, escaped their yard and was killed by a car, Melanie is shocked.

Less than a week later, Jenny is dead, of arsenic poisoning.

Was it an accident? Suicide?

Or, as the police suspect, murder?

And a few days later, following up on a food recommendation Jenny made during their last visit together, Melanie discovers that Ziggy is not dead; he's living with the boarding kennel owner who makes the food Jenny recommended.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, by Jennifer E. Smith

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, ISBN 9780316192866, January 2012

Hadley Sullivan, seventeen years old, is at JFK airport, having just missed by four minutes her flight to London to attend her father's wedding. She's not happy about going anyway; she'd prefer to skip it, and is going only because her mother has insisted, saying that she'll regret it later if she doesn't. She's even less happy now that she's going to be spending hours waiting at the airport for the next flight, which will get her to Heathrow just in time to take a cab directly to the church.

And then she meets Oliver, an eighteen-year-old Yale freshman headed home to England for his own family event. First he helps her with her bags as they go in search of food, and then they start to talk.

Agent of Change (Liaden Universe #1), by Steve Miller and Sharon Lee (authors), Andy Caploe (narrator)

Audible Frontiers, September 2012 (original publication 1988)

I'll start by saying that the Liaden Universe is large, with internal subseries, and can be read in several different orders. By internal chronology, Agent of Change is #9, not #1. I'm a believer in publication order, though. Discover the universe in the order the writers invented it. On that basis, Agent of Change is #1.

Miri Robertson is an ex-mercenary, ex-private bodyguard, whose last employer set her and the rest of his household up as a bloody sacrifice to cover his escape. His former employers, the Juntavas crime syndicate, are convinced she has information they want, and in any case, having worked for a traitor, she's a traitor, even though she was never herself part of Juntavas.

Trans-Siberian Express, by Warren Adler

Stonehouse Productions, ISBN 9781629212982, November 2013

It's the late 1970s, Mao is dead, and tensions are rising between the USSR and China. The US is set on a policy of detente, and doesn't want war between the two major communist powers--especially not a nuclear exchange. The cloud of radioactive fallout would reach the west  coast of the US, with potentially major consequences.

The current Communist Party Chairman, Dimitrov, has convinced the President and the Secretary of State that he agrees with him and is the safeguard against a disastrous war. Unfortunately, he has leukemia, and is dying.

The US secretly agrees to send one of the world's leading leukemia experts, fortunately the son and grandson of Russian immigrants and a speaker of Russian, to treat Dimitrov and hopefully keep him alive long enough to attend an international meeting and sign a treaty.

Dr. Alex Cousins, né Kuznetsov, is off on an adventure he never expected or wanted.

It's not too bad at first, treating Dimitrov successfully and bringing him back to greater health, at least for now. But along the way, he learns a dangerous secret about Dimitrov's real plans for China. When it's time to go home, Alex finds himself being given the "gift" of a trip on the Trans-Siberian Express, through Siberia where both his father and grandfather spent important years of their lives, culminating in theory in a boat ride to Yokohama and a plane trip home.

Alex doesn't believe he'll ever make it, unless he can find a way to get his dangerous message to US authorities before he's stopped.

Along the way, we see both the grimness of the Soviet system, and glimpses of what the Russians, especially the Siberians, love about their country. A beautiful Russian history professor, recruited back into KGB employment she left ten years ago, Dimitrov's hatchet man Zeldovich, assorted other KGB agents, a carload full of KGB soldiers, and even the railroad steward staff are all either really watching Alex, or making him feel that they are. The deeper they get into Siberia, the more events and misunderstandings and all too real conflicts ratchet up the tension and the danger.

This is a very solid political thriller set in a half-forgotten period of our recent history, when the collapse of the Soviet Union was still unthinkable, and Mutual Assured Destruction was what was keeping us all alive.

Recommended.

Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins #1), by P.L. Travers (author), Sophie Thompson (narrator)

Listening Library, ISBN 9780739366790, June 2008 (original publication 1934)

This is a story most of us know, whether from the book or from the 1964 Disney movie. Recently it has gotten a flurry of new attention due to the new Disney movie about making the Mary Poppins movie, Saving Mr. Banks.

Mary Poppins arrives, apparently on the East Wind, at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, London, when the Banks family is in dire need of a new nanny, Katie Nanna having quit and departed quite abruptly. She is brusque and high-handed, and promises only that she will stay until the wind changes, but magical things happen all around her.

It's a charming story, and well worth reading whether you are in the intended age group, or long removed from that.

Hominids (Neanderthal Parallax #1), by Robert J. Sawyer (author), Jonathan Davis (narrator)

Audible Frontiers, April 2008 (original publication 2002)

Ponter Boddit is a theoretical physicist working with his professional and life partner--his man-mate--Adikor on a quantum computer, deep in the bowels of a nickel mine, when something goes horribly wrong and, from Adikor's perspective, Ponter disappears.

From Ponter's perspective, he's suddenly in a tankful of water in a large, dark room.

Ponter and Adikor are Neanderthals, from a world where H. sapiens sapiens died out, and H. sapiens neanderthalis survived to become the dominant species.

Stolen: A Letter to My Captor, by Lucy Christopher (author), Emily Gray (narrator)

Recorded Books, ISBN 9781449838409, July 2010 (original publication May 2009)

Gemma is sixteen years old, traveling with her parents from London to Vietnam on what is a business trip for her art curator mother, when a vaguely familiar man in his twenties pays for her coffee because she doesn't have local currency. She's grateful; he's polite and charming.

And within a few minutes, he has drugged her coffee and snatched her away from the coffee shop into a less public part of the airport.  When she is next fully awake and in her own senses, she's in an isolated house in the Australian Outback, with only her kidnapper, Ty, for company.

Three Princes, by Ramona Wheeler

Tor Books, ISBN 9780765335975, February 2014

This is an alternate history set in a timeline where Caesar lived, he and Cleopatra prevailed, and the line descended from them continues to rule an empire dominated by Egypt over 1,800 years later. Lord Scott Oken, a British prince, a younger son of a line descended from both Caesar and Cleopatra (not just one or the other), is a young man who has made his career serving as a spy and agent for the Egyptian royal court.

His mentor and friend, Professor-Prince Mikel Mabruke, is a Nubian prince, as high-ranking as anyone outside the immediate Egyptian royal family, and an expert in alchemy, which is to say poisons.

Oken, on a recent trip through Europe, uncovered evidence of a nasty plot involving ambitious native leaders in Britain, Oesterreich (Germany), and Russia. The details aren't clear, but there's a religious aspect as well as the political, and the group apparently calls itself the Black Orchid.

He arrives home from this trip just in time to help rescue Prince Mikel Mabruke from another, apparently unrelated, criminal conspiracy, known as the Red Hand.