Cryoburn (Vorkosigan Saga #14), by Lois McMaster Bujold (author), Grover Gardner (narrator)

Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9781441747464, October 2010

Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan is once again in his favorite situation--in the midst of a major mystery, with people trying to kill him or exploit him. This time, he's on the planet Kibou-daini, checking out the cryocorps--corporations that freeze corpses for future revival when their medical conditions are curable--because one of them is attempting to expand its franchise to Komarr.

This is a fun Miles romp, through a planet where the dead aren't dead, at least they're not supposed to be, and they still vote--or rather, the corporations that hold their contracts and their proxies do, on their behalf. When political activists dedicated to equal cryo rights for the poor discover that some of those voting cryocorpses may be real corpses, due to a covered-up failure of cryo fluid a generation ago, the cryocorp responsible has a major secret to hide, and a powerful reason to make people disappear. Meanwhile, other activists want to simply burn all the cryocorpses, and let their property pass to their descendants.

The Friday Night Knitting Club (Friday Night Knitting Club #1), by Kate Jacobs (author), Carrington MacDuffie (narrator)

Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9781433201813, August 2007

Georgia Walker had her heart broken in her mid-twenties, and has spent the intervening thirteen years raising her daughter Dakota alone. She's built a successful small business, running a yarn shop, Walker and Daughter, and is starting to build a small reputation as a designer of elegant knit clothing. To her own surprise, as socially withdrawn as she has been since the break-up with Dakota's father, she has recently started a Friday night knitting group in her shop, and has started to regard this odd collection of women as friends.

Then Dakota's father, James, comes back from France, a successful architect, and wants to be involved in Dakota's life. That's hard enough for Georgia to accept; she's never really gotten over the feelings of pain and betrayal from James' sudden departure from her life just when she thought they'd be starting a family together.

The Anatomist's Apprentice (A Doctor Thomas Silkstone Mystery #1), by Tessa Harris (author), Simon Vance (narrator)

Blackstone Audio, ISBN 9781455122783, December 2011

Thomas Silkstone is a young colonial physician who has moved to London and taken up the infant art of anatomy and the even more infant art of the postmortem. One of his students, Francis Crick, sends his cousin, Lady Lydia Farrell, to him after her brother, Lord Edward Crick, dies under mysterious circumstances, with her husband, Captain Farrell, the most obvious suspect. Against his better judgment, and against the advice of his mentor, Dr. Silkstone travels to Oxford to examine Lord Crick's body, when he has been dead long enough for considerable decay to have taken place.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, by Michio Kaku

Doubleday, ISBN 9780385530804, January 2011

Michio Kaku is, in my opinion, our most entertaining science popularizer right now. He's a theoretical physicist and a science fiction fan, and the result is he's not afraid to imagine and project what might be, as well as talking knowledgeably about what we do know and can do now, on the cutting edge of science and technology.

In this book, he looks at what we can expect in technology in manufacturing, information technology, medicine, and transportation, in the near, medium, and more distant future.  Said that way, it doesn't sound too exciting, but three-d printers, nano-technology, self-driving cars, and the ability to slow or reverse the aging process offer possibilities as amazing to us as airplanes and space travel would have been to 18th century Europeans. Programmable matter, able to transform into any number of different tools and objects at the press of a button, might turn out to be one of the more mundane developments.

Deadly Nightshade (Martha's Vineyard Mystery #1), by Cynthia Riggs (author), Davina Porter (narrator)

Blackstone Audiobooks, ISBN 9780786153374, March 2006 (2001)

Victoria Trumbull and her niece Elizabeth live on peaceful Martha's Vineyard--peaceful, that is, until Victoria hears a scream, investigates, and finds a body on the outgoing tide.

Victoria starts, not investigating, of course, just wandering around her island home noticing things and asking questions. Which, unfortunately, the wrong people notice. Elizabeth, who drives her aunt around, and works for the harbor master (a retired NYC cop whom some people find to be very out of place on the island), starts to have some scary experiences--being followed, nearly driven off the road, unexpected and unfamiliar visitors when she's on the late shift at the harbormaster's shack.

We get a lively picture of island life, the mix of the old residents and the new, the social changes disrupting old ways, the tourists, and a presidential vacation. The characters are interesting, individual, and compelling. I'm looking forward to reading more of this series.

Recommended.

I borrowed this book from the library.

Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, by Newton S. Minow and Craig L. LaMay

University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226530390 , September 2008

Newton Minow, who helped bring the presidential debates into existence, and then helped guide their development, wrote this history of the debates for 2008. University of Chicago Press re-released it as an ebook for the 2012 elections.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this history is how hard it was to create televised debates between the presidential candidates, precisely because of rules intended to prevent the power of the new medium being exploited for partisan advantage. We get a wonderfully interesting tale of how the first presidential debate series, between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, was brought through the tangle of regulatory and competitive obstacles, and why it didn't happen again for well over a decade. Even with regulatory issues resolved, and both major party candidates in theory willing to do debates, there are still endless problems that need to be resolved anew every single time: number of debates, format(s) of debates, whether third party candidates will be included (and which ones.)

Days of Grace, by Catherine Hall

Portobello Books, ISBN 9781846271830, 2009

Nora is twelve years old when, because of World War II, she becomes one of the thousands of English children put on trains out of London into the safer English countryside. Her mother puts her on the evacuation train for her safety, but Nora feels it as an emotionally devastating rejection. When she reaches rural Kent and is taken in by the Rivers family, she bonds immediately with their daughter, Grace, is enchanted by Mrs. Rivers, and grateful for the new world Rev. Rivers opens up to her with education.

Nora and Grace grow as close as sisters, but as the girls reach adolescence, she discovers that even that is not quite close enough. She wants more, something that at that time and place she can't even ask for. And gradually she learns that this idyllic family is not quite so idyllic as it looked at first. There is a grief and a barrier between Rev. and Mrs. Rivers, and a fatal weakness in the Reverend.

Pets in a Pickle, by Malcom D. Welshman

John Blake, ISBN 9781843583615, June 2011 (December 2006)

Paul Mitchell is a young, newly-minted veterinarian, beginning his career at Prospect House Veterinary Hospital. Everyone, from the vet owners of the practice on down, is eccentric, to put it mildly. This includes the husband and wife who own the practice and who have their own very decided views, the receptionist with one working eye and one false eye, which comes out accidentally from time to time, and other support staff including Lucy, the young vet tech who becomes Paul's girl friend. She keeps rescuing animals, and she and Paul have a steadily growing menagerie, including the goose originally acquired for Christmas dinner, but who proved too good at home security to eat.

But the eccentricities of the staff are as nothing compared to the eccentricities of the clients and other assorted neighbors. There are the two older ladies still actively farming, and still living in a time about four decades ago, at least. There is the family with one dearly loved pet pig among the livestock on their farm, and the couple who dote on their pregnant mare, and are convinced that normal symptoms foretell the imminent loss of their pet.

It's clear the aim of this book was to tap into the ample market created by James Herriot's tales of his veterinary adventures. Pets in a Pickle is a fun book, but not in James Herriot territory, sadly. It suffers from the fact that fiction has to be plausible, while non-fiction only has to be true.

Fun but lightweight.

Book trailer

Second Hand (Tucker Springs #2, by Heidi Cullinan & Marie Sexton

Riptide Publishing, ISBN 9781937551575, September 2012

Paul is a young man who has been dumped by his girlfriend Stacey for a man with better prospects. Paul, sadly, is still hung up on her. El--Emmanuel Rozal--runs the pawn shop he inherited from his granddad and avoids all relationships because he sees all the failed relationships (but not the successful ones) all around him. El, by the way, is gay and out, and however mixed up his family is in other ways, it's just not an issue for them.

One day, spurred on by the need to do some outside maintenance on the rundown rented house Stacey picked and then left him with, Paul walks into El's shop.

The Secret Keeper, by Kate Morton

Simon & Schuster, ISBN 9781439152805, October 2012

Laurel Nicolson is an actress now in her mid-sixties, successful and happy in her career. She's come home with her brother and sisters for her mother Dorothy's birthday--her last birthday, as Dorothy Nicolson is fading both mentally and physically.

And Laurel finds herself obsessed with a long-buried mystery, the shocking day in her teens when, sitting in a treehouse, she saw her mother--her kind, generous, loving mother--kill a strange man who approached her in front of the Greenacres farmhouse and said something alarming. The man was Henry Jenkins, a writer who had been popular in the thirties and forties, but had since faded and declined, obsessed with the death of his wife Vivien and having acquire a reputation as the "picnic stalker." It doesn't fit the mother she knows, and Laurel decides she has to know the truth.