A Shot in the Dark by Lynne Truss

In the 1950s, Brighton, England, was bucolic and lovely—if you disregard the hooligans, Teddy Boys and other criminal mischief- makers lurking about. In A Shot in the Dark, author Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) fame introduces Inspector Steine, a police captain who wants nothing more than for crime to simply relocate itself so he can enjoy his ice cream in peace. When a well-known theater critic is gunned down just before he’s supposed to share crucial evidence in an old case, earnest Constable Twitten is determined to buck departmental tradition and actually solve a crime. This farcical tale is packed with interwoven plotlines, clues strewn about like confetti and a comically oblivious chief inspector. It reads like a stage comedy, and in fact Truss has written four seasons’ worth of Inspector Steine dramas for BBC Radio. There are no dark and stormy nights here, just gorgeous seaside views marred by occasional corpses. The ’60s are coming, but for now, women are still largely ignored; this turns out to be its own kind of liberation, since who would suspect them? Sharp and witty, A Shot in the Dark is a good time. 

Recommended by Monica Shine
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*Portions of this review was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage.  It was published with their consent.

Dream Country by Shannon Gibne

This epic but fast-moving novel focuses on several members of the same multigenerational family, starting with Kollie, a Liberian-American teenager in 2008 Minnesota struggling with his school, community, and family.  The novel moves between the United States and Liberia and backward and forward in time ranging from 1826, soon after African-Americans settled in the new African country, to 2018.  Gibney only spends a few chapters with each group of characters, and I would have been happy to read more about any of these parents, children, soldiers, and lovers, but the book’s relative brevity speeds it along.  All major characters’ stories are compelling, even as they face terrible hardships and losses.  The final section ties these tales together in an especially satisfying way.   Gibney is both a gifted author—her prose is poetic but realistic—and an authority on the subject: she is a professor of English and African diaspora (and she offers a helpful historical timeline at the end of the book). 

Recommended by Andrew Gerber
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