The Inner Sanctum

Shelf Awareness reviews Ron Hansen’s novel A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion below:


It may not have qualified as the crime of the century, but the lurid murder of New York magazine editor Albert Snyder in March 1927 riveted the attention of that city–when the perpetrators went on trial, the courtroom was packed with more than 1,500 spectators. In this vivid, imaginative novel based on that crime, Ron Hansen (Atticus and Mariette in Ecstasy) weaves a story that will appeal to fans of classic mysteries, in the process skillfully evoking the morally compromised atmosphere of Prohibition-era New York. (The Snyder case was the inspiration for Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, which was the basis for Billy Wilder’s famous movie.)


When she meets handsome, alcoholic lingerie salesman Henry Judd Gray in June 1925, Ruth Snyder is a bored Queens housewife married to a man 13 years her senior. It doesn’t take long for the vain, shallow duo to tumble into a torrid affair. After a few months, Ruth tricks her husband into applying for an insurance policy that will pay double indemnity in the event of a death from other than natural causes.


After Albert Snyder demonstrates a Rasputin-like quality to survive several of Ruth’s bungled murder attempts, she urges the weaker Judd to bludgeon her husband, concealing the deed as a burglary. The killing is as inept as the lovers’ intensity is strong, and barely a month later, they’re on trial, turning on each other with the same alacrity that marked the start of their affair.


Hansen takes pains to present the story as something other than a morality play. As he portrays the era, it was a time when “wealth began to seem available to anyone.” Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray were two characters whose tragic flaw was the self-delusion that led them to believe the easy riches of the time were theirs for the taking. –Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer


Discover: A lively retelling of a notorious murder in Prohibition-era New York City.


A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (Scribner, Hardcover: 9781451617559, eBook: 9781451617573) is available now!

Shelf Awareness reviews John Dalton’s The Inverted Forest: A Novel (Scribner, Hardcover: 9781416596028, eBook: 9781416598183) below:

John Dalton’s debut novel, Heaven Lake, won the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With his second novel, Dalton proves that the praise was no fluke.

In The Inverted Forest, an assortment of last-minute replacement counselors arrive at Kindermann Forest Camp in rural Missouri, only to learn that the next several weeks will be spent taking care of a special group of campers: 104 severely developmentally disabled adults. Dalton writes with clear-sighted, simple humanity concerning the disabilities of the campers and the varying abilities of the unprepared counselors. Among the counselors is Wyatt Huddy, an often misjudged young man who is disfigured by a genetic disease known as Apert syndrome. The ambiguity of Wyatt’s proper designation–is he more like a camper than a counselor?–is purposeful and is a clever manifestation of one of the novel’s central themes.

With a measured sense of dread, the narrative follows Wyatt’s path to a fateful interaction that also involves an empathetic camp nurse, a vulnerable camper and a charming but untrustworthy counselor. Wyatt’s actions are life-defining for all of those involved and, in the second part of the book, Dalton moves the reader 15 years into the future to explore the consequences of what happened at Kindermann Forest Camp. The Inverted Forest deserves a place on every must-read summer list, and it should be slowly savored until the very end. –Roni K. Devlin, owner of Literary Life Bookstore & More

Discover: An excellent novel set at a summer camp in Missouri, featuring well-cut characters and a storyline that pulls the reader toward a climactic interaction with perfectly measured suspense.

The Inverted Forest is available now!

Lisa Tucker loves The Bird House: A Novel (Washington Square Press, Paperback: 9781439160930, eBook: 9781439164051) by Kelly Simmons!

Some novels are meant to be read slowly, savoring each word, while others push you to keep turning pages, teased on by the promise of secrets revealed. And then there are novels that are both, like The Bird House by Kelly Simmons. This book is so beautifully written that I felt guilty racing through it to discover what happens, and so I read it a second time, happy to spend another day under the spell of the story’s brilliantly realized narrator, 73-year-old Ann Biddle Harris.

The flap copy tells us that Ann is experiencing early signs of dementia, but I found her a generally reliable, if not always forthcoming, narrator. Though she has some minor memory problems, she is whip-smart and keenly aware of what’s going on around her. Listen to Ann discussing her marriage, when she admits that her late husband might have a different view: “Theo isn’t here to refute me. There’s a certain glory in that, I tell you. Widowhood means I’ll always have the last damn word.” Or Ann reacting to her eight-year-old granddaughter’s homework: “Oral history?… The things these teachers think of! Nothing an assignment, everything a project. As if children were archeologists or journalists.”

But in fact, little Ellie does turn out to be an archeologist of her family, unwittingly digging up truths of the past when she recruits Ann to help with her oral history project. Over her long life, Ann has kept many secrets: about her daughter’s death, her troubled marriage, and her feelings about her parents, who had disturbing secrets of their own. Yet it is the developing relationship between Ann and her granddaughter that is at the heart of The Bird House: a relationship that is always honest, often tender and sometimes very funny. Tinsley, Ann’s daughter-in-law and Ellie’s mother, is wary of Ann’s influence on the little girl–and no wonder. Ann dares to serve the child Coke–caffeine!–and takes her out for ice cream after school. When Ellie worries that she’s going to ruin her dinner, Ann calmly asks what they’re having. “Spinach lasagne,” Ellie says. “No great loss,” Ann concludes.

Wonderful small moments like these can be found throughout the novel, but this is not a quiet book; the story is filled with mysteries, both current and more than 40 years old. I don’t think it’s giving away too much to point out that three of the main characters turn out to share very similar secrets. Though this could be said to stretch plausibility, it works perfectly to underscore the questions of guilt, blame and innocence at the core of the novel. One of Ann’s most poignant moments is when she realizes she made a terrible mistake; she judged someone harshly because she was looking at the adult world through her “childhood eyes.” To be grown up, The Bird House suggests, is to recognize that the motives–and mistakes–of other people are as complicated and difficult to understand as our own. By novel’s end, we know Ann will continue to grow and change and, with Ellie, continue to celebrate all the ways life can still surprise her. –Lisa Tucker

The Bird House is available now, and Tucker’s latest Winters in Bloom: A Novel (Atria, Paperback: 9781416575405, eBook: 9781416575757) is available in September.

Scott Gummer‘s first novel uses a popular sport — baseball — in one of the best ways a novel can: as a backdrop for dark comedy. Here, Ben and Jili, a level-headed pair of suburban parents, find themselves in the middle of the very strange, weirdly competitive world of Little League baseball, where the kids are nervous, the coaches are punishing and the adults’ memories of childhood are surprisingly fresh. In arching a brow at youth sports, Gummer resists the urge to make all of the parents awful (only some of them are awful) or to discount the very real trade-off that sometimes exists between winning as much as possible and having a good experience as a player. As much as it’s a sharp-tongued takedown of win-at-all-costs culture, Parents Behaving Badly is also a teasing, but ultimately affectionate, story about a happy marriage grappling with the approach of middle age and the pressures of parenting kids who are getting older every day.

Read the full article here!

Parents Behaving Badly (Touchstone, Hardcover: 9781451609172, eBook: 9781451609196) is available now!

See below for The Observer’s Very Short List review:


Hot Stuff


A few years ago, Reuters picked up the following story: HOUSE OF HOLES AIMS TO PLUG CLIMATE CHANGE GAP. The article itself had nothing to do with Nicholson Baker’s new novel, House of Holes: A Book of Raunch. And yet the headline strikes us as strangely apropos.


Baker’s writings are all over the place—but wherever he strays, controversy seems to follow. Yet another smutty novel (Baker’s written a few) became a footnote to the whole sordid Lewinsky-Clinton affair. His provocative—some would say half-baked—history of the Second World War (Smoke) was totally savaged by most of the mainstream critics. And House of Holes, which comes out early next month, is sure to be remembered as this summer’s most sensational midlist title.


The book’s as dirty as anything Baker’s published to date, and more out there than anything he’d thought up previously. (To be fair, the author’s harshest critics would say that Smoke gives it a run for its money.) Alice in Wonderland is one obvious reference point. The Penthouse letters column is another. But Lewis Carroll was never so kinky (not on the page, at least), and Baker’s imagination easily outstrips that of your average Penthouse-letter writer. The results won’t be to everyone’s liking. (Cue the ensuing controversy.) But Baker’s fans will spot his Cheshire Cat grin peeking out from every page.


House of Holes (Simon & Schuster, Hardcover: 9781439189511, eBook: 9781439189535) is available August 9!

Shelf Awareness calls Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia: A Novel (Scribner, Hardcover: 9781451617962, eBook, 9781451617986) “an intimate exploration of the complex territory of an adult sibling relationship.” Read the review below:

Like her National Book Award-nominated Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta’s new novel has roots in the 1970s. This time, instead of focusing on the era’s politics, she attends to the intimate details of family life, the slow erosion of dreams and the faint persistence of hope.

Narrated mostly in the voice of Denise Krasnis, a woman struggling in midlife, Stone Arabia is the story of her relationship with her older brother, Nick Worth, a talented if only modestly successful post-punk musician in bands with names like the Demonics and the Fakes. Now, in 2004, Nick lives in obscurity in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon, subsisting on a bartender’s income. When not working on an elaborate fictional narrative of his life he calls “The Chronicles,” he’s recording an equally imposing, provocative series of experimental CDs, distributed sporadically and rarely.

Denise, who calls her own story “The Counterchronicles,” can’t escape the incessant drumbeat of stories from the wider world that insinuate their way into her life as she realizes that she “had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously.”

Spiotta captures the stew of love, frustration, anger and lack of communication that are the stuff of adult sibling relationships: “We don’t talk out everything,” Denise tells her daughter, Ada, a filmmaker who’s working on a documentary on her uncle’s career. “We keep a lot in the air between us.” As she watches, with concern and alarm, her brother’s increasingly reclusive behavior, she must deal with their mother’s early dementia, fearing she’s destined for the same fate.

In a voice that rarely rises above an intense whisper, Dana Spiotta’s novel leaves us with some profound questions: How well do we know the ones dearest to us and, in the face of our most well-intentioned efforts, can their inner lives ever truly be known? –Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Discover: Dana Spiotta’s new novel is an intimate exploration of the complex territory of an adult sibling relationship.

Stone Arabia is available now!

Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You: A Novel (Washington Square Press, Paperback: 9781451613971, eBook: 9781451613988) is receiving outstanding praise! Read the BookPage review below:

In war, finding refuge

Review by Megan Fishmann

Originally published in the U.K. in 2009 to little fanfare, The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison went on to be shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize, drawing much-deserved attention to this haunting coming-of-age story.

Alison takes readers to London in 1939, with Hitler’s troops poised on the brink of invading Poland. In anticipation of an attack, thousands of British parents are sending their children out of the city, to safety in the countryside. Anna Sands, a precocious eight-year-old with a flair for poetry, is one of these children. She arrives on an estate run by childless couple Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton.The story unfolds from the points of view of four characters: Thomas and Elizabeth, whose lives have been marked by their inability to have children and Thomas’ crippling bout with polio; Anna, whose life is changed by her arrival there; and Roberta, Anna’s mother, who embraces her newfound independence in London.

Alison tactfully tackles the notion of loneliness—be it in a foreign setting or a familiar home—along with expertly describing complicated relationships that are fraught with passion. Whether it’s Anna discovering an affair not to be witnessed, or Anna’s mother relying on the comfort of another man, these tangibly real characters are ones that inspire both pity and awe. The Very Thought of You is not just a story of love but a story of loss, one whose voice will touch even the coldest of hearts.

Also check out Shelf Awareness’s review below:

Like 2011 Best Picture Oscar winner The King’s Speech, Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You is so absorbing that you don’t realize how little has happened until after you’ve finished reading.

That is, how little has happened on the surface. Like most humans, Alison’s characters eat and sleep, fight and make love, take trips and suffer accidents. But book’s real action is psychological: battles are fought in the characters’ minds and hearts, their actions betraying very little of their inner struggles.

The slight action of The Very Thought of You unfolds at Ashton House, a Yorkshire estate converted to a boarding school as housing for London children fleeing the Blitz. Its narrative switches among the perspectives of several well-drawn characters, with just enough time spent on each one’s thoughts for them to be sympathetic and not tiresome. Eight-year-old Anna Sands is the common thread, pulling the reader through Mrs. Ashton’s unfulfilled desire to have a child, Mr. Ashton’s deep regrets over both his inability to walk and his wife’s longing, and his unfolding attachment to schoolteacher Ruth Weir.

Alison deftly handles love, regret and loss, creating a web of dramatic irony all the more impressive because it’s never obvious. The result is like a watercolor half filled in, a psychological landscape made more real by the spaces left blank. The Very Thought of You is a fine first novel from a keenly perceptive writer. –Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at Intractable Bibliophilia

Discover: A child fleeing World War II London discovers a world of unspoken love and loss.

And one of our favorite book bloggers, Booking Mama, says it is “extremely powerful” and “deeply touched my heart.” Also great for book clubs! Below is an excerpt, and read the full review here.

In addition to the writing, I deeply appreciated how this novel explored the theme of love. Initially, I thought the story might be just a love story (and it was), but it was so much more than that. This novel delved into almost every aspect of love in society. There was parent/child love, adulterous love, passion, unrequited love, and lost love. THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU was definitely a heart-breaking look at love and how much our lives can be affected by love, loss and even unrequited love.

The Very Thought of You is available now!


Shelf Awareness has reviewed Paul Malmont’s The Astounding, The Amazing, and the Unknown (Simon & Schuster, Hardcover: 9781439168936, eBook: 9781439168950) in their July 5th “Shelf Awareness for Readers.” See below for the full review!


We know some things to be true: Robert A. Heinlein recruited fellow science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to work in a research lab at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during the Second World War. There is a persistent rumor associated with the Navy Yard–the alleged disappearance and reappearance of the USS Eldridge in the “Philadelphia Experiment” of October 1943. Earlier that year, L. Ron Hubbard was relieved of his U.S. Navy command after a shooting incident in Mexican territorial waters, and was also involved with Jack Parsons, a pioneering member of the American space race program and one of the nation’s highest-ranking occultists. And the publication of “Deadline,” a short story written by Cleve Cartmill, led to a federal investigation into the possibility that science fiction writers were leaking atomic secrets to the enemy.


Paul Malmont (The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril) takes all these historical tidbits–along with some of the legends about Nikola Tesla–and bundles them into a rollicking novel in which pulp fiction writers become real-life adventurers. Sure, the story tweaks the historical record in a few places, but it’s clear readers aren’t meant to take all of this too seriously as the plot becomes increasingly baroque, with more than a few ingenious twists along the way.


Malmont’s rich characterizations do much to obscure any questions of accuracy. It’s because this re-creation of the literary and fan communities that emerged during the science fiction boom feels so accurate that all the other stuff seems, even if only for a few moments, utterly plausible… and remains entertaining even after disbelief returns. –Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com


Discover: A rollicking novel in which pulp fiction writers (Asimov, Heinlein and Hubbard, to name a few) become real-life adventurers in order to defeat the Nazis.

Shelf Awareness has reviewed Douglas Kennedy’s The Woman in the Fifth (Atria, Paperback: 9781451602111, eBook: 9781451602142) in their July 5th “Shelf Awareness for Readers.” See below for the full review!

Douglas Kennedy (The Moment; Leaving the World) offers up a gritty tale of lost lives, betrayal and murder set in Paris’s seedy underbelly. Readers looking for a cure for the common romance need look no further.

Fleeing a shattered marriage, an ill-fated affair and a brewing legal storm, disgraced film professor Harry Ricks takes refuge in Paris, but the City of Lights is no dream come true. Destitute, Harry barely manages to afford a tiny chambre de bonne alongside criminals and illegal immigrants. Financial need forces him to take a shady position as night watchman for illegal activities. Alone and embattled by suspicious neighbors, Harry spends his time dodging threats and trying to contact his angry daughter, until he meets Margit Kadar. Mature, intelligent and alluring, Margit stokes Harry’s dormant passion into an inferno, and the two strike up a torrid affair. However, a catastrophic series of events soon makes Harry question whether Margit’s mysterious demeanor hides a wounded heart or a sinister nature.

Kennedy’s blunt depiction of Paris’s immigré class provides a grainy backdrop to the layers of danger and manipulation Harry faces in his new dog-eat-dog reality. Kennedy creates an ever-expanding web of tension as Harry proves unable to escape calamity. Kennedy also explores the concept of communal guilt, as catastrophes are created by chains of events in which none of the participants are truly innocent. While the reader will by design vacillate between sympathy and contempt for Harry, the enigmatic Margit steals the show in this noir-style page-turner. –Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries

Discover: A gritty tale of passion turned deadly in Paris’s underbelly.