LITERARY FICTIONAmy PoeppelLimelight: A Novel

Atria/Emily Bestler BooksHardcover, 978-1-5011-7637-1 (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 416 pgs., $26.00May 1, 2018Allison Brinkley’s family is discombobulated. They’ve just moved from suburban Dallas to the heart of Manhattan. Husband and father Michael is nervous about his new job. The substitute teaching position Allison had lined up falls through. Seventeen-year-old Charlotte had to change schools for senior year, leaving behind her first boyfriend. Fourteen-year-old Megan’s grades are dropping and she’s acting out, dealing with hormones. Speaking of hormones, eight-year-old Jack discovers one of those your-body-is-changing-in-new-and-confusing-ways books, which ended up in one of his moving boxes by mistake, and he’s got questions.When Allison sideswipes a mirror off the door of a BMW, she meets Carter Reid, a Justin Bieber sort, once a charming, dimpled child crooner turned churlish, out-of-control, pop-singing bad boy. Allison accidentally becomes Carter’s personal assistant after discovering him in the ugly aftermath of a drug-infused bender with his entourage, and it’s her job to ensure Carter is ready for his Broadway debut, an adaptation of the Charles Chaplin 1952 classic film Limelight.    >>READ MORE

MYSTERY/ SUSPENSESpencer KopeWhispers of the Dead: A Special Tracking Unit Novel

Minotaur BooksHardcover, 978-1-2500-7288-7, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 336 pgs., $26.99; April 17, 2018A pair of human feet are found in a Styrofoam cooler in the middle of a judge’s living room in El Paso, Texas. Another pair are found in a defense attorney’s living room in Tucson. FBI Operations Specialist Magnus Craig and his partner, FBI Special Agent James Donovan, along with intelligence research specialist Diane Parker, form the FBI’s Special Tracking Unit. They have a serial killer on their hands, apparently meting out vigilante justice.Whispers of the Dead: A Special Tracking Unit Novel is the second in a mystery-suspense series by Spencer Kope, a crime analyst for the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office in Washington State. Collecting the Dead (Minotaur, 2016) is the first installment in Kope’s series, and while not necessary to understand follow the action in Whispers of the Dead, it provides some references to prior events, including in the epilogue, which also tees up the third book.  >>READ MORE

SCIENCE AND HISTORY

Robert Kurson

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon

Random House

Hardcover, 978-0812988703, 384 pages, $28.00; April 3, 2018

Reviewed by Chris Manno

If you could pick only one book to read that would place you at the epicenter of the daring Apollo moon landing program, the Cold War and the legendary Space Race, this would be it.

       In Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon, Kurson has achieved a fascinating and readable blend of both the history and context that comprised the world stage upon which man’s greatest journey played out in the latter years of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 mission itself was the crucial leap forward that boldly catapulted NASA and the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the race both nations undertook to validate competing political ideologies with technical superiority.  >>READ MORE

FICTION

Patricia Hunt Holmes

Searching for Pilar

River Grove Books

Paperback, 978-1-63299-153-9 (also available as ebook); 320 pages, $16.95; April 10, 2018

In stark, disturbing detail, Searching for Pilar confronts the grim crime of sex trafficking in Mexico and the United States and shows how difficult it can be for law-enforcement authorities to take actions to stop it.

     This first novel by Houston writer Patricia Hunt Holmes is “inspired by real events and informed by experts.” It takes the reader into the darkest heart of an inhumane underworld business.

     Naïve and economically desperate young women from small towns in Mexico, many of them teenagers, are lured to Mexico City with the promise that they will be interviewed for good-paying jobs. Instead, once they show up, they are drugged, secretly thrown into windowless vans, and taken by cartel members out into the countryside to secret compounds protected by heavily armed guards.  >>READ MORE

FICTION

Glen Larum

Waltz Against the Sky

Walking Three Bar T Publishing

Hardcover, 978-0-9966865-0-1, 400 pages; $28.95; 2016

As you open Austin and Midland writer Glen Larum’s debut novel, get ready for a dance with characters who are caught in swirls of life’s randomness, its chance convergences, and their own spur-of-the-moment decisions.

     Waltz Against the Sky has echoes of mysteries by such writers as Tony Hillerman and Elmore Leonard.  >>READ MORE

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

>> archive

Lisa Wingate novel a best seller for six months

Texas author Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours (Ballantine, $26, hardcover) has been on the New York Times Bestseller List every week for more than six months, much longer than the latest novels from such authors as John Grisham and James Patterson. Eventually it will come out in paperback but not anytime soon. Meanwhile, it’s been making the top ten week after week after week.

I’ve known Lisa since her early success with her debut novel, Tending Roses (2001),  based on stories from her own grandmother. It’s still in print, and it remains one of Lisa’s favorites that she likes to read at book events.

The first of Lisa’s novels I read was Good Hope Road (2003), and I highly recommend it. It involved a tornado that tore through a Missouri community. A young woman rescued a victim, then made it her mission to sort through debris and reunite photographs and letters with the proper families.

Lisa and husband Sam lived in Clifton, Texas, near Waco for several years before heading to Arkansas and then back to Texas.

Before We Were Yours — which I think is Lisa’s best novel, and certainly her most successful — is based on a true story about a Memphis children’s home in the 1930s that kidnapped poor children and sold them to wealthy families for a huge profit.

The story is fiction, but the children’s home was not. Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis from the 1920s until the scandal was fully investigated in the early 1950s. You can get more information about the home by Googling Tann’s name.

Lisa’s novels are good PG reads, with strong characters but little or no bad language. I think one of the reasons that Before You Were Yours has stayed on the best-seller list for so long is because it’s a tough, compelling story but one you feel comfortable passing along to your  mom, grandmother, or friend.

Texas stories: Carlton Stowers’s collection of Texas stories, On Texas Backroads is being featured this week as the 2018 selection for Mansfield Reads.

The Mansfield Public Library every year encourages all its patrons to read one particular book and brings in the author to talk about it. Stowers will speak at the library at 7 p.m. Friday.

On Texas Backroads ($16.95 paperback) includes more than forty stories, essays, and musings by Stowers, most of them previously published in the last few years in American Way, the American Airlines magazine, or other magazines or newspapers.

Included are such gems as a piece pursuing the far-fetched possibility that Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth actually escaped and made his way to Texas, a touching story about a special Christmas the author fondly recalls, a tribute to Ballinger’s still-operating Carnegie Library, a debate about the origin of the hamburger with a humorous note about how fried potatoes came to be called French fries, and a tribute to the chicken fried steak at Mary’s Café in Strawn.

For more information on Mansfield Reads, go to mansfieldlibraryfriends.org.

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Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life

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2018 TEXAS BOOKISH DESTINATIONS

Can you name this literary place in the Lone Star State?

Okay, one last chance at the prize, before National Poetry Month comes to an end April 30!

Admit it: bookfans love traveling almost as much as they love reading itself. Beginning March 4, 2018, Lone Star Literary Life will roll out #10 through #6 in our annual list of Top Texas Bookish Destinations, for readers who want to visit the settings of their favorite books, the birthplaces and haunts of favorite authors, and hot spots for book buying, readings, and other literary activity.

     But throughout Texas’s 268,597 square miles, there are also lots of out-of-the-way points of interest that we don’t always have space to cover in our Top Ten pages.

     Watch this space each week for a new bookish place that you’ll want to add to your own travel list. Be the first to email us with the correct identification, and win a prize!

     This week, we continue with a bookish place that’s located in 2017’s #2 Top Bookish Destination. There’s plenty of poetry in this literary-rich city, but there’s a Poet Tree, too. Can you name the city? And extra credit for telling our readers the neighborhood or street where they can find it, too.

Email us at info@LoneStarLiterary.com with the specific right answer, and we’ll send you a free copy of Literary Texas.

LAST MONTH’S PHOTO (below) was correctly identified as the Capitol Gift Shop, inside the state capitol building in Austin. Congratulations — your prize is on the way!