Daily Archives: August 27, 2020

Managed Careby Joe Barrett

Maxy Awards “Book of the Year” 2019

Pencraft Awards “Best Fiction Book of 2019”

“Witty, occasionally crass, and an unqualified delight.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS

Is it too much to ask that a managed care facility refund a year’s advance payment when your grandfather dies before he can move in? Frank Johnson doesn’t think so, which is why the thirty-three-year-old now lives in a nursing home, locked in a chess match feud with management that doesn’t occupy nearly enough of his time.

When foster kid Elroy is thrust into his life, Frank decides to turn this forced relationship to his advantage – launching a string of absurd decisions, inappropriate behaviors and unexpected glimpses of tenderness that ultimately turn a New Jersey suburb upside down. A laugh-out-loud celebration of bad choices for good causes, Managed Care is an offbeat story about three misfits on the social fringes of suburbia and their ridiculous campaign to introduce an unfiltered version of intimacy to their stale, impersonal community. Because, according to Frank, it’s probably what Jesus would have wanted.

The Collector of Lost Thingsby Jeremy Page

“Moody and affecting prose buoys this strange and troubling account of an Arctic ocean voyage to the end of the earth, and the end of a species” (Publishers Weekly).

The year is 1845 and young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an expedition to the Arctic in the hope of finding remains of the by now extinct Great Auk.

He joins a hunting ship, but the crew and the passengers are not what they seem. Caught in the web of relationships on board, Eliot struggles to understand the motivations of the sociopathic Captain Sykes; the silent first mate, French; the flamboyant laudanum-addicted Bletchley; and most importantly of all, Bletchley’s beautiful but strange “cousin” Clara.

As the ship moves further and further into the wilds of the Arctic Sea, Eliot clings to what he believes in, desperate to save Clara but drawn irrevocably back into the past that haunts him.

Fellowship of Fear (The Gideon Oliver Mysteries Book 1)by Aaron Elkins

First in the Edgar Award–winning series “that never disappoints,” featuring the forensic anthropologist known as the Skeleton Detective (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

When anthropology professor Gideon Oliver is offered a teaching fellowship at US military bases in Germany, Sicily, Spain, and Holland, he wastes no time accepting. Stimulating courses to teach, a decent stipend, all expenses paid, plenty of interesting European travel . . . What’s not to like?

It does not take him long to find out. On his first night, he is forced to fend off two desperate, black‑clad men who have invaded his Heidelberg hotel room with intent to kill. And then there are a few trivial details that the recruiting agency forgot to mention—such as the fact that the two previous holders of the fellowship both met with mysterious ends.

From there, it is all downhill. Gideon finds himself the target in an unfamiliar game for which no one has bothered to give him the rules. What he does have is his own considerable intellect and his remarkable forensic skills. He will need them, for he is playing for some fairly high stakes: the security of Western Europe.

Fellowship of Fear is the 1st book in the Gideon Oliver Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.