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Hotlists 2008
Crime Fiction - embedded
Booklists
Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.
Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .
Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.
Booklists and Suggested Reading
Paris Stars
Page Modified: August 19, 2008
Fiction and Nonfiction Titles
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
Crime Fiction
- Murder in the Sentier
Author: Black, Cara
Publisher: Soho $ 24 ISBN: 1569472785 Date: 2002
PW
The third Aimee Leduc investigation is set in the historic Sentier district, where once-fashionable private mansions now house the Parisian "rag" trade and nightclubs. Members of a 1960s Red gang are seeking their hidden loot, which leads to new murders. Aimee fears the killers may include her long-lost mother.
Updated 3/7/02 - Murder in the Bastille
Author: Black, Cara
Publisher: Soho Press $ 23.00 ISBN: 1569473242 Date: 2003Kirkus
April in Paris is a time for crime when Aime Leduc is attacked in an alley and knocked unconscious. When she awakes, she discovers she is blind. The police maintain she was the victim of a serial killer targeting showy blondes. Was he after another woman, or was Aime his intended victim?
Updated 1.26.03 - A Citizen of the Country
Author: Smith, Sarah
Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345433025 Date: 2000Kirkus
In the ancient, bloody region of French Flanders looms Montfort castle, home of Count Andre du Monde, owner of a famous Parisian horror theater. To repair his fortunes, he marries an heiress. Then the Grand Necropolitan Theater is suddenly stricken with disasters.
Suggested Reading: Historical Mystery Stars
Updated 6/6/00
Fiction
- Lydia Cassatt Reading
the Morning Paper
Author: Chessman, Harriet Scott
Publisher: Seven Stories $ 24 ISBN: 15832222723 Date: 2001Kirkus
Set in the Parisian art world of the 1880s, this novel imagines a poignant time in the lives of the American impressionist Mary Cassatt and her sister, Lydia. Fatally ill and conscious of impending death, Lydia contemplates her narrowing world.
Suggested Reading: Art Stars
Updated 10/8/01 -
Light
at Dusk
Author: Gadol, Peter
Publisher: Picador $ 24 ISBN: 0312203365 Date: 2000PW
In this atmospheric new novel by the author of The Long Rain, three Americans launch a desperate search across Paris for a kidnapped boy. In the process, they must challenge the moral burdens of their past, and in an attempt to rescue the child, find a way to redeem themselves. - Le Divorce
Johnson, Diane
E P Dutton List Price: 23.95 ISBN: 0525942386 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Combining delicious wit with penetrating social vision, Diane Johnson, author of The Shadow Knows, returns with a modern comedy of manners featuring two American sisters who take on sophisticated French society. -
Le Mariage
Author: Johnson, Diane
Publisher: Dutton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525945180 Date: 2000PWLibrary Journal
In her sparkling, new comedy of manners, the bestselling author of Le Divorce puts a contemporary twist on this venerable form with her keen-eye portraits of modern-day Americans living in Paris.
Updated 3/13/00.
Nonfiction
- The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
by Carhart, Thad
Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375503048 Date: 2001Kirkus
This intimate and idiosyncratic history of the piano and a view into the secret heart of Paris life is written by an American expatriate, who details his attempts to gain entry into a piano shop where locals gathered to discuss music, love, and life. - A Year in the Merde
Author: Clarke, Stephen
Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 22.95 ISBN: 1582345910 Date: 2005LJ
A #1 bestseller in the United Kingdom and an urban antidote to A Year in Provence, this laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of an expat in Paris is the almost-true story of the author's own experiences.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 4.7.05 > - From Paris to the Moon
by Gopnik, Adam
Publisher: Random House $ 23.95 ISBN: 0679444920 Date: 2000Booklist
The comic-romantic adventures of an American family in Paris is penned by "The New Yorker" writer and author of the magazine's popular "Paris Journal" column. The private story is rooted in the sentimental re-education of a weary American through the experience of his son's childhood in France.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales - Paris: A Thousand Year History
Author: Jones, Colin
Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670033936 Date: 2005PW
A British historian unfolds the entire history of Paris in a single splendid volume that is simultaneously exuberant and erudite. Fluent in cultural as well as political history, Jones brings to life the people, ideas, social movements, and architectural upheavals that have made and remade Paris.
Updated 3.10.05 - Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Author: Macmillan, Margaret Olwen
Publisher: Random $ 35 ISBN: 0375508260 Date: 2002PWLJBooklist
In this landmark work of narrative history, MacMillan brings extraordinary personalities to life. The great-granddaughter of Lloyd George, she makes use of his personal papers and gives a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries--Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel--were founded whose troubles haunt the world still.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 8.28.02 - Report
From a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939
Author: Roth, Joseph
Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393051455 Date: 2003KirkusPW
Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925. Translated and collected together here for the first time in English, the exhilarating pieces in this evocative collection distill the wisdom of a lost generation.
Updated 11.17.03 - Me Talk Pretty One Day
by Sedaris, David
Publisher: Little Brown $ 22.95 ISBN: 0316777722 Date: 2000Kirkus
Sedaris's essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest he's ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! - Publisher marketing. - The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930's
by Wiser, William
Publisher: Carroll & Graff $ 26 ISBN: 0786707860 Date: 2000Kirkus
This lavishly illustrated social history of Paris as it went through the 1930s looks at the how throughout that decade the city continued to revel in Montparnasse and Montmartre, retained its allure as a magnet city to celebrated expatriates, and how the fall of Paris came with Nazi occupation in 1940.
Hotlists
African American Fiction | Christian Fiction
2008 Excel Files: (download - print, sort, etc.)
Crime Fiction | Fiction | African American Fiction | Christian Fiction | Nonfiction Notables
Stars
Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec Crime Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec
Speculative Fiction Romance Historical Nonfiction | YA
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