Once your line as been selected in the Play Thread, please post your book information here.

Line #7 - If I were a man, this would translate to a three-week hard-on that would end up in the record books and quite possibly kill me. (wss4 --> Musie)

LOL I knew that line would get everyone's attention. :lol:

Here is your book Musie (hope you like it) --



The Middle Ages
by Jennie Fields

From the Publisher
When you least expect it, life can turn you around. Take forty-something Jane Larson. Although she views her situation with wry humor, her life feels frozen. An architect, she's had the same job for eighteen years, designing chain banks, grocery stores, and dry cleaners instead of the beautiful houses she craves to create. Living in Brooklyn with her difficult teenage daughters, she's lost all hope for the possibility of love or excitement.

Then she's let go from her firm and is suddenly free to pursue her career dreams. And when she contacts her old college flame, an exhilarating long-distance correspondence with him reawakens that part of her she's long ignored. Does Jane have the courage to gamble with her heart? Can happily-ever-after be a reality for people who've done it all before?

With warmth and humor Fields explores the territory of middle age, proving that it's never too late to reinvent your life, or to take the risks that bring us the pleasures we all deserve.

Line #18 - On Tuesday September 21, 1963 I abducted you from a supermarket in New York and brought you directly to this house. (nwpassage --> Irenic)

Somebody's Baby by Charlotte Vale Allen

Imagine this: On her deathbed, your mother confesses to an unthinkable crime. Thirty years before, she stole you from a New York City supermarket. She is not your mother. You are somebody's baby, but not hers.

This is Snow Devane's story. At thirty-one, she is a successful child portrait photographer living in Manhattan. Her life is everything she wants it to be. And she has managed to establish some distance from the mother she loves but who would, given the opportunity, smother her with caring concern.

Her mother's deathbed confession upends Snow's entire life. Who was this woman Snow thought she knew? What drove her to steal another woman's child? What happened to the woman who, thirty years before, turned around to find her baby gone? And, finally, who is Snow Devane?

As we travel with Snow on a course strewn with endless obstacles in her search to learn her true identity and that of the woman she knew as her mother, Somebody's Baby takes you to the heart of the issue central to every one of us: the matter of our identity.

Line #6 - Besides, they only pay six dollars an hour - before taxes. Mom, nothing I do with my clothes on is going to pay this well until I get my degree. (akasha -->terrafreaky)



Amazon.co.uk Review
The Nanny Diaries is an absolutely addictive peek into the utterly weird world of child-rearing in the upper reaches of Manhattan's social strata. Cowritten by two former nannies, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the novel follows the adventures of the aptly named Nan as she negotiates the Byzantine byways of working for Mrs X, a Park Avenue mommy. Nan's four-year-old charge, the hilariously named Grayer (his pals include Josephina, Christabelle, Brandford, and Darwin) is a genuinely good sort. He can't help it if his mother has scheduled him for every activity known to the Upper East Side, including ice-skating, French lessons, and a Mommy and Me group largely attended by nannies. What makes the book so impossible to put down is the suspense of finding out what the unbelievably inconsiderate Mrs X will demand of Nan next. One pictures the two authors having the last hearty laugh on their former employers. --Claire Dederer

Synopsis
Nan, in her early twenties, goes to work for the wealthy X family to help put herself through college, and is shocked by their antics. Between raising the X's son Grayer, keeping on top of her studies, moving house and ensuring Mrs X's day runs smoothly, it's a wonder Nanny ever finds time to hang out with the gorgeous HH on the sixth floor. With divorce on the cards, Nanny finds herself caught up in the X's embittered world of power plays, lies and deciet. As communication rapidly breaks down, will Nanny be able to maintain the mental health of Grayer, despite the onslaught of Personal Problem Consultants, macrobiotic nutritionist and bilingual meals?

4 - I never did sleep. (rebeccaljames --> giz-angel)


Back Roads: A Novel by Tawni O'Dell

Book Description
Meet Harley Altmyer. His mother's in prison for his father's murder. At nineteen, he's raising his three younger sisters-and he's just developed an obsessive crush on the sexy, melancholic mother of two, living just down the road...

:lol: Aw, geez. I picked out a book that I just read a couple months ago. That shows something about my memory, huh? :lol:

Line 1 is mine :bananadance:
Giz-angel ~ catsalive


I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith


(mine has a different cover -better I think)

Synopsis
This wonderful novel tells the story of seventeen year old Cassandra and her extraordinary family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Cassandra's eccentric father is a writer whose first book took the literary world by storm but he has since failed to write a single word and now spends most of his time reading detective novels from the village library. Cassandra's elder sister, Rose - exquisitely beautiful, vain and bored - despairs of her family's circumstances and determines to marry their affluent American landlord, Simon regardless of the fact she does not love him. She is in turns helped and hindered in this by their bohemian stepmother Topaz, an artist's model and nudist who likes to commune with nature. Finally, there is Stephen, dazzlingly handsome and hopelessly in love with Cassandra. In this maelstrom, Cassandra strives to hone her writing skill. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries, which candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has captured the heart of the reader in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.

From the Back Cover
This is the journal of Cassandra Mortmain; an extraordinary account of life with her extraordinary family. First, there is her eccentric father. Then there is her sister, Rose - beautiful, vain and bored - and her stepmother, Topaz, an artist's model who likes to commune with nature. Finally, there is Stephen, dazzlingly handsome and hopelessly in love with Cassandra.

In the cold and crumbling castle which is their home, Cassandra records events with characteristic honesty, as she tries to come to terms with her own feelings. The result is both marvellously funny and genuinely moving.

Line 11 is one of mine (picked by Flicki):

Getting Over Jack Wagner
by Elise Juska



From Booklist
Juska's first novel is as light and winning as a 1980s love song--and in its own way, as earnest. Eliza Simon is a 26-year-old copywriter who feels that life and love are passing her by. When she's not avoiding family dinners with her perfect sister, Camilla, or dissecting TV reruns with her friend Andrew, Eliza is writing a semiautobiographical book about dating "rock stars"--which for Eliza means everyone from Jack Wagner to the moody drummer who won her heart at the high-school talent show. In a series of hilarious (and sometimes painful) flashbacks, Eliza reminisces about the rock stars she has known and loved, including, of course, Jack Wagner, whose image she lovingly steamed onto a T-shirt when she was in the fifth grade. Juska's references to 1980s girlhood are perfect, as when Eliza remembers herself on a date with a high-school boyfriend "dressed in some senseless combination of long underwear and men's boxer shorts." A funny and endearing addition to the "single girl in the city" genre.

Line #22--On Friday, he's the love child of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.

From Friday Night Cocktails/AllMenarebastards.com

Gemma and Sarah have been friends forever. Along with their friendship, a list has survived over the years - a list they fondly call "the bastard list." This list is made up of a the names of guys that had earned the name in one way or another. One night after a few too many cocktails, they decide to put the list up on the internet. Gemma not only puts up the list, but gets the word out to the virtual world about it. Before they know it, people all over the world are viewing the list, adding their own names and stories. Gemma discovers that money could be made from it, and she decides to put the list on a new website and begin advertising. The new name she comes up with is www.allmenarebastards.com. She hires an assistant (a quiet, serious type of guy) and the revenues begin rolling in.

Gemma's friends Sarah and Michael begin expressing their concern over the website. After all, the website was supposed to be based on a list of men who had acted like bastards, not state that all men were bastards, right? Gemma seems to be especially bitter about men lately, it seems. But she has pretty good reason to, or so she thinks.

Line #24 - The boy was nude, and he was propped up. with his legs straight out and arms by his sides and head bent forward. His clothing was in a moderate neat pile on the pavement.



Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell

At 11.05 one december evening in Richmond, Virginia, convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair.

At the morgue Dr Kay Scarpetta waits for Waddell's body. Preparing to perform a post mortem before the subject is dead is a strange feeling, but Scarpetta has been here before. And Waddell's death is not the only newsworthy event on this freezing night: the grotesquely wounded body of a young boy is found propped against a rubbish skip. To Scarpetta the two cases seem unrelated, until she recalls that the body of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similar position.

Then a third murder is discovered, the most puzzling of all. The crime scene yields very few clues: old blood stains, fragment of feather, and - most baffling - a bloody fingerprint that points to the one suspect who could not possibly have committed this murder.

8 - Nate's legs felt a little shaky, the way they did when Coach caught him goofing off at practice and sentenced him to run laps as punishment.


Gossip Girl #9: Only In Your Dreams: A Gossip Girl Novel (Gossip Girl) by Cecily von Ziegesar

Book Description
Welcome to New York Citys Upper East Side, where the girls are dazzling, the guys are gorgeous, and the summer heat is the perfect excuse to throw a fabulous roof-deck pool party. Its their last summer together before heading off to college, and things are sizzlingno, its not just the weather. Despite that steamy kiss on graduation night, Blair, Serena and Nate have gone their separate waysthough not for long. Blair is off to London with her English Lord-boyfriend, Serenas about to become a movie staras if she wasnt a star already!and Nates rolling up his well-worn khakis and heading to the Hamptons. Back in New York, Dan and Vanessa are rekindling their love. Fiery! Watch out, this summer is going to be hotter than ever.

26 - The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Amazon.com
William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. At first, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. Overseeing their efforts are Ralph, "the boy with fair hair," and Piggy, Ralph's chubby, wisdom-dispensing sidekick whose thick spectacles come in handy for lighting fires. Although Ralph tries to impose order and delegate responsibility, there are many in their number who would rather swim, play, or hunt the island's wild pig population. Soon Ralph's rules are being ignored or challenged outright. His fiercest antagonist is Jack, the redheaded leader of the pig hunters, who manages to lure away many of the boys to join his band of painted savages. The situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away, until Ralph discovers that instead of being hunters, he and Piggy have become the hunted: "He forgot his words, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet." Golding's gripping novel explores the boundary between human reason and animal instinct, all on the brutal playing field of adolescent competition.

Huh, my book has been chosen! :-) Now, krin, you will most certainly enjoy 'Ursula, Under' by Ingrid Hill. I'm still reading it but this should be fast as I'm spending most of my flu-filled hours in bed right now and the summer holidays are approaching soon, too! So far this is just an incredible book! I only wonder when Ingrid Hill has written this - the author's introduction says she has 12 children!!!

Here's the synopsis from amazon.de:

"A dangerous rescue attempt in Michigan has captured the attention of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. Ursula Wong is the only child of a poor family and referred to by one member of the TV audience as 'half-breed trailer trash', not worth all the expense. But there is much more to Ursula than this: she is the last of her family line - and here the novel explodes into a gorgeous saga of culture, history and heredity. By its end, we've met, among others of Ursula's forebears, a second-century-B. C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a Swedish queen; and Ursula's great-great-grandfather, Jake Maki, a miner who died in a cave-in aged twenty-nine. Ursula's fate echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual's life comes to seem a miracle."

2 - She circled away from him, walked a few steps deeper into the trees.



"After You" by Annie Garrett

New York journalist Clare McClendon has just survived a terrible illness, only to find that her marriage is falling apart. Then the postcard arrives, asking her to come to Maine because Riley Brackett needs her. Brawny, big hearted Riley was her first love during one starlit summer. Now a boating accident has left him unable to recall anything..after Clare. To him, nothing has changed, not his passion, not his love. The doctors hope Clare can help Riley heal. But as memories entangle with desire, a woman may be torn between the present and all the past once promised.

This book was kinda what I expected. The character development was a little poor, but the character emotions were really detailed. The ending dialog of the book between two of characters really threw me for a loop and left me thinking "huh? Where did that come from?". That's all I can about that w/o giving anything away.

The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

From Publishers Weekly
The year is 1941. For the Weeks family on their frontier farm in Western Canada, life is brutally hard, with moments of joy few and far between. Fifteen-year-old Beth Weeks narrates this coming-of-age story, which is sprinkled with recipes, home remedies and useful homesteading advice (e.g., how to kill and clean a chicken: keep it calm, since "there's nothing as frustrating as trying to kill a panicked chicken"). Though the inventory of authentic period detail is evocative, make no mistake: this is no warmhearted tale of pioneer life. Forget square dances and barn raisings; think bestiality and incest. Beth's tortured, demanding father, mentally ill following a traumatic bear attack and the lingering effects of a head injury he received in WWI, goes on one rampage after another. Beth, meanwhile, does her best to fight off various sexual predators, finding solace of sorts in a tentative love affair with Nora, a troubled half-Indian girl. But Coyote, a sinister shape-changing spirit, stalks them and others, infusing the plot with a weird mystical aura at odds with the hardscrabble realism of the descriptions of day-to-day life. A dysfunctional Little House on the Prairie, this bleak, violent saga is a disturbing mixture of period minutiae and grim supernatural phenomena. (May) FYI: The Cure for Death by Lightning is based on a short story that won the Canadian Broadcasting Company's literary competition in 1993.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Line 3 was one of mine (picked by nwpassage)

Oh My Stars
by Lorna Landvik



From Publishers Weekly
The author of Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons cooks up a novel of hard-won luck and the wonder of reaping blessing from calamity. It's 1937, and shy, homely, 18-year-old Violet Mathers—battered by a mother's desertion, a father's contempt and an accident that cost her her arm—has decided to travel from her Kentucky hometown to the Golden Gate Bridge, from which she plans to jump. But when her bus is totaled in North Dakota, she's put up by a warm local family, whose heartthrob son, Kjel, dreams of musical stardom with his black friend Austin, a guitar virtuoso. Pitying Violet, Kjel ropes her into a journey to retrieve Austin's brother, Dallas, a sullen but musically gifted ex-con. By happy accident, the three men fill in for a no-show band at a carnival, enthralling the first of many crowds. As the Pearltones, they soon inspire a mania of Elvis-like proportions, and Violet blooms in their company and proves a savvy manager. Landvik cuts her light, sweet prose with dashes of wryness and pinches of reality: appalled stares, clenched fists and even a burning cross greet the band as they make their way South, while bad apples threaten it from within. Landvik strings the escapades into a playful and poignant narrative, even as a backdrop of Ku Klux Klan violence and Depression-era hardship keeps the fairy tale in check.

My reveal, better late than never???
:shedevil:



Fletch's Fortune


Book Description
Fletch's Fortune

He hadn't been a practicing journalist for years, although people remembered him and he still has a few contacts. And he's pretty sure he hasn't paid his dues to the American Journalism Alliance anytime recently. But somebody has.

Fletch's Fortune

Enjoying himself on the French Riviera, developing a killer tan, and sleeping with the neighbor's wife, Fletch is feeling pretty flush. But when agents Eggers and Fabens show up with a little more information about Fletch than is comfortable and an invitation to the A.J.A. convention, how could he refuse?

Fletch's Fortune

So he finds himself enlisted as a spy among his peers. But before he can even set up his surveillance, there's a murder. And almost everybody's a suspect. Because a lot of people were employed by Walter March, and most of them had a reason to hate him.

My reveal:

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

In the summer of 1953, during a Little League baseball game, 11-year-old Owen Meany hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. What happens to him after that fateful day makes A Prayer for Owen Meany extraordinary, terrifying, and unforgettable.

Owen Meany, the only child of a New Hampshire granite quarrier, believes he is God’s instrument. He is. This is John Irving’s most comic novel; yet Owen Meany is Mr. Irving’s most heartbreaking character.

Line # 19 was mine (going to daughterof cokie):

Hating Valentine's Day
by Allison Rushby



From Publishers Weekly
Rushby channels A Christmas Carol into this Valentine's Day tale about one Liv Hetherington, a single wedding photographer whose distaste for February's signature holiday prompts a spectral intervention-of the Dickensian kind. Though her father, her roommate and her boss all disapprove of Liv's no-time-for-dating lifestyle, this Valentine's Day our heroine is determined to lay low-that is, until she's visited by the Marley-esque ghost of a deceased co-worker. (A true horror for single women, Rushby's ethereal guide is an old lady who devotes all her affection to cats.) Thereafter, Liv greets a trio of ghostly visitors with little skepticism as they show her Valentine's Days past, present and future. Because Rushby narrates the novel from Liv's point of view, she often repeats the salient plot points several times: that Liv was abandoned by her ex-boyfriend, that she's living in dreams of the past, that her new suitor is genuinely a nice guy. The book's humor is similarly over-explained. When Cupid calls a woman's skirt "materially challenged," Liv repeats his observation a few sentences later: "her skirt's not quite as long as it could be." It's as if the author doesn't trust her readers to get her jokes or her narrative arguments. (She also hammers home the Dickens connection with frequent, heavy-handed references to the tale.) The repetitions drag down the book's momentum and smother much of its humor, dulling what might have otherwise been a clever remake of a classic tale of transformation and self-discovery.

Line #10 (not picked)

The Pact
by Jodi Picoult



Book Description

Until the phone calls came at three o'clock on a November morning, the Golds and their neighbors, the Hartes, had been inseparable. It was no surprise to anyone when their teenage children, Chris and Emily, began showing signs that their relationship was moving beyond that of lifelong friends. But now seventeen-year-old Emily is dead—shot with a gun her beloved and devoted Chris pilfered from his father's cabinet as part of an apparent suicide pact—leaving two devastated families stranded in the dark and dense predawn, desperate for answers about an unthinkable act and the children they never really knew.

From New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult—one of the most powerful writers in contemporary fiction—comes a riveting, timely, heartbreaking, and terrifying novel of families in anguish and friendships ripped apart by inconceivable violence.

Line #16 (not picked):

Best Friends
by Martha Moody



From Publishers Weekly
First novels that track a pair of friends from college days through their subsequent lives aren't exactly uncommon, but Moody's is so freshly observed and gifted with such a palpable sense of the ravages of time that it feels utterly new. Clare, the narrator, is a prematurely cynical Ohio girl, daughter of a left-wing schoolteacher, who says up-front that all she wanted out of college when she went to Oberlin in 1973 was "unrest and demonstrations." Sally Rose is her roommate, an apparently nave, sheltered kid from a wealthy Los Angeles family whose occasional sly wit and perfect word choices appeal to Clare. The girls grow close, and soon Clare is making regular visits to the big house off Mulholland Drive where Sid, Sally's indulgent, wise-guy father, seems to cast a spell over a happy household. Sally never questions the source of the family wealth, but inquisitive Clare does and that is the first of many shocks that unfold as the shadows begin to gather around the Roses. Sally's bright, perky younger brother, Ben, turns into a haunted druggie; their mother, ace cook Esther, becomes increasingly remote; Sid begins a long decline into Alzheimer's. Yet despite their geographical distance, the two girls, Sally going into law of a peculiarly California kind, Clare becoming a hardheaded doctor with a specialty in AIDS, never lose their deep attachment, which somehow sustains them through a darkening landscape. They both suffer their share of unhappy relationships and here Moody's skills at character drawing, already clear in her portraits of Sid and Ben, take full rein and both come to rueful realization of their limitations, and those of life itself. Even in its dying fall, however, the book never loses its edge, at once compassionate and humorous, nor its moving conviction that a strong friendship between women can be one of life's most powerful relationships.

12 - Both Rae and June revealed themselves as believers in total extinction. (not chosen)




Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast by Bill Richardson

From Publishers Weekly
Fifty-something fraternal twins Hector and Virgil operate a Shangri-la for bibliophiles, located somewhere between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada. In this deliciously witty tale of their B&B, which has won Canada's Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, the collected autobiographical jottings - "Brief Lives" - of the brothers' guests are interspersed with chapters alternately penned by each brother as dispatches for CBC Radio (Richardson first introduced Hector and Virgil on CBC Radio's Gabereau show). Virgil is the wry, bassoon-playing, contemplative one, sending missives from thought-inspiring locales like the cemetery-cum-golf course. (On their dead mother: "In compliance with her wishes, we kept her ashes in a ziplock bag in the freezer, attending the day we could incorporate them into a household project.") The more energetic Hector enjoys the affections of cosmetics saleswoman and would-be writer Altona Winkler and harbors a penchant for trouncing librarians at Scrabble. There's also Waffle the cat and the resident parrot, Mrs. Rochester, who spouts maternal advice along with the occasional vulgar epithet. Guests are greeted by musical eggcups at breakfast, and the brothers supply suggested book lists (e.g., "Hector's List of Favorite Authors for the Bath"). Richardson's voice is impressively versatile, equally assured with such diverse characters as Helen, a Winnipeg grandmother, and Gordon, a staid attorney on a forced wilderness encounter. This quiet charmer is a bibliophile's delight.

15 - Afterwards, to the delight of his parents and grandparents, various models emerged from Gustad's room: fire-engine, crane, racing car, steamboat, double-decker bus, clock tower

Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry


"It is Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war over what was to become Bangladesh. A hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble is a devoted family man who gradually sees his modest life unravelling. His young daughter falls ill; his promising son defies his father’s ambitions for him. He is the one reasonable voice amidst the ongoing dramas of his neighbours. One day, he receives a letter from an old friend, asking him to help in what at first seems like an heroic mission. But he soon finds himself unwittingly drawn into a dangerous network of deception. Compassionate, and rich in details of character and place, this unforgettable novel charts the journey of a moral heart in a turbulent world of change."

13 - Eleanor paused on the treshold of the gold salon, trembling. (not chosen)

The Stolen Bride by Brenda Joyce

Book Description
Sean O'Neill was once everything to Eleanor de Warenne--but since he disappeared from his ancestral home, there has been no word, and even Eleanor has abandoned hope, promising her hand to another. Then, just days before her wedding, Sean reappears…but the boy who was once her protector is now a stranger, hardened by prison and on the run.

Weary and haunted, Sean is shocked to find that little Elle has become the beautiful, desirable Eleanor. Though he refuses to endanger her by pressing his claim, his resolve to stay away is sorely tested by the determination of a woman who will not be forsaken again. And when, in a moment's passion, Sean steals another man's bride, it is Eleanor who has the power to steal his heart…

28 - Ruth's house, early morning: a bowl of apples on the kitchen table, crumbs on the checkered tablecloth. (not chosen)

The Burning House: Short Stories by Ann Beattie

The now-classic, utterly unique voice of Ann Beattie is so dry it throws off sparks, her eye endowed with the emotional equivalent of X-ray vision. Her characters are young men and women discovering what it means to be a grown-up in a country that promised them they'd stay young forever. And here, in shapely, penetrating stories, Beattie confirms why she is one of the most widely imitated -- yet surely inimitable -- literary stylists of her generation.

In The Burning House, Beattie's characters go from dealing drugs to taking care of a bereaved friend. They watch their marriages fail not with a bang but with a wisecrack. And afterward, they may find themselves trading confidences with their spouses' new lovers. The Burning House proves that Beattie has no peer when it comes to revealing the hidden shapes of our relationships, or the depths of tenderness, grief, and anger that lie beneath the surfaces of our daily lives.

Mine was: (not chosen)

21 - The "gorgeous" wedding my college roommate referred to with such nostalgia had been the campy foreplay to a grim marriage that lasted fewer than five years.

Hot on the Trail by Jane Isenberg




Isenberg's latest Bel Barrett mystery glows with heart, humor and hot flashes. One winter night, elderly pigeon fancier Dominic Tomaselli falls off a Hoboken roof and dies of exposure. His daughter suspects foul play and calls in Professor Bel Barrett, who teaches the senior memoir class Dominic attended. An inveterate sleuth, Bel welcomes distraction from the chagrins of menopause and the challenge of planning a wedding (to longtime live-in love Sol) that will accommodate her army of friends and relatives without breaking the bank. Drawing on the class's memoirs and the help of her staunch female pals, Bel slowly untangles the truth about Dom's death—and gets happily wed as well.

Her investigation is low-key at best (strategy: chat with suspects and sources constantly, preferably over snacks), but the book's sharp-eyed energy more than compensates for the mystery's mildness. Beautifully drawn, Bel tackles everything from meddlesome kids to stress incontinence with zesty honesty. Thoughtful references to the human cost of urban gentrification, the complexities of elder care and the lingering aftermath of 9/11 anchor her playful ruminations; underneath its comedy, the book is a surprisingly nuanced look at the way individual lives and communities survive difficult transitions.