First to Die, by James Patterson

David and Melanie Brandt have just been married and they are in their honeymoon suite in San Francisco.  Room service arrives with champagne but it's not room service it's a killer and the Brandts are brutally murdered.  Several days later the bodies of another newlywed couple  are discovered.  San Francisco homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer is assigned to the case and she thinks a serial killer is just getting started.  The case looks like a tough one to crack but luckily she has the help of the Women's Murder Club.  Lindsay has formed the club with three friends.  Claire Washburn is a medical examiner, Jill Bernhardt is an assistant D.A., and Cindy Thomas is a crime reporter for The San Francisco Examiner.  All four women get on the case and a famous novelist soon emerges as the prime suspect.  But, is he the real killer?  This is a great crime thriller filled with interesting characters and plot twists that will keep you guessing right up to the very end.
 

On the Street Where You Live, by Mary Higgins Clark

Ms. Clark certainly has a nice thing going.  Take an attractive, thirtyish woman and put her in peril.  That simple formula has yielded her one of the richest contracts in publishing.  In her latest, Emily Graham is a young, divorced attorney living in Albany.  One of her grateful clients gave her stock in his fledgling high-tech company and when it took off, she sold the stock for ten million dollars.  Albany has soured with her ex-husband living there and she has also been pursued by a stalker so she decides to decamp and buy her old ancestral home in the New Jersey resort  town of Spring Lake.  No sooner has she moved in when two dead bodies turn up buried in her backyard--uncovered during the excavation for a new pool.  One of the dead is a young lady named Madeline who disappeared in the 1890's; the other another young woman who had disappeared much more recently.  Both had been murdered in an identical fashion.  Emily is related to Madeline and she decides to look into their deaths.  She discovers that someone is exactly duplicating murders that occurred in the town over one hundred years ago.  Has the long ago killer been reincarnated?  If the pattern follows, one more woman will be killed in just a few days.  Emily will do nicely, the killer thinks.   This was an enjoyable mystery/suspense novel with an interesting cast of suspects.  The formula still works like a charm.
 

Potshot, by Robert B. Parker

Parker is in fine form once again with this latest "Spenser" novel.  Mary Lou Buckman, cute, thirtysomething, has traveled all the way to Boston from Potshot, Arizona to hire Spenser to look into the murder of her husband, Steve.  Potshot is a former mining town that has become a Mecca for affluent Hollywood types escaping the L. A. rat race.  However, Potshot is currently in the clutches of a gang of forty thugs led by a charismatic man known as The Preacher.  Every week The Preacher collects money from Potshot's businesses and in return the businesses are left alone.  Steve had refused to pay one week and shortly afterwards he was shot to death.  No witnesses have come forward and the local police chief is reluctant to take on The Preacher and his gang.  So, Spenser to the rescue.  But, not by himself.  Along with his good friend Hawk, Spenser recruits five tough guys that he has worked with along the way in some previous Spenser novels and they all ride into Potshot to try to clean up the town and solve Steve's murder.  Giddyup!
 

Back When We Were Grownups, by Anne Tyler

I've loved every Anne Tyler book I've read and her latest is no exception.  Rebecca Davitch is a fifty-three-year-old grandmother and she is at a point in her life where she is taking stock.  While in college, she met and married an older divorced man with three young children.  Together, she and Joe Davitch had a fourth child and six years into their marriage Joe was killed in an automobile accident.  Suddenly, Rebecca was forced to raise the children by herself and run the family business of hosting parties in their nineteenth century Baltimore row house. Now, some thirty years later, the children are all grown but Rebecca is still the problem solver and the one who holds the large extended family together.  The story follows Rebecca from June through December of 1999 as she decides to pursue the first love of her life, Will Allenby, a recently divorced college professor.  The results--both humorous and poignant--reaffirm Rebecca's place in the world.  This is a wonderful, wonderful book and every page is a treat to read.
 

Stalker, by Faye Kellerman

This is billed as a "Peter Drucker/Rina Lazarus novel"  but the main focus is on Cindy Drucker, Peter's daughter and a rookie cop with the LAPD.  She has become a cop against her father's wishes and she's having some problems with her fellow cops.  Some dislike her for being a woman in a male-dominated profession and others resent the fact that her father is a fairly high-ranking policeman.  In addition to her problems fitting in, Cindy is being stalked.  First, someone has taken a shot at her and later she notices that objects in her home have been rearranged.  Then, someone starts tailing her.  But, why her?  She has been investigating the death of a man she knew who had swindled a number of investors in a failed land deal.  Could she be coming too close to the truth of why he was killed and is she being warned off?  Determined to prove to herself and her father that she has what it takes to be a good cop, Cindy will keep digging--at least until the stalker decides she needs to be silenced permanently.
 
 
 

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