Tom Langdon is a former war reporter who now writes feature articles for various magazines. Banned from flying on airplanes after a hostile incident at an airport security checkpoint, Langdon is forced to take a cross-country train from Washington, D.C., to L.A., where his girlfriend is waiting to spend Christmas with him. As he begins talking to the passengers and staff aboard the train, he meets an eccentric older woman who seems to be a regular rider, a young couple preparing to marry on the train, and a former Catholic priest. To Tom's shock, the former love of his life, Eleanor, is also aboard the train.
Rufus Harms is rotting in a Virginia military prison. As readers learn in the terse opening of The Simple Truth, he was convicted 25 years ago of the brutal killing of a young girl. Readers also learn that Rufus did not commit the crime; out of a haze of memories and with fragments of evidence, he has reconstructed the truth about the horrid event that ruined his life. He knows his discovery could cost him his life, so he breaks from prison after sending an appeal to the Supreme Court that details a massive conspiracy tied into the foundations of Washington.
In Smith's winning fifth novel to feature Edinburgh philosophical sleuth Isabel Dalhousie (after The Careful Use of Compliments), Dalhousie, who's recently assumed ownership of the obscure journal she's edited for many years, the Review of Applied Ethics, applies her deductive gifts to the case of a disgraced doctor. When a patient dies after taking a new antibiotic that Marcus Moncrieff deemed safe in clinical trials, the doctor's original report turns out to contain falsified data.
While Smith's seventh novel featuring Scottish philosopher and woman of means Isabel Dalhousie (after The Lost Art of Gratitude) doesn't break new ground, the author's many fans will be more than satisfied to follow the small events of Isabel's life, in particular her struggle to come to terms with her own imperfections. Much to Isabel's dismay, Prue, a cellist with a terminal illness who's a professional colleague of her bassoonist fiancé, Jamie, has been making ever greater demands on the good-natured Jamie.
Lucky Jim is an academic satire written by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first published novel, and won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. Set sometime around 1950, Lucky Jim follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant Medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university (inspired in part by the University of Leicester). The novel uses a precise and seemingly plain-spoken narrative voice.
