Physical

A wild ride through the dark heart of American health and health care, plus sex, drugs, and stem-cell wars.

Physical is the story of a hard-living, happily married, middle-aged American (the author) who gets a three-day “executive checkup” at the Mayo Clinic and is thereby forced to confront his mortality, not to mention glove-wearing doctors and the pair of dominatrix-esque technicians who supervise his stress test quite strictly. James McManus must understand his revised actuarial odds in the light of his not-so-long-lived forebears and the fact that his youngest children are only six- and five-years-old.

A Voyage Round The World

Here is a sort of compendium of all the excitements that befall Kingston's young heroes. Swimming episodes of various kinds, serpents, unfriendly savages, and unexpected coincidences, have all been put together here, to make a well-written book, that you will find quite amusing and interesting.

Broken Teaglass

Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault

" ... two young lexicographers find clues to an old murder case hidden in the files at their dictionary company. Billy, the narrator, is a strapping recent grad with a football player's physique, a penchant for philosophy and a painful chapter in his past that he hasn't quite closed. Mona is a girls' college grad with an ambivalent relationship to her stepfather's wealth and a habit of falling for older, wiser men.

More Work for the Undertaker by Margery AllinghamMore Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham

The story takes place in Apron St., 'a strange decayed sort of neighbourhood', Dickensian London-at once entertaining and disquieting. Due to Allingham's unique gift for making place as vivid as character, the atmosphere is one of frozen in time, unchanged since the Victorian era. London is described as a series of villages in which the Palinodes act as squires. The characters are, as usual, quite wonderful, and the villains are true 'Margery Allingham evil.' Nobody does this quite like her.

Quite Ugly One Morning

In Christopher Brookmyre's wild and wildly funny debut crime novel, Quite Ugly One Morning, which won Britain's First Blood Award, journalist and hedonist Jack Parlabane ("different day... same hangover") investigates the murder of a young, well-to-do citizen of Edinburgh. Crooked cops, guns-for-hire and cheating spouses complicate matters as does Jack's growing affection for the dead man's wife.