Good Old-Fashioned Haunting

In the spirit of Halloween, settle down for this quick read: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. I'm not a huge fan of scary stories, but this one had the right amount of thriller and supernatural creepiness to keep me on the edge of my seat (and not too afraid to be alone in the dark). Though published in the early 1980s, Hill sets her ghostly tale somewhere in the early part of the 1900s on the desolate marshes of England's northeast coast. Arthur Kipps, a young up-and-coming lawyer is sent to the secluded Eel Marsh House to settle the estate of it's most recent inhabitant, Alice Drablow. Instead, he finds himself caught in a web of terrifying apparitions and unexplainable sounds. And to add to the tension, Eel Marsh House just so happens to be situated at the end of a causeway and is only accessible when the tide is out. If this story sounds a little familiar, it's because The Woman in Black has already been made into a stage play, a TV movie, two radio programs, and will be introduced to the big screen early next year (starring Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame as Kipps). HM

Breaking the Rules

Have you ever started reading a book, only to discover about halfway through that it's the second book in a trilogy (if you read Nora Roberts, I'm sure this sounds familiar)? It's a major pet peeve for a lot of library patrons, so what I'm about to say might sound a little strange. I recently read In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson, and absolutely loved it. The caveat? It's the 10th book in the author's long-running Inspector Banks series (out of a staggering 19). Having not read any of the previous nine titles, I half-expected to be a bit lost. Not so! In a Dry Season begins with the mystery writer's cliché of the discovery of a body -- only this particular body is found in the mud of a depleted reservoir, which in turn was constructed on top of a village decades ago. Robinson expertly weaves Inspector Banks' modern day murder investigation with flashbacks and memories of the people who lived in the village during World War II. Along the way, the reader picks up tidbits about Banks' troubled background (including a failed marriage and his demotion to the backwaters of Yorkshire), filling in the blanks presumably detailed in the earlier books in the series. So go ahead, be brave! Read a series out of order --after all, sometimes it feels good to be bad. HM

A year in thirteen chapters.

"Black Swan Green written by David Mitchell, re-creates the universe inhabited by a 13-year-old English boy in 1982. It's a world of superstition, misinformation, obsession with social status, the mystery of girls, popular songs, school, his family's increasing dysfunction, and dimly understood political upheaval. Mostly though, Jason Taylor struggles with his stammer ("the hangman") and bullies. As in previous books, Mitchell's structure is a series of stories that add up to a novel. From Jason's first cigarette to his first kiss, this novel finds the strange in the quotidian. The antique Brit slang delights as often as it baffles. Highly recommended." -Library Journal