A great mystery!

This story takes place in contemporary Dublin, where a 12-year-old girl has been murdered; her body was found by archaologists - she was laid out on an ancient stone used for sacrifices centuries ago. In this same location about 20 years ago, three 12-year-old kids went into the woods and disappeared. Well, two of them did -- the third was found hours later with his arms wrapped around a tree, his shoes filled with blood. He has no memory of what happened. This boy became a policeman when he grew up, and he is one of the detectives trying to solve the crime of the current murder. Perhaps he'll also be able to find out what happened to his two friends, who were never found.
He realizes that he probably shouldn't even be connected to the case because of his personal involvement, but only his partner knows his story, and she leaves the decision up to him.
I'm only about halfway through this story, but I LOVE the mystery, the description of the characters and their relationships, and the just-slightly-different culture that is Dublin. And I'm being good - I haven't read the end of the book yet, and I'm trying really hard not to. I will update in a week or so when I finish, but so far, I would highly recommend this one.

Four stars

!

One false step, and BAM! there goes your future . . .

A videotape of a sexual encounter between three H.S. basketball players (ages 18 and 19) at a private boarding school in Vermont and a 14-year-old freshman finds it way to the headmaster -- and eventually to the parents, police, and the press. What happened to these three promising young men, two of whom had never been in trouble before? Did the girl "seduce" them, and in light of the law, does it even matter if she did? Shouldn't they just say no? This disturbing novel takes a look at the issue from multiple viewpoints, illustrated by interviews conducted two years after the event. If any of these boys could go back in time, you just know they would make a different decision -- but who among us can't say the same thing about various episodes in our own lives? Most of us are lucky, though, in that the consequences of our bad decisions don't affect us as drastically as they do the characters in this novel. This is a sad story - but utterly believable. It's hard not to point fingers at who was MOST responsible, who was hurt the most, who should pay the biggest price. The characters are multi-faceted and real, and the entire story just made me so grateful not to be in the middle of it. But it was still kind of sleazy, and therefore I can't give it all four starts.

So -- three out of four.

Ghostwalk: don't look behind you!

I know, I know, this is the wrong month for ghost stories, but this is the book selected by the teacher's book club for February. To appease those who insist on love stories for Valentine's Day, this is also a love story -- but not your ordinary kind. Writer Lydia Brooke agrees to complete the unfinished book after her ex-lover's mother dies unexpectedly. She moves into his mother Elizabeth's house and is soon enmeshed in research on the life and career of Sir Isaac Newton, the subject of the unfinished book. Sure enough, Lydia and the married Cameron soon resume their affair, but they both have many secrets. Cameron, a scientist who develops pharmaceuticals in a lab where they use rats for their trial experiments, is always in danger from an animal rights terrorist group -- but he doesn't tell Lydia about the true purpose of the drugs he's developing, nor of his involvement with a world-wide group pulling the strings. Lydia, conducting research on Trinity at Cambridge University in the 17th century, doesn't share information about the mysterious lights that appear in his mother's house, the odd disappearances, the man in a red cape she keeps seeing just out of the corner of her eye, nor the woman who approaches her to channel the spirits of contemporaries of Newton who died in unexplained ways.
The story takes meandering paths and leads Lydia into dangers she can neither foresee nor avoid. This is a book full of historical facts and scientific explanations -- but always with that surreal twist. Do you believe? This books makes it seem so possible that by the end you're not sure which explanation to believe -- the scientific or the supernatural.
I liked it okay, but it wasn't a totally-awesome thriller.

I'll give it three stars out of four.