A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 23 Jan 09

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the January 23rd issue include:

Beat the Reaperby Josh Bazell. Little, Brown and Company. MYSTERY. EW's slant: "...medical thriller in the blunt, brutal prose style of a hard-boiled pulp mystery. Think House meets The Sopranos..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99.
"Meet Peter Brown, a young Manhattan emergency room doctor with an unusual past that is just about to catch up with him. His morning begins with the quick disarming of a would-be mugger, followed by a steamy elevator encounter with a sexy young pharmaceutical rep, topped off by a visit with a new patient--and from there Peter's day is going to get a whole lot worse and a whole lot weirder." - Amazon.

Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippiby Nanci Kincaid. Little, Brown and Company. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...there's something raffish and whimsical about Kincaid's prose that hooks you good..." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Truely Noonan is the quintessential Southern boy made good. Like his older sister, Courtney, Truely left behind the slow, sweet life of Mississippi for jet-set San Francisco, where he earned a fortune as an Internet entrepreneur. Courtney and Truely each find happy marriages--until, as if cursed by success, those marriages start to crumble. Then their lives are interrupted by an unexpected stranger--a troubled teenager named Arnold, garrulous, charming, thuggishly dressed, and determined to move in to their world. Arnold turns their lives upside down--and in the process this unlikely trio becomes the family that each had been searching for. In the best Southern fiction tradition, Kincaid has brought us an inspiring story about finding the way home." - Amazon.

Nemesis by Jo Nesbo. HarperCollins. THRILLER. EW's slant: "Nesbo has a knack for Euro noir, but this 474-page behemoth could be much tauter." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $14.29.
"Gripping and surprising, Nemesis is a nail-biting thriller from one of the biggest stars in crime fiction. Grainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn't get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case...Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hole to dinner, and he can't resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as Hole awakens with a thundering headache, a missing cell phone, and no memory of the past twelve hours. That same morning, Anna is found shot dead in her bed. Hole begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death?...Racing from the cool, autumnal streets of Oslo to the steaming villages of Brazil, Hole is determined to absolve himself of suspicion by uncovering all the information needed to crack both cases..."

Never Tell a Lieby Hallie Ephron. HarperCollins. THRILLER. EW's slant: "Though Ephron's basic idea is a good one, she's delivered a clunky, plodding mystery..." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $9.99.
"An innocent yard sale jump-starts this stunning stand-alone thriller from Ephron...Ivy and David Rose, happily married high school sweethearts, are trying to clear out the junk the previous owner left in their glorious Victorian in Brush Hills, Mass., before the birth of their first child. Among the bargain hunters is Melinda White, a high school classmate who's also pregnant...When Melinda disappears and no one can remember seeing her leave the sale, the evidence suggests the couple murdered her. Ephron doesn't miss a searing beat as she plunges the Roses into an abyss of suspicion...a deliciously creepy tale of obsession." - Publishers Weekly.

Runnerby Thomas Perry. Houghton Mifflin. THRILLER. EW's slant: "Take your standard pursuit drama; add a dash of GoodFellas and a dollop of The Dark Wind." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition: $14.30.
"After a nine-year absence, the fiercely resourceful Native American guide Jane Whitefield is back, in the latest superb thriller by award-winning author Thomas Perry. For more than a decade, Jane pursued her unusual profession: 'I’m a guide . . . I show people how to go from places where somebody is trying to kill them to other places where nobody is.' Then she promised her husband she would never work again, and settled in to live a happy, quiet life as Jane McKinnon, the wife of a surgeon in Amherst, New York. But when a bomb goes off in the middle of a hospital fundraiser, Jane finds herself face to face with the cause of the explosion: a young pregnant girl who has been tracked across the country by a team of hired hunters." - Amazon.