THE THREE MISS MARGARETS by Louise Shaffer, 2003.
If you enjoy the likes of Fannie Flagg, this may appeal to you. Set in a small town in southern Georgia, the  main part of the story involves a dark secret buried for years. Laurel Selene McCready, a white trash reporter for the local paper, starts digging around after meeting an out of town writer working on a book concerning a former resident, Vashti Johnson. Miss Peggy, Dr. Maggie, and Miss Li'l Bit, who have known each other for years, are solid citizens of Charles Valley, Georgia, and thirty years before, they helped do a terrible thing--they hid the truth about a murder in order to protect someone close to them. In so doing, however, other lives were affected in various ways. When Laurel starts poking around and asking questions, old memories are stirred up and loyalties tested. These women must decide whether it's the right time to reveal the truth about what happened. Enjoyable, suspenseful, with plenty of quirky characters, strong regional flavor, and humor. It's partly a mystery, but it's mostly about friendship, loyalty, righting wrongs, and forgiveness.

FRAGMENT by Warren Fahy, 2009.
I just finished this last night. A fast moving adventure suspense thriller similar to the novels of Michael Crichton. Paper thin characters, but lots of action and violence. Plot concerns an unexplored island in the South Pacific where the ecological system has developed completely and evolved undisturbed for millions of years. The island is remote and only has one way in--and of course, humans eventually discover it. First up is the cast and crew of a TV reality show called "SeaLife", with horrendously bloody results. Next in are the U.S. government and navy, with boatloads of scientists and state of the art equipment. What they find are nightmarish creatures and "plants" that exist in an "everything is food" environment, where all have evolved into animals with many and very startling characteristics and parts--multiple limbs and eyes and brains, abilities to mate in the womb and give birth continuously, are always in motion, and everything eats everything--including each other. When it is realized that these creatures have no natural enemies and no introduced predators can control them and the risk of their escape is too great, it is decided that the island must be destroyed. Meanwhile, it is discovered that salt water repels the attacks of the animals, earthquakes begin, fissures open, and the island is thrown into more chaos. Then, a benign, intelligent life form is found, and it becomes a race against time by a small group of people to save this creature at all costs before the island habitat is totally destroyed. Read this for the excitement and creativeness, I enjoyed the whole environment in chaos thing with weird animals and plants, good page turner with plenty of suspense, but a bit of a letdown toward the end. A really fast read, though.

THE LITTLE STRANGER by Sarah Waters, 2009.
I stayed up past midnight the other night reading this, as I just had to know how it ended. Set in post-World War II English countryside, the story involves a crumbling estate and its owners, the Ayers family. The narrator of the story is Dr. Faraday, a middle aged local GP who has been fascinated with Hundreds Hall since he was a young boy and visited there. The current family consists of the lovely and delicate Angela, her spinster daughter Caroline, and her war scarred son Roderick, and they are struggling with changes in society, have sold off most of their land, have only one full time servant to wait on them, and are strapped for cash. Dr. Faraday becomes involved with the family when he is called to Hundreds to treat their servant, Betty, who is having some trouble adjusting to life at Hundreds. After a disastrous dinner party in which a young guest is seriously injured by the family dog, Faraday finds himself drawn to Hundreds and becomes a frequent visitor. Over time, he comes to realize, as the Ayers do as well, that something isn't quite right in the old Georgian mansion, that the strange creaks and tappings and the series of "accidents" are being caused by something that is dark and menacing. As their lives intertwine, each of them experiences genuine fear and horror over the sinister events at Hundreds Hall. A wonderfully compelling gothic story, full of quiet, unnerving incidents, interesting characters, and a great eerie atmosphere. Waters is a good storyteller and manages to pull the reader in fairly easily and keep those pages turning. If you have enjoyed novels like The Turn of the Screw or Rebecca or The Haunting of Hill House, that are full of creepiness and give you goosebumps, this has a lot of the same elements. I found it quite enthralling, and I am still thinking about it...

A PARCHMENT OF LEAVES, by Silas House, 2002.

Recommended by a friend and colleague, I found this novel to be a very moving and somewhat haunting story set in the Appalachian region of Kentucky during World War I. It involves a young man, Saul Sullivan, who is looking for work near Redbud Camp, and falls on sight for Vine, a young Cherokee girl who lives there. Even though his mother, the tiny but strong-willed Esme, is against the idea of mixed marriage, the two are wed and come to live on God's Creek, Saul's homeplace. There, Esme and Aaron, Saul's younger brother, take to Vine very quickly (and she to them) and they form a close family unit. However, Vine has a bad feeling about Aaron, as she realizes over time that his admiration of her turns to an obsession. When Aaron leaves home for an extended period and then returns with a bride of his own, when Saul is forced to do war work in another county for nearly a year, and Vine's parents are forced to move to North Carolina, relationships change and conditions deteriorate within the family until disastrous violence erupts and Vine is forced to live with a terrible secret. Only months after Saul comes home for good  and Esme has died is she able to finally unburden herself by forgiving others as well as herself.
The author has a wonderful writing style--you can hear the birdcalls and smell the mountain air when reading this book. It's poignant and evocative, filled with rich historical details of life in rural Kentucky during the early years of the last century, especially how women lived and worked, gave birth, loved, and died. His characters are real: the hardworking and stable Saul, who loves Vine and his family; the matriarchal and kind Esme; dreamy, bitter, and self absorbed Aaron; the tough talking and funny midwife Serena; Aaron's wife, Aidia, who so much resembles Vine and suffers for it; and Vine herself, patient, loving, faithful, haunted, determined to be true to herself, one who loves nature and her people, yet has to be separated from her people and see her old home destroyed. The novel deals with so many things: the idea of Cherokee culture being slowly destroyed from within by the older people refusing to talk about it as well as from outside forces, lumbering in the mountains and the making of turpentine for the war effort, the isolation of the hollers, religion in the characters' lives, issues of race. The author's use of accurate dialect and his descriptive passages of things natural add so much to the feel of the story, too. One of my favorite lines is "Maybe the trees were God." Overall, an emotional, thoughtful  and beautifully written novel. Highly recommend it.

DOUBLE BIND by Chris Bohjalian, 2007.
Excellently written novel that intertwines the homeless, bipolar disorder, and a mystery involving Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan (from The Great Gatsby). Set mainly in Vermont, the story moves back and forth from the 1920s to present day, and involves Laurel Estabrook, a social worker at a homeless shelter with a horrifyingly violent incident in her past, and an elderly, mentally ill homeless man, Bobbie Crocker, who has a box of photos that he won't let anyone see. After Bobbie's sudden death, the truth about him comes out: before he was homeless, he was a successful photographer who worked with subjects like Eartha Kitt and Robert Frost. Laurel, in looking through the photos, becomes fascinated with Bobbie's life and is convinced that there is a dark secret behind the photos. As she tries to fit the pieces of Bobbie's life together, she becomes aware that it is connecting with her own troubled past, and that someone desperately wants to keep that connection hidden. Interesting characters, an imaginative tie-in to a classic novel, beautiful Vermont scenery, vivid language, suspense enough to keep the story moving at a good clip, and a twist at the end that I didn't see coming. This is a really good page-turner.

Viewed "Doubt" during the past weekend, and I found it so engrossing and unexpectedly intense that I watched it again last night. Set at a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, the story concerns the vague suspicions and dislike of the school's principal, Sister Aloysius, towards the church's pastor, Father Flynn. She urges the other sisters to be on the lookout for anything that doesn't seem quite right. Sister James, a young and idealistic teacher, reports what she has observed concerning the 12 year old Donald Miller, and sets in motion the chain of events that follow for the rest of the picture. Meryl Streep is excellent as Sister Aloysius, determined, inflexible, and oh so right in her own mind about the doubts she has concerning Father Flynn; Philip Seymour Hoffman provides a wonderful performance as the pastor under attack; and Amy Adams is superb as the somewhat innocent and trusting Sister James.Viola Davis, even though her time on the screen is brief, makes her pivotal character of Mrs. Miller very real. A movie about right and wrong and trust and doubt, very thought provoking and well acted throughout. It just blew me away. One of the best pictures I've seen in quite a long time.

Watched "Sherlock Holmes" over this past weekend with my wife and family. Actually my wife and I viewed it twice, as we wanted to catch stuff that we missed the first time around. Wicked fun, cool effects, convoluted and intense storyline, and interesting characters--Sherlock and Dr. Watson, as portrayed here by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, are not the literary creations that most of us are familiar with. However, Downey and Law are an intriguing pair, with much witty banter and bickering throughout the movie, as they wend their way through a literally explosive case involving human sacrifice, magic, poison, multiple murders, a secret society, politics and a strange plot to take over the world. With boatloads of action, tremendously skillful fighting, and plenty of humorous repartee amongst the cast, the movie moves mostly at breakneck speed, and you don't really care if some things make sense or not, or if there are holes in the story. Rachel McAdams as the naughty undercover girl Irene Adler (who's being manipulated by the unseen Moriarty) and Mark Strong as the villainously evil Lord Blackwood are excellent in their roles, and it's fun to watch them interplay with Holmes and Watson. This film is a wild ride through Victorian London, with all its grimy back alleys and glittering restaurants and old cemeteries and magnificent halls of government, and replete with heroes and villains and damsels in distress, so hang on and enjoy this wonderfully entertaining picture.