Not all the women in No One Knows You’re Here are victims.  Syeeda, the reporter at the heart of the novel, is a modern-day heroine, complicated and smart, driven to work hard but yet willing to party with her friends, make peace with her family, and offer tentative commitment to her on-again/off-again boyfriend. Syeeda has uncovered the links between the back-alley murders of south Los Angeles prostitutes, identifying the habits and m.o. of a serial killer.  As a successful writer, Syeeda calls attention to the victims, and make the police and the public take notice.

What drives Syeeda is not only her commitment to the under-served but also the fact that she was brought up not far from the killing zone, protected fiercely by her parents throughout childhood.  She may be living in a safe neighborhood now, with a nice house and car, but Syeeda knows how lines can blur and lives can change on a dime — and she won’t let it happen to herself, or to anyone else within her ambit of help.  When old friends resurface, Syeeda welcomes them back but little does she know how deeply into trouble she is casting herself, and how closely she is coming to her own encounter with the serial murderer.

Based on the Grim Sleeper killings that occurred in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a case of serial killings that no one even knew about until the story was broken by reporter Christine Pelisek of the L.A. Weekly, No One Knows You’re Here shines the light on crimes that go unnoticed (committed against the underclass) and heroes that go unsung (journalists and writers), providing not only a great book but a sharp jab in the shoulder: Are you paying attention yet? After reading this book, you most certainly will be.

Howzell is the Sue Grafton of her generation, with a bit more social conscience and street cred.  Like Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, Syeeda is determined to be her own woman, solving crimes and facing down danger, and protecting her own body — and heart — as ferociously as she hunts down bad guys. I hope to see more, much more of Syeeda (Ms. Howzell, you hear me?) and I look forward to reading another novel starring the scrappy, savvy, and stalwart Syeeda.

Miller writes beautifully, creating lingering images of people and places, as when he describes the church organist, “his spine and neck arched slightly backwards as though the organ was a coach-and-six and he was hurtling through the center of Les Halles, scattering geese and cabbages and old women” or when he describes the clogged vein of a street where cheese is sold (heaven for me!) and the smells of so many cheeses overpower, finally, the stench of the cemetery: “Jean-Pierre has no idea what most of them are or where they have come from but one he immediately recognizes and his heart lifts as if he had caught sight of some dear old face from home. Pon-l’Eveque! Norman grass! Norman air!” I was surprisingly moved by the scene when Baratte goes back to the mine where he used to work, to seek out manpower for his project and is invited to a poor dinner of cow head: “it tastes, poor thing, as though pickled in its own tears.”

There are historical figures in the cast of characters, including Doctor Guillotin, but most of the players are drawn from Miller’s own substantial imagination: the prostitute who resembles the young and hated Queen, Marie Antoinette; the young woman who grieves for the graveyard so much she tries murder as a way to save it; the church organist who has played for nobody for years while plotting out changes the future is sure to bring; the Flemish miner with violet eyes and his French master with the decaying soul. The protagonist, Jean-Pierre Baratte, is a complex man, a man of reason wound up by matters wholly outside the realm of reasoning or reckoning.

Miller is a marvelous writer, weaving his amazing story around the framework of his characters, so full of heart and muscle that they seem to come alive on the page. Or maybe it is the other way round, that his amazing characters weave and dance around the framework of his plot, a plot full of wild machinations and lofty dreams and sober realities. Either way, the book is a fantastic reading pleasure, a book to be reread and savored all over again, and a book to keep always, for returning to when Paris on the cusp of Revolution beckons.

Walter Mosley’s All I Did Was Shoot My Man, the latest in this great series starring ex-boxer and bad guy Leonid McGill, has McGill still working hard to right all the wrongs committed during his past life, while also pursuing present-day dreams of love, security (if not for himself, at least for his kids), and reconnection with his father who disappeared into South America decades ago. Having sprung from prison a woman McGill helped to put there, McGill now tries to help her re-establish a life on the outside. But forces way beyond his ken (initially) keep getting in the way. McGill uses his tenacity, intelligence, and specially-skilled friends to identify the forces, help the lady, and cut off the bad guys for good.

The special skills McGill comes to rely upon are not only in the muscle category but also in the technology fields — he must be able to hack, monitor, and hunt down the online footprint of the bad guys in order to nail them. In Ghost Hero by S.J. Rozan, her eleventh in the marvelously entertaining and smart series starring Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, Lydia’s cousin Linus, tech whizzie, must loan his skills at hacking and tracking as Chin, Smith, and the interesting Jack Lee (another private eye!) track down forgeries, corruption, and political power playing in the art worlds of New York and China. If Mosley offers food for the soul and the brain in his McGill mysteries, Rozan’s mysteries feed our need for both good laughs and hard puzzles, offering up spicy whodunits and tasty characters, along with a bit of history, a pinch of Chinese wisdom (better than the Tiger Mother ever did), and finales as satisfying as the best Eight Treasure Pudding.

D.E. Johnson supplies the history buff/mystery lover with thrills, chills, and solid research reformulated as marvelous plot. In this second in the series starring Will Anderson, heir to Detroit Electric (car, that is) of 1900s Detroit, Will is drawn into the battles between unions and owners, gangs and cops, and finds corruption everywhere he looks. Calling on friends like Edsel Ford (son to Henry) and ex-fiancee Elizabeth Hume, Will shies from nothing in avenging wrongful deaths, protecting family, and fighting his own drug habits. The result is a fascinating portrait of old Detroit, with many lessons resonant for today and a conclusion that ripped my heart out. In a good way.

But a closer read reveals that How It All Began is more than just a lovely and engaging story. It is a deeply incisive explanation of how we all begin, how we plod on, and how we approach the end – we are always looking for a theory or an idea to bring cohesion to the chaos that is life, whether it be the career we choose (or reject) or the spouse we adore (or don’t) or the label we flaunt (“free-spirit”; “dependable”; “respectable”).

We, like Lively’s characters, are looking for somewhere solid to place our feet and hang on but good luck trying, because life is like a pinball machine, albeit one that allows us moments of rest, reflection, even complacency, before sending us flying off again, in directions we never imagined. What can we do but hang on to what bits of ourselves that we can and hope for the best?

What is so marvelous about Lively’s novel is how she allows us into each of her characters, exactly to the degree that their personalities would allow: we are treated generously by Charlotte, an expansive and empathetic woman (in part due to all the reading she has done all her life, absorbing characters and emotions and situations), and more gingerly by her daughter, who is a more reserved and less confident woman. Anton, as his comfort with English grows, becomes more available to us and provides an unexpected fount of insight, while Marion and Jeremy manage both to surprise and to confirm what first we saw in them. Henry is a hoot – we have all known someone like Henry in our lives – and Gerry proves to be more magnetic than first glance promised (although as a cat lover, he had me pretty early on). Lively uses her characters to underscore her theme of “story.” Those most willing to contribute are the ones with the largest story to tell, but even the smaller stories prove compelling.

Lively also presents questions of aging and role re-alignment in a wholly fresh and genuine way: Charlotte and Rose must negotiate the changes in their relationship, as Rose becomes more responsible for Charlotte and Charlotte chafes at the concern displayed by her daughter. At the same time, Charlotte is not relieved from worrying about Rose because worrying about children, no matter what their age, is a lifelong occupation. Henry, once so confident of his facts, finds names, dates, and, even worse, words themselves, becoming fuzzy. He understands it is the human condition but, damnit, he is no ordinary human! He protests against the breakdown of his faculties vehemently – and then finds a soft way out.

Lively doesn’t serve up a soft ending to her story but nor does she allow her characters too hard a landing after sending them whirling. And for that we are grateful, because we’ve come to like, even love, this band of travelers and we wish them Godspeed and a bit of happiness, before the next flip of fate.

Just to prove that I am not love-blind for Mosley, there is one book of his that absolutely clunked for me, Known to Evil, the second in his Leonid McGill series. But I LOVED When the Thrill is Gone, his latest McGill, in which McGill must search out a missing person who turns out to be someone most unexpected — and unexpectedly welcome. McGill is finally on the brink of accepting the man his father was — “dreams are like oceans…If they’re worth a damn they’re bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls ‘em down” — and of becoming the father he wants to be.

The idea of him and Twill working together just thrills me and I don’t have long to wait in order to find out how it all works out, because the next Leonid McGill comes out next week! Come back soon for my review of All I Did Was Shoot My Man.

Narrator and manly hero Jake Epping goes back to the late nineteen fifties and stays on, at the behest of another, to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from taking those fateful shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Along the way he meets up with a host of characters from the post-World War II, pre-Vietnam age, an age like any other with its racism, sexism, conformity, and fear of annihilation. But it was also an age before fast food and fake food, urban sprawl and Florida real estate, and cell phones and the internet — and for Epping, those differences tether him to the past as much as the wife-beating, White-only signs, and repressed sexuality repel him. Epping falls in love, thereby complicating his fight against evil — and make no mistake, this book is about good versus evil, angels versus devils, and the dark side attacking the light. Decency and goodness can prevail but not vanquish — and it is up to Epping to make sure the final equation isn’t the other way round, with evil ruling and goodness holed up in crummy little dens of withering faith.

King is a master story-teller and if the characters in this book don’t run quite as deep as some of his others from past novels, they do enchant, where appropriate, and disgust, as needed. Certainly his Lee Harvey Oswald is multi-layered, a pathetic, nasty, stupid but crafty man who took an opportunity and changed history — but as King elucidates in this mind-boggling foray into time travel, history changes every moment, depending on how we react to it.

The climax of the novel — the “what if” answered — is brutal, melodramatic, soul-sucking, and horrifying. It is also absolutely necessary, for it illustrates King’s point that the most we can hope for from history is to learn from history. If only we can learn from it. The novel does, in the end, offer the hope that the best in humanity can flourish and overcome the worst, and on this day commemorating Martin Luther King, I cling to that hope — I, too, have a dream. But last night 11/22/63 gave me nightmares.

Jamesland tells the story of two descendants of Henry and William James: Kate, an elderly aunt who has been writing a novel based on the life of William James for the past fifty years, and her niece Alice (there are many “Alice”s in the James family, as any good James fan knows) who has been linking up with the wrong men for too long and works at a dead-end job serving drinks. Pete, an overweight, sometime-suicidal but deeply talented chef stumbles into their lives, along with Helen, a smart and bouncy Unitarian Universalist minister; Foster, a scientist studying transcendental phenomena (and using mediums in at attempt to reach William James, a transcendentalist himself) and Dewey, his very handsome and sweet assistant; Jocelyn, the wife of Alice’s latest married liaision; and Beth, Pete’s mother who is also a Catholic nun. One more unforgettable character: Dr. Freeman, Pete’s unorthodox psychiatrist.

All the characters are struggling to figure out how to live; Pete asks the question most succinctly and most often: how do people live in this world? The irony is that for William James, the question was more on the lines of “how do we go on living beyond it?”

The answers the group come up with, individually and collectively, provide great food for thought — and great lines for flagging, including this beauty: “Joy was rarely free-floating. It was tethered to sorrow, which rarely existed where joy had never dwelt; and vice versa. Joy and sorrow were the balancing weights in the dance of human emotions. Joy without sorrow was mania…sorrow without the memory of joy was depression.”

In turns both laugh out loud funny and tear-inducing, Jamesland is a novel I will always remember and a place where I will most definitely want to return. I wish that both Alice and Helen could be my friends (yes, I would most definitely sit through midweek service at the Unitarian Universalists) and that Pete could cook dinner for me every night of the week. A great book, with great ideas, people, and existences to discover.

Cherry Paget is young, beautiful, and rich — but all that changes one lovely summer day, when Cherry takes a fall and ends up as a dog. The possibility of reincarnation has been entertained for centuries (as demonstrated by the quotes that begin every chapter, by everyone from Ben Franklin to Paul Gauguin to Voltaire to Leonardo da Vinci) but rarely has it been as entertaining as in Chihuahua Karma. Cherry didn’t make the best choices as a woman (she is not entirely to blame, given the advice she got from her mom: “Don’t waste all that time in law school. Take the modeling job. That underwear catalogue is a stepping stone…”) but as a dog, she matures into a caring human being, more concerned with how she can help a little girl escape the clutches of deranged adults than her previous concerns of couture and vodka and “nails manicured to the buff and shine of a newborn Porsche”. Cherry-as-dog has to battle not only living adults in her quest to help those in need but dead souls waiting for their new bodies and willing to wreak havoc until the next incarnation.

All’s well that ends well, and the passage — spiritual and physical — trip to ending well is twisted, unpredictable, and hilarious. Align yourself with Chihuahua Karma and find greater meaning in the dogs — and humans — in your life.

Umrigar uses the intertwined stories of the four women to tell the history of India in the past thirty years, buoyed in so many ways financially and politically, and yet still rife with prejudice, corruption, and inequality. Divisions of class, religion, and generation are all brought to painful and very personal life: through Umrigar’s characters we see the individual burdens and costs borne by abstract bludgeons of denigration and denial, along with the guilt and excuses brought on by material comfort and success.

As in all her novels, Umrigar is a beautiful genius at presenting the intimate side of large-scale (and widely accepted) practices of discrimination and bigotry. In this novel, she turns her focus to religion and to the scorn — and much, much worse, as in the mass murders and beatings in Bombay in 1993 and at Gujarat in 2002 — heaped on the Muslim population of India. One of the women, Nitsha, converted to Islam to please her previously sectarian husband but now finds herself increasingly isolated, both from within and without the Muslim community. Will the reunion with her friends ease her isolation — or set her apart forever?

Nitsha is not the only one imprisoned by circumstances and choices. All the characters are in some form of imprisonment, whether it be of poverty or prejudice or illness, or in nostalgia for the past. There is no denying, however, that some imprisonments are worse than others, and at least one holds a death sentence. And yet, Umrigar cautions her readers, we all will die. All the obsessions of politics, regrets, or rancor will mean nothing, eventually. All that remains, in the end, is the beauty we’ve managed to create from wherever we are, with whomever we are, in the world we find ourselves in.

In youth, we believe we can create a new world, shape a better place and future. This is the correct and proper sentiment for energized, intelligent, ambitious youth (like Armaiti, Kavita, Laleh, and Nitsha), and I hope my own children feel it as passionately as I did, thirty years ago (Umrigar’s characters lament their own children’s seeming obsession with unimportant things — is that not every parent’s worry?).

As we grow older, we understand that through our struggles to create a better place, what comes out is the world we find. Umrigar’s four women are reuniting in this found world and discovering the truth behind its beauty: that it is the people in their world that matter most of all. And because of the fluid mastery of Umrigar’s writing, all four of her women will matter to readers (and resonate and disturb and inspire) and the world they found (equally disturbing and enlightening) will be known, and discussed, and remembered.

This review was previously posted on The Huffington Post.