Book Reviews

November 3, 2010 J.T. Ellison delivers her trademark blend of police procedural doused in the macabre with The Immortals, the fifth in her Nashville-based Taylor Jackson series. When the ritualistic murder of eight teenagers on Halloween shocks an upper-middle-class neighborhood that prides itself on its normality, homicide lieutenant Jackson and her team are plunged into a dark world of teenage Goths and black magic. Ellison will discuss The Immortals at Sherlock’s Books in Nashville on November 6 at 7 p.m.

October 27, 2010 With his new collection of short fiction, Burning Bright, Ron Rash offers a scaled-down version of the same concerns on display in his bestselling novel, Serena, employing a sweeping cast of characters and historical milieus, ranging from the Civil War era to the present day. Ron Rash opens the 2010-11 Lipscomb University Landiss Lecture Series on October 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the Doris Swang Chapel of the Ezell Center on the Lipscomb University campus. A reception follows the program with a book signing. Admission is free.

October 22, 2010 Lady Emily has not had the most auspicious beginnings to married life. Her first husband, essentially a stranger, died as a newlywed. On her second honeymoon, she was shot while helping her husband Colin, a British intelligence agent, on one of his investigations and suffered a subsequent miscarriage. In Dangerous to Know, Tasha Alexander’s fifth Lady Emily novel, the protagonists have returned to Colin’s mother’s house in France to recuperate. Naturally, this recovery is hampered.

October 18, 2010 Traversing both the gentrified pockets and gangstaland of Los Angeles, as well as the sugar-cane fields and sweltering swampland of Louisiana, Susan Straight’s new novel is a complex work of art. Take One Candle Light a Room offers exquisitely rendered settings, lyrical prose, and a formidably large cast of characters. Its narrator, Fantine Antoine, an African American of Louisiana Creole descent and California birth, is an accomplished travel writer, but in this book she undertakes a journey unlike any she has experienced before—one that stands to alter her path permanently. Straight will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 18 at 6 p.m.