Books of the Week:

• A Madness of Angels, Kate Griffin
• The Naturals, Jennifer Barnes
• Dead Heading, Catherine Aird
• Jinn and Juice, Nicole Peeler
• Prince Lestat, Anne Rice
• The Likeness, Tana French

Matthew Swift returns to life lying on the floor in his London bedroom . . . but it’s not his bedroom any more. He’s been dead for two years, and his house has been sold in that time. This is the opening for Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels. It sets the tone of the book: grim, intriguing, and tense. Swift sets out to find out who caused his death. It’s a wonderful book, a virtual tour of the magical underside of London, and it’s a winner.

The Naturals is an unusual YA novel. The “naturals” in question are all teenagers who have some extra sense about crime. They’re either instinctive profilers, proficient in discerning lies, or great at probabilities. The FBI recruits young Cassie, daughter of a “psychic” who has disappeared, to join this small group. To learn more about her mother’s fate, Cassie agrees. She finally is among people who understand her, and her otherness is valued, but she also faces a great danger. I really liked The Naturals.

Catherine Aird has been one of my favorite traditional mystery writers for years. Her low-key, humorous novels featuring D.C.I. Sloan and Constable Crosby are always entertaining, some laugh-out-loud funny. Crosby is stupid but enthusiastic. Sloan is clever, alert, and always watchful of the oddities of his superior, the irascible Superintendent Leeyes. In this entry of the long-running series, Dead Heading, Sloan and Crosby must investigate a break-in at an odd place – a plant nursery.

Jinn and Juice marks the beginning of a new series by the popular Nicole Peeler. It’s a must-read for fans of her Jane True books, and new readers will enjoy this outing in the realm of the paranormal. Belly-dancing jinn Lyla hopes to gain her freedom; it’s been almost a thousand years since she was claimed by a Magi, and she may finally become human. But of course, she doesn’t. A most unusual Magi comes into the club where Lyla works, and before you know it, she’s up to her wiggly hips in intrigue. This book will be published in APRIL.

Anne Rice has been a huge influence on me in ways too complicated to tell you. I’m so delighted that in Prince Lestat Rice has returned to the characters who made her famous, and she’s in top form to resume Lestat’s story. When the vampires are being killed all over the world by a force none of them can detect or fight, who are they gonna call? Lestat! This is a wonderful continuation of a great series.

Tana French is just so good that when I read her, I waver between utter envy and inspiration. Her stories about murder in modern-day Dublin are amazing textured and layered. It sounds like I’m describing a sweater, but truly, French is really a fabulous novelist. Do yourself a favor and pick up one of her books. In The Likeness, police detective Cassie Maddox (another Cassie!) is asked to step in when the body of an unknown woman is found stabbed to death. There are no clues. But Maddox is an exact duplicate of the dead woman, and the dead woman has been living under the name Cassie created for a previous undercover stint. Who was the dead woman, really, and why was she killed? Cassie assumes the dead woman’s identity to find out.

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I don’t make New Year’s Eve resolutions. I know it’s traditional, and it may be a good exercise in evaluating what you think would improve your life – many people plan to lose weight or quit smoking, for example. One of my friends actually quit smoking this time last year by making the switch to vaping which involves inhaling a flavoured mixture known as an ‘e-liquid’ which is widely considered as a safer option to the alternative. She bought herself an e-cigarette and some e-liquids from the Killer Kustard range and has not looked back since. And then, of course, people also make resolutions to be kinder to their mothers, or to work harder, or to stop complaining. These are all great things to resolve. In my experience, I never lived up to my own expectations after I’d made all these promises to myself, so I ended up feeling worse. I gave up the practice of resolutions. Some people say they are going to quit smoking but don’t even make it a week before they are back to old habits. They, like I, seem to underestimate how embedded our bad habits are, making it rather difficult to break out of them without external help. For example, those who want to stop smoking may require medical advice or a prescribe for medication similar to wellbutrin xl to help to kick the habit.

I’m generally pretty “Bah, humbug,” about New Year’s Eve, too. Because of the time differences all over the world, you can celebrate the New Year for many, many hours, so it just seems silly to me. Plus, the fireworks upset my dogs. Plus, I’ve never enjoyed staying up late. I realize this makes me sound to the right of Ebenezer Scrooge, and sometimes I feel that I must be the all-time Party Pooper. In the past decade, I’ve certainly made my peace with that. So be it.

I do hope that I become a better writer in 2015. I hope that I will not fail my children, or my husband, or my friends, or my readers. I also hope that I will eat healthily and go for the occasional walk. “Hope” is a less loaded word than “resolve,” and one that I can stick with . . . I hope.

With this in mind, I am also hopeful that I will make some major changes to my health this year.

For example, I want to start by going to bed earlier. We should all be doing more to get enough sleep and I always seem to find myself going to bed far too late and then regretting my decisions in the morning. I am a bit of an insomniac though so this will not be easy.

That being said, I was speaking to a friend about finding new ways to get to sleep earlier the other day and she told me that since investing in a new mattress, her sleepless nights have become a thing of the past. I am a side sleeper so I think I am going to have to Brush up on the newest mattress knowledge at Bestmattress-brand.org and see whether buying a new mattress could be the key to getting to sleep earlier. Watch this space.

Nonetheless, maybe setting resolutions leads to lower expectations for myself? Maybe I’m dooming myself to failure? Or maybe (and experience leads me to believe this is true) I’m just being realistic. It takes something more than the calendar rolling over to make me get worked up enough to make life-changing decisions.

What about you? Are you good at making those resolutions stick?

Charlaine Harris