Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore

Secondhand Souls: A Novel by Christopher Moore --- 335 pages

Secondhand Souls, is a sequel to A Dirty Job (2006), and continues the adventures of the Death Merchants, the folks who collect and resell the souls of the departed — and their battle to keep the forces of the Underworld from taking over San Francisco.

Our hero, Charlie Asher, died in A Dirty Job, but his soul lives on in a 14-inch tall meat puppet that was put together in a hurry from spare animal parts and lunch meat by the arcane powers of Charlie's Buddhist nun girlfriend, Audrey.

Then there's Mike Sullivan, who paints the Golden Gate Bridge for a living. One day Mike is confronted by the 223-year-old ghost of a beautiful Spanish girl who is pining for the lover who never came back to claim her.  She tells him the bridge is crowded with thousands of ghosts of lost souls, waiting to be rescued. By Mike. All he has to do is find and foil the Ghost Thief.

And I haven't even mentioned Charlie's seven-year-old daughter Sophie, who happens to be the Luminatus, the Ultimate Death-Dealer. Sophie is guarded by two immortal Hellhounds, Alvin and Mohammed. Or the Taser-wielding banshee who is suddenly keening death and destruction all over town because Charlie's old adversaries, the Morrigan, are back with a mysterious yellow stranger in tow.

Christopher Moore is NOT --- I repeat --- NOT for everyone, but if you enjoy no-holds-barred, wickedly deranged black comedy, you will not find anyone better.

Click HERE for a review from the Dallas News.

The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith

The Novel Habits of Happiness: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel by Alexander McCall Smith --- 257 pages

This is the tenth novel in the Sunday Philosophy Club Series, that has all the charming appeal of leisurely afternoon chats with a very old friend.

Isabel Dalhousie asks herself whether she has a tendancy to be severe in her judgments of others. In particular, she’s having qualms about her negative reaction to a pair of rival philosophers who are intruding on her patch with their scheme to take control of Edinburgh's Philosophical Institute. Then there's her ambivalent relationship with her niece, Cat, who has embarked upon yet another unsuitable romance with a dishwasher repairman.

Isabel simply can’t help getting involved in other people’s problems. Isabel’s husband Jamie has his qualms about this, but he knows that this tendancy is also what he finds so attractive in her.

This time around Isabel has been asked to help the mother of a young boy who believes he had a previous life with another family and expresses a wish to return to them. Isabel finds this unbelievable but, not wishing to further upset the boy's mother, agrees to investigate whether there is any factual basis to the boy's descriptions of the other family and home.

As the reviewer in Kirkus observes,  The Novel Habits of Happiness is "the wooliest of Isabel's ten appearances to date and the one that makes the most decided case for the mental digression as a structural principle" in the writing of fiction. In short, readers either love Isabel or hate her.  There seems to be no middle ground.  Having read and enjoyed all ten books in the series so far, I qualify as an Isabel-lover.

Click HERE to read the Kirkus review in full.

Click HERE to read the New York Journal of Books review by an Isabel lover.

Click HERE to read the Washington Times review by an Isabel hater.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson- 529 pgs.

Ursula Todd is born on a snowy February day in 1910.  She dies before she can take her first breath.  On that same night, Ursula is born again, this time surviving.  And so it goes.  Ursula is born and then dies multiple time over the course of the novel.  Each time she dies, Ursula remembers little bits from her previous lives and is able to change the course of her life.

It took me a little while to get into this book.  The timeline jumps around, which can be a bit confusing, but once I got into it, I really enjoyed it.  There were several variations of Ursula that I didn't care for, but it was always interesting to see what she would remember and change.  Definitely an interesting plot.

Seduction by M.J. Rose

 Seduction: A Novel of Suspense by M.J. Rose --- 372 pages

I was quite intrigued when I picked up this novel, because it is partly based on the journals kept by Victor Hugo about his spiritualist experiments during the first years of his self-imposed political exile from France, when he and his family were living on Jersey in the Channel Islands.

The author, whose previous bestseller, The Reincarnationist, became the basis of the hit television series Past Lives, weaves her fictitious tale of three troubled souls doomed to relive their curse through succesives reincarnatons. Theo Gaspard, his   wife Naomi, and his brother Ash are just completing another cycle of       this tragedy when they encounter Jac, a woman with the extraordinary     ability to channel the past lives of others.

  The novel suffers however from uneven pacing as Rose juggles four    
  different story lines, and although she constantly repeats the mantra  
  "there are no coincidences," so much of her story depends on
  coincidence that it loses credibility. The story line that draws most on
  Hugo's journal is the best written; but the rest of the characters are like
  bad actors reading from a worse script.