BEACH READS

Summer is finally here, and we know that BookPage readers wouldn't dream of embarking on long-awaited—and much-deserved—vacations without a carefully chosen book. Going beyond the traditional definition of "beach reads," our editors have searched fiction and nonfiction alike to find these diverse suggestions for gripping summer reading. From inspirational fiction to real-life treasure hunts, there's sure to be something for every taste. Take one of our picks along with you, and we guarantee you won't fall asleep on the beach!

FICTION

REVIEW BY MAUDE MCDANIEL

When "the great Ivan Z" returns to the little Appalachian mining town where he grew up, he is "a grown man with only one box." Indeed, the former football hero turned sheriff's deputy, whose dream career was stopped in its tracks by an accident, has few possessions to show for the last 17 years—but a great deal of baggage.

He has come home to await the arrival of an old teammate, Reese Raynor, who has been paroled after serving 18 years in prison for beating his young wife into a vegetative state. The fires that still rage underground years after a local mine explosion are reflected in the hell on earth that Raynor has created for those he touches. Ivan aims to do something about it, although he's not sure what.

Coal Run gradually reveals that Ivan, too, has consequences to deal with, the result of his own untrammeled adolescent behavior. Tawni O'Dell, whose first novel Back Roads struck gold when it was picked for Oprah Winfrey's book club, has given us a second novel just as steeped in gray-black local colors, and perhaps even more subtly amusing. ("Our other deputy is Todd Stiffy, whose name alone propelled him into an armed occupation.") And O'Dell exhibits surprising mastery over the young violent male mind, for which the advice, "Don't kill anything you don't want to kill" is stunningly appropriate. (Actually, an oversupply of violent males clutters the first 100 pages, until the reader gets them all straight.)

The spirit of this book is John Denver noir, country roads at midnight, when more demons than stars come out. Still, for Ivan in the end, love supplies meaning and purpose. The wisdom of his father, a Ukrainian refugee who was killed in the mine accident, proves more timeless than the disastrous foul-ups of teenagers:

" 'You can have all the food and toys and even all the bombs,' he told my mom while they shared one of their last nights together, 'but no man can protect himself from uselessness.' "

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

HISTORY

REVIEW BY DEBORAH DONOVAN

The chaos in the art world resulting from World War II continues to this day, as paintings, icons and sculptures routinely emerge in auction rooms and private sales. As the Nazi armies raced towards Leningrad in 1941, the Catherine Palace was hastily dismantled and Peter the Great's art treasures packed away. One of them, a room made of panels of amber mined from the Baltic Sea—a gift from the King of Prussia—has never been found.

In September 2001, journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark began their own search for the Amber Room, combing through archives in Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin, interviewing the few surviving figures and relatives of those deceased, and poring over previously unknown diaries. Their quest is meticulously recounted in The Amber Room: Uncovering the Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Art Treasure. Levy and Scott-Clark have turned up two conflicting stories as to the fate of the Amber Room.

One theory follows the reasoning of Anatoly Kuchumov, a curator in charge of packing up Leningrad's art treasures as the Germans invaded in 1941. Figuring that the Amber Room could not be moved, Kuchumov decided to disguise it instead. Another theory comes from archeology professor Alexander Brusov, who led the first search for the room just as the war ended in 1945. He concluded it had been carted off by the Nazis to Konigsberg Castle in East Prussia, where it survived until the city fell to the Red Army on April 9. By the end of May, the castle was a charred ruin, undoubtedly the work of Red Army troops, unaware that Russian art treasures were stored there.

Perhaps finally accepting the probability of the room's destruction, Russia began assembling a replica in 1999, which officially opened in May 2003. While the fate of the room may never be established, The Amber Room is a fascinating tale of obsession, intrigue and fabrication rivaling a work of fiction. And since art works supposedly "missing" in the war continue to be uncovered, there may be a trove of similar stories waiting to be told.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati, Ohio, and La Veta, Colorado.

SPY THRILLER

REVIEW BY PAUL GOAT ALLEN

Memorial Day is traditionally a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation's service, but in Vince Flynn's newest Mitch Rapp novel (Transfer of Power, The Third Option, Separation of Power, etc.), the peaceful May holiday will include much more than morning parades and afternoon barbecues. Memorial Day is the target date for undercover al-Qaeda operatives in the States to detonate a nuclear bomb in the nation's capital during a dedication ceremony for the new WWII memorial. Their target: the president, leaders of Great Britain and Russia, and a few hundred thousand ill-fated infidels.

Counter-terrorism operative Mitch Rapp has one helluva score to settle. A Syracuse University All-American lacrosse player who lost the love of his life in the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack in 1988, Rapp's thirst for vengeance led him to dedicate his life to fighting terrorism—by any means necessary.

Now decades later, Rapp (an amalgam of John Wayne, General George Patton and Dirty Harry) has a potential disaster on his hands. After a clandestine raid on a village on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border nets Rapp some high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders, he learns of a plot to transport a nuclear weapon into the States. But after Rapp takes his shocking findings to his boss, CIA director Irene Kennedy, and later, the president, he finds himself quickly embroiled in political claptrap. As precious hours tick away, self-righteous politicians bicker about how to handle the imminent disaster. Meanwhile, sleeper cells are becoming active and terrorists are converging on Washington, D.C., with a bomb that could turn the nation's capital into a radioactive wasteland. In usual Mitch Rapp fashion, he takes matters into his own hands.

Flynn's protagonist is reminiscent of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan and Dale Brown's Patrick McLanahan: all are extremely intelligent, incredibly focused, unwaveringly patriotic loose cannons that readers can't help but root for. And that essentially describes Memorial Day: a highly intelligent read that is virtually impossible to put down.

Paul Goat Allen is a writer in Syracuse, New York.

MYSTERY

REVIEW BY SHERI SWANSON

Sassy, Irish-Jewish PI Tess Monaghan, protagonist of Laura Lippman's popular series, returns in the suspenseful By a Spider's Thread. This time out, Tess takes on a referral from her Uncle Donald (of the Weinstein side of the family) and finds herself getting in touch with her Jewish side. Hired by Mark Rubin, a devout Orthodox Jew, to find his wife and three children, Tess spars with tradition, treachery and of course Tyner, her former employer and soon-to-be uncle-in-law. She works this case without help from any of her usual companions: boyfriend Crow, former roommate Whitney, former client-now-friend, Jackie. However, ex-nemesis Gretchen O'Brien reappears as the leader of a whole new web of support for Tess and other women PIs.

Rubin's penchant for privacy and naiveté regarding his wife and the state of his marriage make for an initially unsympathetic client. His oldest son, Isaac, however, instantly wins our hearts as a scrapper—an instinctive survivalist. Without his beloved books to keep him company, Isaac spends his time concocting new ways to escape, or at least contact his father. Through him, we see a softer side of Mark, that of a father who wishes "first and foremost that you would be a virtuous man" but who also uses Advanced Mission Battleship to teach his son that he need not be the smartest one to win.

Trapped with a mother not acting herself and a man posing as his father who clearly considers him a threat, Isaac reminds us of both the resilience of children and their sometimes overlooked maturity beyond their years.

With her usual bullheadedness, Tess bends rules, interferes where she's not welcome and experiences a handful of near-death experiences. In the process, she attains a new level of self-perspection, and takes what fans might hope is a first step in the right direction. Acclaimed author Lippman knows how to keep the reader guessing: the only thing we know for certain is that in this case, the butler didn't do it.

Like Tess, Sheri Swanson has a grandmother Weinstein.

INSPIRATIONAL FICTION

REVIEW BY MIKE PARKER

The swampy, meandering waters of the Salkehatchie River that flow with oblivious urgency around the town of Digger, South Carolina, provide both the backdrop and the metaphor for Charles Martin's debut novel, The Dead Don't Dance. Life, for protagonist Dylan Styles, mirrors the uncertain currents, the peaceful surface and the inexorable flow of the river. As with fellow Southerner Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, the river is the ultimate representation of God. You can fight it and drown, or you can embrace it and be carried wherever it wishes to take you.

Styles, a poor dirt farmer with a Ph.D., is in love with his wife, Maggie. The soybeans have peaked, the corn is high, the wisteria is in bloom. Maggie is gloriously pregnant. God is in His heaven, all's well with the world. Life is good—until the delivery goes tragically awry. The baby is stillborn, and the doctors are nearly helpless to staunch the flow of Maggie's blood, leaving her in a coma. The river has become a raging flood.

A devastated Styles wrestles with God with all the fervor, anger, questions and demands of a modern-day Jacob, and gets his proverbial hip kicked out of joint for his trouble. Like Jacob, though he may limp for the rest of his life, every life he touches is changed—including his own.

As medical bills mount, Styles puts his Ph.D. to use as an adjunct teacher at the local junior college, and in true Mr. Holland fashion whips a ragtag group of grammatically challenged miscreants into a competent class of creative writers. Among the students is a shy, unmarried, pregnant girl, Amanda, who doubles as a nurse's assistant; a gifted athlete with a shot at the pros, if he can just pass this class; a Hemingway/Fitzgerald prodigy who hides her eyes and her pain behind dark glasses and an icy demeanor.

Martin's novel inspires without being overly religious, or even particularly faith-based, and should strike a chord with fans of Sparks' The Notebook and similarly emotive works. The Dead Don't Dance is a classic example of God-haunted Southern literature.

Mike Parker is a Southern writer from Texas, now living in Tennessee.

ADVENTURE

REVIEW BY JASON EMERSON

Few Americans know that German submarines commonly ranged within sight of America's Atlantic coast during World War II, and even fewer know that many were destroyed in those waters. In 1991, deep-wreck divers John Chatterton and Bill Nagle found a sunken German U-boat 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. Resting at a depth of 230 feet, the submarine—which was unknown to naval experts, historians and governments—was beyond the reach of all but world-class divers. The story of the efforts to identify the sub and its 56-man crew is vividly and, at times, chillingly described by Robert Kurson in his book, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Discovered Hitler's Lost Sub.

Yet the book is about more than just the sub: it's also about humanity. Chatterton and fellow diver Richard Kohler, the two who did the most to identify the sub, disliked each other immensely, but their shared obsession led them to spend seven years piecing together the story of the U-boat, researching in museums and archives both in the U.S. and in Germany as well as making repeated dangerous dives to the wreck. In the course of their experiences, they pioneered diving techniques and equipment, became diving legends, developed a friendship and eventually rewrote history.

Shadow Divers is a mystery, an action-adventure, an education on deep-wreck diving, a drama, and at times, a tragedy. Its climax is so harrowing and emotional that anything Hollywood has to offer pales in comparison.

Jason Emerson is a freelance writer based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

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