It’s 1975 and Matthew Scudder hasn’t been a New York City cop for several years. And when he quit being a police detective, he also quit being a husband and father, at least of the live-in variety. Now he lives in a residential hotel in a relatively cheap part of Manhattan and spends his time drifting from saloon to bar, drinking with his friends (his “saloon friends,” he makes a distinction) and occasionally earning a little money as an unofficial, unlicensed private investigator.

His is a world of bar owners who cheat on their taxes, and nobody thinks twice about it, of people living in single rooms, of men and women getting drunk before noon. It’s not a pleasant place but Matt seems at home there.

In the wee hours of a July morning, he’s getting quietly smashed in an Irish-run after-hours joint when two masked men burst in and grab all the cash out of the register and the safe. A few days later, the IRA-connected owners offer a sizable reward for the names and whereabouts of the robbers, and everyone knows what lies in store for them if they’re found. At the same time, the wife of one of Matt’s drinking buddies is murdered in their home while the husband is out on the town with his girlfriend. The authorities all seem to think the husband is the guilty party, either in person or by proxy, and he hires Matt to dig up evidence clearing him. And then another of his friends, partner in a bar he frequents regularly, has his “honest” accounts books stolen with a threat that they will be turned over to the feds if a ransom isn’t forthcoming. Can Matt, with all his experience of bad guys, help deal with this? And that’s the set-up. The story builds slowly as the reader tags along with Scudder, watching over his shoulder as his initially almost aimless inquiries gradually acquire focus, as he turns up clues and hints and turns them over in his mind until the epiphany strikes. And the resolutions of the several mysteries are anything but cut and dried when it comes to justice.

Block is highly regarded as a novelist, and justly so. He had already written five Scudder novels and figured the series had played itself out naturally — and then he had to fulfill a contract obligation with a short story, which led to this book, which led to eleven more books (so far), each of them set in Scudder’s real-time present, in which he is now a recovering alcoholic. But this retrospective look back at the early days of Matt’s second career is one of his best, both in Block’s own opinion and in that of his fans and the reviewers. In most ways, Scudder is the complete opposite of Dirty Harry or Harry Bosch. He’s very low-key, minding his own business, never looking for a fight (not when he’s at least half-sober) but not backing away from the possibility. And as he walks and takes the subway about the city, he seems to stop at almost every watering-hole along the way for a beer and a shot. Block’s style is strong on slightly off-center dialogue (these are the conversations of heavy drinkers). His descriptions show us a side of New York you would have to be a native to love. And he tells a story you have to believe.

The best way to approach this short book is to pretend you’ve never heard of Steve Martin, to forget that he was once a wild and crazy guy with a fake arrow through his head. Anyone who has read his more recent novels (this one was his first) and short stories and screenplays knows he’s a lot deeper than that. His imagination also displays considerable breadth, from the hilariously bizarre originality of Cruel Shoes to the in-depth social observation of An Object of Beauty.

There are essentially two characters in this story — well, two-and-a-half if you count Jeremy the amplifier-stenciler. The first is Mirabelle, who works the glove counter at the Beverly Hills Neiman-Marcus — except “work” is an overstatement since dress gloves are out of fashion and she is essentially consigned to shopper Siberia. At twenty-eight, she’s better educated than most of her peers, with an MFA, and she occasionally sells drawings to local galleries. She’s slightly off-kilter, basically passive and vulnerable, which makes her very attractive to a certain kind of man, and she’s beautiful in an entirely unmannered way (what you wake up with in the morning is what you went to bed with at night — a nice bit of description). But all she really wants is someone to talk to.

Ray Porter is a fifty-year-old unmarried millionaire businessman from Seattle with a pied à terre in Los Angeles. He sees Mirabelle at the store and immediately wants her. But rather than initiating a conversation, his method is to send her a gift with an invitation to dinner, which fits with his efficiently logical program for dealing with the world. The author makes it clear that Ray is not a predator — no more than any other single male — but his interest in Mirabelle obviously is not altruistic.

One of the best parts of the book is the way the relationship between Mirabelle and Ray differs profoundly, depending on which side one sees it from. They constantly misread each other. While he’s trying to be ethical by carefully explaining to her that he’s not ready for a full-time committed relationship, she’s hearing “not yet, but I will be.” As each begins to think he/she understands the other, neither of them really understands anything. This may be true of most of us, most of the time. In another episode, we learn that Mirabelle suffers from a clinical depression which can be successfully chemically controlled, but that when a given medication no longer works for her, she’s likely to undergo a serious downer before she can begin getting used to the replacement prescription. Martin’s description of this profoundly harrowing periodic experience, and the thin veneer of normalcy that equates with “success,” will bring beads of sweat to your forehead and make you wonder whether he’s writing from first-hand experience.

There are really only two potential problems with this book, both of which seem to be deliberate narrative decisions. One is the tendency to explain to the reader the revelations made about the characters and how one ought to react to them. The other is the lack of dialogue. You’re a third of the way into the book before encountering your first bit of conversation, so that when Mirabelle and Ray do speak, it’s kind of jarring after hearing only the author’s own voice. Despite this, it’s a very well-written novel (well, novella), exactly the right length to say what it wants to say.

I have a granddaughter just turned nine who has always read well beyond her theoretical level, and this book and its two sequels are presently her favorites. In fact, she insisted I read them. Probably not many adults without kids in the house read children’s books, but having been a public librarian all my life, I’m well used to reading almost anything and everything. (How else can you make suggestions to patrons?)

Birdsall is a new author to me, but this one — her debut novel — won the National Book Award for YP Lit, which in itself is an excellent recommendation.

The set-up is straightforward: The four Penderwick sisters of Massachusetts and their widowed father (a professor of botany) are headed off to a cottage in the Berkshires for their summer holiday. They represent quite an array of personality types, too. The practical Rosalind, at twelve, is the oldest. She has become her sisters’ substitute mother, the caregiver, and she’s pretty good at it. Skye, age eleven, is the smartest, adventurous, fiery-tempered, but also fanatically neat and tidy, the only blonde in the family, and is teaching herself algebra and irrational numbers just for the fun of it. Jane, age ten, is the most athletic, romantic and dramatic by nature, determined to become a published author, and has already written a stack of spiral-notebook novels about “Sabrina Starr,” heroine to small animals. And then there’s four-year-old Batty, the shyest, who insists on wearing her butterfly wings all day, everyday, and who seems to have a special ability to communicate with Hound, the family dog.

It appears they’re all going to have an ordinary, pleasant vacation — though what passes for “ordinary” among the Penderwick sisters would exhaust anyone else — but then they meet Jeffrey Tifton, young son of the rather unpleasant woman who owns the mansion behind which their summer cottage is located. Moreover, Rosalind meets Cagney, the friendly, good-looking young gardener, for whom she is soon baking brownies. Everyone has their problems, of course. Cagney has to suffer being employed by Mrs. Tifton. Batty has to deal with the restrictions put on her independent movement by her age. Rosalind has to figure out how to handle her crush, as well as keeping an eye on everyone else. Jane has to work out a ending to her latest book. Mr. Penderwick, though unflappable, has to deal with being the father of four bright, active daughters. And Jeffrey has to figure out how to avoid being packed off to military school and instead pursue his ambition to be a classical musician.

Birdsall creates a perfect balance among these disparate personalities, playing them off each other and telling her story from the viewpoints of each of the sisters in turn. It’s a delightful, often very funny book about absolutely real, believeable people that thoughtful adults will enjoy as much as adolescents. Most important, the author never condescends to the reader, assuming instead that anyone who picks up the book will be willing to put in a bit of work themselves — a somewhat chancy narrative decision whose success in this case comes through on every brilliant page. It has “classic” written all over it.

This oversized graphic novel has gotten quite a few awed reviews, so I had hopes of an unusual reading experience. What it is, basically, is a rather detailed history of every bleeding thing that has ever happened in and around the Northumbrian port town of Sunderland.

It was the eastern anchor of Hadrian’s Wall, so you have the Roman troops. It’s also just down the beach from Lindisfarne, so you have the monastery and the early tradition of learning. And Holy Isle was the first spot in England to be stomped by the Viking raiders, so you have (eventually) the Danelaw. And in more modern times, Sunderland was one of the great ship-building sites in Europe, so you have industry and urban growth and heavy raids during two world wars. It was also the hub of the coal industry, so you have grinding poverty. And you learn the difference between a Mackem and a Geordie, those two great rivals (and not just in football). And especially, you learn all (and I mean all) about a number of people who either came from Sunderland or were closely associated with it, from Jack Crawford, the sailor hero of the Battle of Camperdown, to Sid James, the irritating star of the “Carry On” films, who died on stage at the Empire Theater (which is also sort of the setting for this entire book). But especially, there’s Lewis Carroll, who is usually associated with Oxford but who had deep familial roots in the Sunderland area and who did much of his writing there. The whole Alice mythos, in fact, seems to pop out in all sorts of odd places and in all kinds of personal associations — and Talbot will tell you about every single one of them. And that’s the biggest problem. Unless you hail from Wearmouth, this book is going to become dreadfully tedious in its stultifying level of detail and in its relentlessly lecturing style. I found myself skimming through much of the second half of the volume, slowing down only to enjoy the author’s riffs on Alice and her adventures. This book is a noble effort, but I was ultimately quite disappointed.

I read a great deal, both classic literature and recent novels, and have done for half a century. In all that time, I have accrued a list of favorite characters, from Elizabeth Summerson and Dorothea Brooke to Lazarus Long and Harry Flashman. And George Smiley, the short, fat, nearsighted genius of the Secret Intelligence Service during the Cold War, is very near the top of that list.

I’ve reread the “Karla” trilogy half a dozen times over the years. This book was, in fact, both Le Carré’s first published piece of fiction and Smiley’s introduction to the world. Like A Murder of Quality, published a year later, this is not a long book — almost a novella rather than a novel — and also, like that other one, it’s both a murder mystery and a spy story. Smiley was recruited for Intelligence in 1928, spent much of the ’30s in Nazi Germany, recruiting agents himself, and passed the war years traveling between Sweden and Switzerland, with frequent detours into Germany. Now it’s fifteen years since the end of the war and Smiley is looking at middle age and probable retirement. He doesn’t much care, either, because the Service has become bureaucratized beyond recognition. He’s spending his time now doing interviews with government employees in sensitive positions about whom there is doubt, or who have been anonymously denounced. So George’s best days (you really couldn’t call them “great days”) are definitely behind him. Then a mid-level Foreign Office official whom he had interviewed the day before and had given a clean bill of health — and had told him so, too, so he wouldn’t worry needlessly — apparently commits suicide in despondency. Smiley is flabbergasted. And he has to go down and talk to the widow and tidy things up for his boss. But there are just too many things wrong, circumstances unexplained, items out of place, and he gradually becomes convinced it was murder, not suicide. But why? That’s the set-up and it will draw you right into the story as only Le Carré can. The plot is complicated but not too much so. The author always gives full attention to his supporting characters, so Peter Guillam (his first appearance, too) and the newly retired Inspector Mendel are just as three-dimensional as Smiley himself. Their mental processes are fascinating to observe as they sort things out and the often elliptical dialogue is perfect. Finally, a number of themes are introduced which will later become familiar to Smiley fans, including his rather strange, rather hopeless relationship with Ann. Frankly, there just aren’t enough books featuring George Smiley and his colleagues. I know the Cold War is long over and Le Carré has gone on to other themes, but I sincerely wish he would go back and write more about George’s adventures in the three decades before the setting of this book.

British crime novelist Charlie Howard is a moderately successful author, but in the real world, he’s also a talented thief and burglar, usually working on commission but sometimes for himself. His moral code is somewhat negotiable but he’s not a bad guy, really. Stealing is just what he does.

Though sometimes he’s not very smart about it. In this third in Ewan’s rather new series, Charlie has left Paris under a cloud in the company of his agent and good friend, Victoria, and after a short spell in New York he has hijacked her into a trip to Baghdad in the Desert. And they’ve hardly checked into the casino hotel of their choice when Charlie has lost his stake at poker and Victoria has been bedazzled by the hotel’s handsome headliner stage magician. Charlie becomes unreasonably miffed about this, lifts the magician’s wallet, and slips into his suite, where he gleefully cleans out the room safe in the spirit of revenge. And then he discovers the dead body of a young woman floating in the jacuzzi. Throw in a pair of dangerous casino-owning twins with juice, a show producer who wants in on the action, a head of security you don’t want to upset, a Croatian giant and his four-foot-tall friend, and a greedy croupier, and it’s all downhill from there. This caper yarn has an amazing number of twists and turns, most of which work. And one gets the impression Ewan (who lives and works tucked away on the Isle of Man) rather enjoyed his trip to Vegas to do research and collect atmosphere. This actually was the first I read in the series, and it’s the best so far. I’m a little surprised one or more of these enjoyably lighthearted action-mystery stories hasn’t been grabbed by Hollywood yet.

This is Ewan’s second novel about Charlie Howard, mystery novelist-slash-gentleman burglar, and while it’s not bad, it’s not as good as the first one (set in Amsterdam) — or, for that matter, the third one (Vegas).

Charlie’s good at making bad decisions and proves it, while in an intoxicated state in the City of Lights, by taking a fee to mentor a young would-be burglar on his first break-in — into his own apartment. Or so Charlie thinks. Then his fence in Paris passes on to Charlie his next assignment: Breaking into the very same apartment to steal an exceedingly mediocre oil painting in exchange for way too much money. But the painting is already gone. And when Charlie gets home, he finds the owner of the apartment he burgled (twice) is now dead and tied to one of his kitchen chairs. And if all that isn’t enough, his agent and closest friend, Victoria, comes on an unexpected visit from London — and she doesn’t even know what he really looks like, having always assumed the jacket photo on his books was genuine.

The set-up is pretty good and there are enough puzzles and unexplained happenings to keep the reader almost as busy trying to figure things out as Charlie is himself. But after awhile, with two separate art thefts, a murder, a whole series of mysterious phone calls, and a not-very-convincing government-employed fixer, it all becomes rather too complicated. And as the questions pile up, the pace of the narrative slows down. By the halfway point, I was trying to decide whether the satisfaction of finding out whodunit was sufficient payback for plowing through the rest of the story. (I found I couldn’t not finish it.) I’m not even sure all of the questions were answered and all the secondary mysteries solved. Moreover, Ewan makes many of the same sort of grammatical errors and gaffes in vocabulary that plagued his first book, such as appearing to believe that “in,” “into,” and “inside” are interchangeable. So while it’s not a bad book, really, it would definitely have benefited from tighter editing and some hand-holding editorial rewrite.

Charlie Howard is a British author of detective novels, the continuing protagonist of which is a burglar. Strangely enough, Charlie Howard himself is also a burglar. He’s not really a bad guy — picking the locks to places where he oughtn’t to be and taking things that don’t belong to him just gives him a special thrill and also helps with his cash flow.

He likes to live for awhile in the cities where his stories are set and just now he’s wrapping up a book in Amsterdam. And then he’s approached by an American who wants him to break into two homes and steal a small figurine from each — the Three Wise Monkeys, in fact. Charlie is puzzled because they’re made of plaster and obviously are intrinsically worthless. But he does the job anyway and then finds that the guy who hired him has been beaten senseless. And then things really start to get out of hand. Charlie is going to have to solve what becomes the American’s murder in order to protect himself, both from the police and from the real killer. The plotting is pretty good and so is the character of Charlie, who tends to approach the case the same way he handles the construction of the plot in one of his novels. He even sets up a classic Detective Reveals All scene in the last chapter. (He just can’t pass up the opportunity.) As a first novel, this is a pretty good one.

However.

This book would really have benefited from the attentions of even a novice copyeditor. There are far too many weird constructions, peculiar usages, and just plain errors. Charlie says a number of times (intransitively) that he “was stood outside” some building or “was sat” in a chair. If that’s a regional Brit idiom, I’ve never heard it before. On another occasion, he rather jarringly describes a damaged item as a “right off.” (“Team” and “teem” aren’t actually synonymous, either.) Nor can I quite visualize stepping “inside the threshold” of a door. He should also consult a grammar book regarding the use of commas to set off appositives and other phrases. There are at least a dozen more sloppy missteps like this and they’re quite jarring to a reader who’s paying attention. Finally, Charlie makes a point of not wanting anything to do with guns — he’s a burglar, not a heavy — but as a writer of crime novels, are we seriously to believe he doesn’t know that the rectangular thing inserted in the grip of an automatic pistol that holds the ammunition is called a “clip” and not a “cartridge”? Plus which, in the last scene in the warehouse, the automatic appears to morph into a revolver with a swing-out cylinder. And, yeah, Ewan also tends to simply over-write at times, to the point where the average creative writing teacher would call him on it — but this is a first novel, so I’ll be lenient about his occasionally slightly magenta prose.

By the way, I’ve been reading this series out of order, and the third installment, set in Las Vegas, has none of the above noted problems, so it appears some editor was at least paying attention after the fact.

I’ve always been interested in London’s deep history — all those two thousand years of layers — and in searching for a good, recently published survey, I had high hopes for this oversized volume from the Museum of London’s Archaeology Service.

They’re the principal agency responsible for excavation these days, with the job of staying one step ahead of any newly planned redevelopment. But it’s rather a disappointment. Following an introductory chapter on the history of archaeology in the city over the past couple of centuries, the present state of excavation (and what you can still occasionally go and see of it) is divided into topical chapters on the rivers, roads, trade, houses, shops, churches, the Great Fire, the effects of the Blitz, and so on. Each chapter then surveys what’s been found, from Roman and Saxon to Georgian and even Victorian. But the Museum seems to be more interested in the design of the book than in getting the information out. There are many photos and drawings, most of them color — but they’re nearly all too small to make out any detail. Some of the photos have captions but many are merely linked by a number system to some point in the text, which often includes only a passing reference. The captions and much of the text are printed in a very light typeface in a very small size, which makes it difficult to read for anyone over the age of forty. And the text itself is composed in short, choppy, bland sentences, apparently aimed at the bored sixteen-year-old who knows nothing about the history of the country, much less the city. This is much more the kind of book you might find in a gift shop than a in library. I’ll have to keep hunting for that survey.