“Marriage and Other Acts of Charity”

“Marriage and Other Acts of Charity”

By Kate Braestrup

Little, Brown and Company 224 pages, $24.99

In marriage, it helps to learn to apologize. Unchecked anger is bad and loving generously benefits both the giver and receiver. These are among the lessons Kate Braestrup shares in her new book. As a minister, she has advised couples wanting to wed, as well as those wanting to divorce. She herself has been married, widowed and remarried. Such a background, coupled with a prior New York Times best seller, leads you to expect great insights or at least inspiration. Unfortunately, this book contains neither. The writing is flowery bordering on saccharine and the substance is, unfortunately, often simplistic.

— Rasha Madkour, Associated Press

“Ordinary Thunderstorms”

By William Boyd

Harper, 416 pages, $26.99

Life can change in a blink of the eye — completely and forever. It’s a bitter lesson that Adam Kindred learns on a rainy evening in London in William Boyd’s “Ordinary Thunderstorms.” Kindred has what appears to be a successful job interview and, on a whim, decides to stop at a little out-of-the-way restaurant for dinner. While there, he strikes up a conversation with a fellow diner. That chance meeting starts a series of events that will change Kindred’s life forever. Within hours, he has been framed for murder and is being chased by a relentless hired killer. It’s all linked to a pharmaceutical scandal that Kindred slowly comes to understand. At times, the book loses focus and Kindred seems a little too naive. Still, Boyd’s writing is lovely and he has a keen eye for detail. Overall, “Ordinary Thunderstorms” makes an interesting read.

— Mary Foster, Associated Press

“Iron River”

By T. Jefferson Parker

Dutton, 369 pages, $26.95

Mexico is paying a high price for America’s appetite for illegal drugs. The drug cartels have murdered an estimated 15,000 people in the last three years and the violence has spilled across the border to the American Southwest.

Americans, T. Jefferson Parker writes, “are complicit in the problem.” Not only are we the market for the drugs, but also the source of the weapons with which the drug lords arm their private armies. “Iron River,” the title of his new crime novel, is a metaphor for the illegal trade in American-made weapons, everything from cheap handguns to military assault rifles, that flow to the cartels from hundreds of American gun dealers.

While Parker has a serious message to convey, he is also a popular novelist with a need to entertain. In “Iron River,” he succeeds brilliantly at both.

Charlie Hood, Parker’s smart, likable young series character, has been detached from his job at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to give the ATF a hand in tracking down illegal gun sales along the border. His first case goes bad, and in the ensuing gunfight, a bystander is shot to death. The victim happens to be the son of one of Mexico’s most powerful drug lords, who retaliates by kidnapping an ATF agent. The attempt to rescue the agent forms the spine of the story.

Since the days of Raymond Chandler, California has produced some of our finest crime novelists, and today Michael Connelly, Don Winslow and Joseph Wambaugh continue the tradition. With “Iron River,” Parker proves again that he belongs in their company.

— Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press

“Happy: A Memoir”

By Alex Lemon

Scribner, 289 pages, $25

Alex Lemon tells us with his title, “Happy: A Memoir,” that all is not as it seems. After all, what self-respecting memoirist would be so unabashedly earnest as to pick such a name without an ulterior motive?

Not this one.

“Happy,” it turns out, is a nickname Lemon gets from boisterous college friends and baseball teammates. They mostly recede into the background as Lemon copes with a potentially fatal disorder that makes his brain stem bleed.

His illness makes him disoriented and numb. It makes him vomit and spit blood. It distorts his vision, tweaking it so he cannot see straight and causing him to fall down in the shower. As he tells his story, Lemon’s nickname comes to seem less like the invention of a care-free coed and more like an unfortunate coincidence.

And yet he convinces you of how strong he is, using the same charm he employs to win friends on campus.

His writing is impressive. With the knowing use of run-on sentences, multiple words combined into one and other tricks, he makes his words evoke his personal story, which is about youth and death.

Lemon is a compelling and inventive writer. At times his prose is so packed, so vivid, you sometimes have to reread it to let your imagination catch up with his.

— Vinnie Tong, Associated Press