Much of the latest Kinsey Millhone mystery is summed up by the very last paragraph of the book: “So here’s what I’ve learned. In the passing drama of life, I’m usually the heroine, but occasionally I’m simply a minor character in someone else’s play.”

Kinsey hooks up with Cheney Phillips, and gets to have some fun in the romantic arena. Henry’s love life is up in the air. And there’s a big money laundering fraud going on, but that’s mostly taken care of by Reba Laffery, a kind of agressive, risk-happy anti-Kinsey. Kinsey is supposed to be shepherding Reba after her release from prison, but she finds herself caught up in Reba’s tangle of loves and lies.

Reba, however, is quite capable of taking care of herself, and she does just so, leaving Kinsey to get on with her own personal issues. It’s a lightweight, as Graftons go, but it’s plenty of fun. And it’s nice to see Kinsey getting a slice of happiness for a change.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the movie business owes it to themselves to read this book. Goldman goes into great depth about how movies are come to be, rather than how they are made: the bulk of the book is about Deals. In the latter part he takes a short story of his own, converts it into a script, and then dissects it. This is an interesting insight into the process of screenwriting, but it is the large collection of anecdotes and bitchy backstabbing earlier on that is much more amusing.

As the book was written in 1982, it is also very interesting to see how Hollywood has moved on since then, particularly in terms of movie budgets. A major big-budget film for $10 million? Pocket change, now.

Stiff is one of the most grisly and unpleasant books I have ever read, but also one of the funniest I have recently come across. It is an exploration of human corpses, and how science makes use of them. Mary Roach takes a deep yet whimsical tour through medical dissections, forensic studies of bodily decay, crash test corpses, and more. Some of the material is thoroughly grotesque, but it is often her light and comical tone that indicates most clearly the respect she clearly has for the people who have donated their bodies. If the book was done more seriously, it may well have been unreadably unpleasant. As it is, it is engrossing, informative, and may make you see death in a whole new light.

Third of Val McDermid’s Tony Hill/Carol Jordan books. In this one, Carol is recruited for a special undercover sting operation against a ring of people smugglers in Berlin. At the same time, Tony half-reluctantly gives up his quiet academic life to help out the Dutch and German police to track down a serial killer targetting experimental psychologsts at major universities. The two strands tie up in a smartly plotted story, with a runaway page-turning climax.

It was actually Alex who chose this book for me, because it had a duck on the front of it. I was very pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be rather good. Pete Amsterdam retired to Key West to enjoy the easy life. He doesn’t do any work, but his accountant convinced him to register as a Private Investigator, so he could offset some property improvements against tax. It’s all a great wheeze, until a desperate individual tries to hire him, and he gets tied up in a real murder investigation. The book has engaging characters, a light sense of humour, and paints a lovely picture of laid back island life. A nice, refreshing little read.

Like his C# web apps book in this series, this study guide for Microsoft Exam 70-320 gives a thorough look at the whole curriculum. I haven’t taken the exam yet, so I don’t know if the book alone is enough revision material to pass the exam with, but the book certainly made me feel confident enough to tackle the real thing. Some of the example code is weak and contrived, but at least it compiles most of the time–I found few errors. It’s not terribly exciting or original, but it’s a solid guide.

When I started reading Lehane’s Darkness, Take My Hand, I was suspicious of his using the Serial Killer plot so early in his Kenzie and Gennaro series. No worries on that account; Darkness turned out to be one of the best books I’d read in 2003. In Sacred, Lehane picks up another staple of the detective genre: the Missing Person/Religious Cult intersection. As before, I was dubious. Could he turn another tired trope into something stunningly fresh and exciting? Answer: yes. Sacred isn’t as profound and emotionally wrenching as Darkness, but it is fast-paced, tense, and rich with character. Top stuff.

Three young people have been missing since Midsummer’s Day. Postcards from them have been arriving from all over Europe, but one of their mothers thinks that something is wrong. She thinks they aren’t travelling at all, and that the police should make efforts to track them down. Kurt Wallander has a nagging feeling she might be right, but it is only when his long-time colleague and friend Svedberg is murdered that his fears take a more sinister shape. He discovers that Svedberg had been conducting a secret investigation into the disappearance of the youngsters for a month already without telling anyone else. Was he killed because he was getting too close to the truth?

As well as being a well-constructed police thriller, I also found this a very intimate book. At the start, Wallander is diagnosed with diabetes. He also spends most of the book consumed with self-doubt and near-panic that he can’t cope with the stress of the investigation. Everyone around him knows that he is more than capable, but he has trouble seeing it himself. Consequently, he works himself into the ground to try and prove his worth, not only to his colleagues, but also to himself. He never grants himself a moment’s peace. I recognised a lot of myself in Wallander’s character, and reading the book actually felt therapeutic. It may not resonate with everyone in the same way, but even without the personal echoes, it’s still an excellent crime novel and a well-observed character study.

When two frozen dead bodies float ashore in a liferaft, Kurt Wallander finds himself caught up in a mystery that stretches to the other side of the Baltic Sea. While on loan to the Latvian police in Riga, he is approached by a secretive underground organization who want his support in tracking down the murderer of one of their friends, himself a police officer. Mankell wrote this novel in 1992, when the immediate effects of German reunification were still rippling dangerously through Eastern Europe. The Latvian society he draws is one filled with fear, repressed pride, and enormous uncertainty over its future. In many ways The Dogs Of Riga comes across as more of an spy thriller than a crime novel. It’s an interesting change of pace, and a very worthwhile read.