February 13, 2012 / Leslie

Mailbox Monday ~ February 13th

Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.

Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The February host is Metroreader.

After a slow month in January it seems like everything arrived at once last week.

From TLC Tours for review:

Come and Find Me
by Hallie Ephron

Reformed hacker Diana Highsmith hasn’t left her house in over a year . . . not since she watched the man she loved fall to his death in the Swiss mountains. Now a grief-stricken recluse, she runs a thriving Internet security company from her home–meeting with clients in OtherWorld, an online virtual reality platform where she lives as her avatar, Nadia. The only two people Diana has seen live in the past twelve months are her sister, Ashley, and her UPS delivery guy. But when Ashley vanishes, Diana is forced to do the unthinkable: to brave both the outside and her own personal demons to find her missing sister.

From AmazonVine for review:

Stay Awake
by Dan Chaon

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations. Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

From the author for review:

Whole Latte Life
by Joanne DeMaio

Sara Beth Riley never dreamt she’d walk straight out of her life. Actually she’d never dreamt a lot of things that had happened this year … From being kidnapped by her own best friend, to throwing her wedding rings into the Hudson River, to calling an old love in France, to getting inked with said best friend, painting the passionate constellation of these choices into permanence. But mostly, she could never have dreamt what started it all. How could it be that her mother’s unexpected death, and the grief which lingered painfully long, turned her into the woman she was finally meant to become?

An assortment of audiobooks for review:

John le Carré’s Karla trilogy:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Smiley Versus Karla #1)
The Honourable Schoolboy (Smiley Versus Karla #2)
Smiley’s People (Smiley Versus Karla #3)

These were originally published in the 1970s and are new to me.
In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6. Le Carré’s many virtues — his faultless deployment of atmosphere and language; his ability to convey the inner workings of an arcane, insular profession; his profligate sense of character; his profound grasp of the moral ambiguities endemic to life in “the secret world” — are fully evident here, and seem as fresh and compelling today as they seemed more than 25 years ago.

All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley
Seven years ago, Zella Grisham came home to find her man, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend. The weekend before, $6.8 million had been stolen from Rutgers Assurance Corp., whose offices are across the street from where Zella worked. Zella didn’t remember shooting Harry, but she didn’t deny it either. The district attorney was inclined to call it temporary insanity-until the police found $80,000 from the Rutgers heist hidden in her storage space.

One more thing…