I got the following reviews from Amazon (and deleted any spoilers!!)
The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown
With The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder mystery with a collection of fascinating esoterica culled from 2,000 years of Western history. A murder in the silent after-hours halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his granddaughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle.
The duo become both suspects and detectives searching not only for Neveu's grandfather's murderer, but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England and history itself. Brown has created a page-turning thriller that also provides an amazing interpretation of Western history. Brown's hero and heroine embark on a lofty and intriguing exploration of some of Western culture's greatest mysteries--from the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile to the secret of the Holy Grail. Though some will quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures, therein lies the fun. The Da Vinci Code is an enthralling read that provides rich food for thought. --Jeremy Pugh, Amazon.com
The Star of the Sea Joseph OConnor
Tragedy is a word too often used. Nevertheless, in Star of the Sea Joseph O'Connor manages to achieve a real sense of the tragic, as personal dramas of the most distressing kind play themselves out against the background of the Irish potato famine and the almost equal nightmare of the mass emigration that it caused. As passengers die of starvation and disease in steerage, a drama of adultery, inadvertent incest and inherited disease plays itself out in first class. O'Connor raises, and does not attempt definitively to answer, real questions about responsibility and choice.
No 1 Ladies Detective Agency Alexander McCall Smith
An absolutely wonderful start to what is hopefully is a long-running detective series set in modern Botswana. This fast-reading book isn't so much a set piece mystery as it is the story of an African woman in her late thirties who stakes her entire inheritance on the crazy idea of becoming the country's first woman private detective. Precious Ramotswe is a intelligent "traditionally built" woman with a keen sense of human nature and a desire to help people in distress. This book tells of her childhood, her loving miner father, an ill-considered marriage to a trumpeter, her strong belief in her own abilities, and skeptical take on the forces of progress and modernization. This volume contains her first cases, which she adroitly solves with the assistance of her expert typist secretary and the local master mechanic, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni.
But the book is not just about her, but also aims to portray a positive picture of modern Africa, one all too rarely seen in the West. The cases often intertwine with issues such as development, social structures, power, and gender, but in a disarmingly light and gentle way. The stories are delivered in a delightfully fluid and simple prose with pacing that makes the book quite difficult to put down.
The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold
On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.
Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com
Eats, Shoots & Leaves The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Lynne Truss
Everyone knows the basics of punctuation, surely? Aren't we all taught at school how to use full stops, commas and question marks? And yet we see ignorance and indifference everywhere. "Its Summer!" says a sign that cries out for an apostrophe. "ANTIQUE,S," says another, bizarrely. "Pansy's ready", we learn to our considerable interest ("Is she?"), as we browse among the bedding plants. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss dares to say that, with our system of punctuation patently endangered, it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them for the wonderful and necessary things they are. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. "Sticklers unite" is her rallying cry. "You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion--and arguably you didn't have much of that to begin with."
This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset about it. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to Sir Roger Casement "hanged on a comma"; from George Orwell shunning the semicolon to Peter Cook saying Nevile Shute's three dots made him feel all funny", this book makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.
I hope that there is something there for everyone. Oh, and in the course of my researches I discovered that there is a fifth novel in the No.1 Detective Agency series.... good news for me (and Dianas, by the sound of it
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