What I Read This Week

Crashing on a deadline today and out of questions to answer, so this will be short. (Send me some questions, folks -- leave them in the comments section, or e-mail me at LambLetters -at- gmail.com.)

Dan Simmons, The Terror. An epic horror novel about the doomed Sir John Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, 1846-1849. It's not enough that they're frozen into the ice and darkness, with no means of communicating with the rest of the world and a rapidly-spoiling food supply; the men are being hunted by a monster who makes the ice its home. The only one who seems safe is the mysterious native woman Lady Silence, whose tongue is missing -- not cut off, but chewed. Fascinating, plausible, truly scary, a little long.

Jesse Kellerman, Trouble. Medical student Jonah Stem becomes a fifteen-minute hero when he saves a young woman from being killed on the street. But the NYPD wants to talk to him about the incident -- which left the woman's assailant dead -- the dead man's family is suing him, and the extra attention is just making his life harder. Then the woman herself shows up in Jonah's apartment, and his life is turned completely upside down. Trouble is a terrific, perceptive, paranoid thriller; I read it in a single sitting, which almost never happens any more.