Highly Recommended Reads for 2010

• Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay
• Open Season by C.J. Box
• Free Fire by C.J. Box
• Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by C.J. Box
• Savage Road by C.J. Box
• Out of Range by C.J. Box
• In Plain Sight by C.J. Box
• Blood Trail by C.J. Box
• Spooner by Peter Dexter
• Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (2 Vol.) by Ulysses S. Grant
• Kissing Arizona by Elizabeth Gunn
• Midnight Fuge by Reginald Hill
• The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson
• Death Without Company by Craig Johnson
• Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson
• Another Man's Moccasins by Craig Johnson
• The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson
• Junk Yard Dogs by Craig Johnson
• The Ragtime Fool by Larry Karp
• Fracture by Susan Cummins Miller
• Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier 1943-1945 by Karl H. Schlesier
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• The Three Stations by Martin Cruiz Smith
• A Whole New Life by Betsy Thornton
• The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall

Why so many by Johnson and Box? The Tucson Book Festival came into being in March of 2010, and I was assigned an interview with Johnson (given to someone else at the last minute) and I was the backup for an interview with C.J. Box because the regular interviewer had family health issues. I'd read Box's Edgar winner, Blue Heaven, but none of his Joe Pickett novels. Who cares about game warden mystery novels, anyway?

Well, me! Or so I discovered after reading the first one. I'd never heard of Johnson. Now, everybody has (or should), with good reason (e.g. Longmire on Arts & Entertainment).

Karl Schlesier was my professor, advisor, and mentor through my early archaeological career. He's the author of several excellent American Indian novels and works of non-fiction. In Flakhelfer to Grenadier he provides an unusual historical view of World War II from inside the collapsing Third Reich -- a boy caught up in life-threatening events over which he had no control.