Winter Reading

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Here are three books that I really loved this season.

Child 44: Mystery/thriller that takes place in Stalin's Russia. Children start to go missing, and a career KGB agent finds himself blocked in the investigation. Like any good historical novel, it makes you feel what it must have been like to live in that (nightmarish) world.

In the Woods: Police procedural involving the murder of a child twenty years after a group of children went missing in the same area. I cared so deeply about these characters.

Ghost Story: I read about this novel by Peter Straub in one of the Halloween lists of "best scary novels." It's a mass market paperback with a typical mass market cover design, so I wasn't expecting it to be so well written. It's very engaging, and it's also great as just a novel---the writing is fantastic, and the characters are well drawn. Also: One section took me back to what it felt like to have a nightmare as a child in a way that no other book ever has.
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