by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Edge of Ruin, by Irene Fleming
Minotaur, 2010
ISBN 978-0-312-57520-5

As the title and the cover art of this novel indicates, it involves a Hollywood cliffhanger of an ending. Fleming also has written a variety of novels under the name Kate Gallison. The Edge of Ruin gives readers a fascinating picture of the cut-throat, silent-movie days of Thomas Edison and other early film producers.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Blood Ballad, by Rett MacPherson
Minotaur Books, 2008
ISBN 978-0-312-36222-5

This is the eleventh book in this Missouri author's series of Torie O'Shea cozies. Victory “Torie” O’Shea is a genealogist, town historian and booster, tour guide, amateur detective, and devoted, wisecracking mother. She excels at prying into the past to explain the present. In this one, Torie digs up a dangerous secret — literally, long buried — about local country music royalty connected to her family.

Trouble always begins in MacPherson’s stories during ordinary activities, as in The Blood Ballad when Torie and a companion flee from bullets at dusk during a community bird-watching competition. Stopping to take a breath, they get sprayed by a skunk. But then the story really takes off when an antique trunk hurtles downhill toward them, depositing a dead, bloody body. MacPherson's mayhem and Americana along the Mississippi would be fun to watch on “Masterpiece Mystery.”

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter, Harper, 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-191604-5
Available at Powell's Books

Jess Walter's Financial Lives of the Poets is grim yet funny.

Business journalist Matthew Prior’s whole life is sliding into the red. His website, an inventive but expensive venture offering financial reporting through poetry—“think of it as money lit”—didn’t succeed.

Now Matthew is scrambling to avert loss of home, wheels and family as he hides looming bankruptcy from his increasingly distant wife.

New business plan
Meanwhile, the depressed financial poet digs the hole of his misery further by making what at first appears to be only a small bad choice—stepping out at midnight to buy exorbitantly priced milk at the local convenience store.

He needs it for his children’s cereal. What he doesn’t need is to get entangled with a group of “wasted, red-eyed, dry mouth high boys” who are shopping for munchies.

But Prior needs money quick, and the marijuana they share with him is so good that he decides to go into business briefly as a dealer. His “Idiot Financial Planner” becomes his first client.

Blank and blue verse
Prior turns his blank verse poetry toward the blank unknown of his future. In a chapter aptly named “Social Networking,” he contemplates the possibility that his wife, Lisa, is having an affair. She spends lots of time chatting online and texting on her cell phone.

“My wife types her life key-by-key/ site-by-site, primarily at night/ on the home PC where I try to find/ work while she’s drowsing, instead/ find the history of her browsing,/ surfing her lost past for evidence/ that she wasn’t always this sad.”

Along with despair and desperation, dark humor pervades Prior’s life: “When I finally go upstairs, Lisa’s in bed, just closing her phone. She’s wearing her giant, population-control pajamas, made of burlap, fiberglass insulation, razor wire.”

Funny and hopeful
It is this hard-edged funniness, Prior’s never-say-die hopefulness, and the likeability of even the seediest characters in author Jess Walter’s quirky novel that kept me reading.

After all, there is a lot to feel glum about in today’s economy, and a reader might prefer to forget troubles by getting lost in a mystery novel or a rip-roaring adventure.  But then one might miss out on Prior’s shaky, but blessed redemption as well as the novel’s unexpectedly sweet ending.