Spencer Quinn, author of thirteen popular mysteries featuring Chet (the dog) and Bernie (his owner), has penned a new novel, Loretta Plansky's Revenge, about a widow in her 70s who is scammed out of her life's savings by a late night phone call from someone pretending to be her grandson.

The story takes place both in Florida, where widow Plansky lives in a plush condo, and in Romania, where she goes after deciding the local police weren't doing enough. There she meets the rather sympathetic perpetrator, Dinu, a skinny teenager, who is being groomed for a life of crime by his Uncle. She has quite the adventure in the Transylvanian Mountains…involving old hotels and motorcycles, as well as Dinu's crime family, and a new possible love interest named Max.

Is Mrs Plansky's Revenge possibly the first in another charming series? Quinn is not saying!

"Stealing" is the heartbreaking story of now 9 year old Kit Crawford, the only child of a white father and a Cherokee mother, who died of TB when Kit was 6. She lives in rural isolation and spends non-school days fishing by herself on the banks of the bayou. One day she notices that someone has moved into a shack that belonged to her uncle, who was killed in a knife fight. She becomes friends with the beautiful new neighbor, Bella. But Kit is the center of a violent crime and is taken from everyone she knows and loves and moved, first to a "white" fundamentalist Christian home in town, and later to a religious boarding school where she and other Native American children are stripped of their heritage.
Author Margaret Verble, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction, has written a compelling coming-of-age story that is hard to put down. It is one of the best books I have read in the past year.