This is a book to love or to hate. The main character Maurice Swift is at his best an arrogant and gorgeous looking man, manipulative, narcissistic, deadly, perhaps a sociopath — someone we love to hate. Maurice wants to be a writer, a famous writer; unfortunately for him, for however well he crafts a sentence, he has no ideas of his own to pursue and the stories fall flat. How about the stories from and by others? If the book were not so deliciously written, even in its somewhat predictable plot line, I would not have finished it with a mischievous smile on my face.

Picture yourself, it's mid week, and now, after dinner you decide it's time to start the book all your friends have been raving about. Unless you're willing to not get any sleep this mid week night it might be better to wait for a rainy afternoon in which at the worst you'll have to call your boss and tell her that you'll be a little late the next morning. Red, White, Blue is that kind of book.

Reading the first few pages you notice a certain crispness about the writing, very straightforward and yet sucking you into its intriguing vortex of two simultaneous stories: one of a person applying to work in counterintelligence for the CIA and the training that they go through and the other story of a daughter of an agent and what she knows and doesn't know and how it impacts her life. What is it like to have a spy for a father? What can you believe about someone you love and who loves you who lies for a living? You may be able to put the book down for some hours before you finish it but it will stay with you like an insect buzzing around you that only can hear. And when you finish it, the book will live with you a bit longer until you're ready to move on with your life.

For the spy genre, this book holds your attention from the first few pages to the end and beyond. If you enjoy being consumed by a book, this book, Red, White, Blue is for you.

In 1950, an archeological find by a childhood friend's father finds a fully preserved man, approximately from 375 to 210 B.C, in a Danish peat bog and is given the name The Tollund Man. Now only his head remains.

Tina Hopgood and her childhood girlfriends were enthralled by the discovery, both from curiosity and the fact that the father of one of the girls made the discovery. And the girl's father, Professor Glob, dedicated the book in 1964 to the girls who were curious about archeological finds and had written letters to him. Because of this Tina had always felt emotionally linked to the Tollund Man.

Fifty years later, Tina Hopwood, never having visited Denmark, is still curious and writes Professor Glob. She finds her letter responded to by Kristian Larsen, now curator of the museum, after Professor Glob. And so begins a correspondence between them, initially about the Tollund Man and they continue their letter writing as each of them discovers the meaning to their own past and current histories and a sense, as they reveal themselves to each other, what they have missed in their lives.

The book is the back and forth letters between the farm wife Tina Hopgood and the widowed curator Kristian Larsen and as each of them unleashes themselves from all that has held them back, an emotional intimacy that has eluded them for many years begins. They begin to feel a deep kinship with each other, a love of sorts, more intimate than romantic. I found myself unable to put the book down, almost like a wonderfully woven mystery, wondering what revelations and what secrets would be unearthed in the next letter. Even more than these two characters and the reflection that they bring to each other, I found myself bringing that same reflection to my own life. I liked the book immensely and I know it will resonate with me for a long time.

Ostensibly it is a search for a missing person who has been pronounced dead, more, it is about family. The characters, Celine, her family, and the client trying to find her father, amazingly interesting, particularly Celine. We could call that the plot. The way it's written, the nuance of both what is said and what is not said totally captures me. It ended when it needed to, but I could have hung out a little longer.

Ginny Moon, fourteen years old with autism, is trying to make sense of her world and with her as the narrator we are on a wild adventure following in her footsteps, watching how her mind works in navigating the zigzag path of her life. From the very first moment of this roller coaster of confusion and her desire to be reunited with her birth mother we want her to succeed. Once you understand the parameters of the journey Ginny is on, there is no way you can put this book down until reaching its culmination. Though at times you feel her fear and desperation, you hang in there with her. She holds our attention, our empathy and compassion as we cheer her through the obstacles that confound reaching her goal. And maybe she’s not the only one who doesn’t understand what’s going on.

How do you feel about hiking in the unfamiliar Australian outback, following a topographical map on a team-building exercise with fellow workmates you don't even like? Such is the beginning of this page-turning novel where one of the participants doesn't return with the rest of her group. The story switches back and forth between the hike and law enforcement trying to unravel the mystery of what happened to the missing hiker. This is the tension that the novel feeds to you in slow delicious increments, and it's a book, that from the first few pages, is hard to put down for very long.