WYPL Book Talk

C.J. Box won the Edgar Award for best novel for Blue Heaven in 2008, but he is best known for his long-running and award-winning series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. The series began in 2001 with Open Season and today, we'll talk about the seventeenth installment, Vicious Circle.

Linda Williams Jackson has many contributions to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, but today we'll be talking about her debut novel, Midnight Without a Moon. While the book is for readers ages 10 and up, it deals with the all too dangerous realities of growing up African-American in the Jim Crow south of the 1950s.

Michael Knight has published two novels, The Typist and Divining Rod. He has also published four story/novella collections. Today we'll be talking about his latest, Eveningland which includes six stories and a novella, and it is published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.

Tova Mirvis's two previous novels The Ladies Auxiliary and The Outside World were published to much critical acclaim. Her new novel, the first in ten years, is called Visible City, and it is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It's the story of two families in Manhattan and the windows into their souls.

Greg Iles is of course one of the biggest thriller writers in America, having written eighteen books which routinely hit the best- sellers lists. We last spoke with Greg about the first installment of his Natchez Burning trilogy about Mayor Penn Cage fighting against a Klan splinter group called the Double Eagles. We missed chatting with him about the second part, The Bone Tree, but he stopped back by to chat about wrapping it up with book three, Mississippi Blood.

Mississippi native Michael Farris Smith's first book was the novella, The Hands of Strangers. In 2013 he broke out with the near future ecological dystopian novel, Rivers, which won the 2014 Mississippi Author Award. Today we talk about his new novel, Desperation Road, which is published by Lee Boudreaux books.

Linda Lloyd talks with Donna Everhart about her debut novel, The Education of Dixie Dupree. Set in 1969 down in Alabama, eleven year old Dixie Dupree is an expert liar who does so to protect herself and her family. Her mother is from New Hampshire and longs to return north, creating anxiety in the home, as more familial secrets come to the fore and threaten a new generation of damage.

Reed Farrel Coleman is probably best known for his long-running Moe Prager series which he ended in 2014 after nine installments. He has also carried on Robert B. Parker's Jessie Stone series, with his fourth contribution coming out in September 2017. But today we'll be talking about his new series featuring retired long island beat cop, Gus Murphy. The first book in the series Where It Hurts was published in 2016 and is a finalist for the 2017 Edgar Award for best novel. The second title has just been published by G.P. Putnam Sons, and it's called What You Break.

(photo: Christine Jean Chambers)

Chanelle Benz's short stories have appeared in Guernica, Granta.com, The American Reader, and The Cupboard, and she has received an O. Henry Prize. In this edition of Book Talk, we will be talking about her debut collection of stories, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, which is published by Ecco/Harper Collins.

Tim Gautreaux is one of the most respected writers of fiction in America. His novels are The Clearing, The Next Step in the Dance, and The Missing. He's had four short story collections, the newest of which is Signals, which includes new and selected stories.