Finally, it’s vacation time! Relax with a good book

The Missing

By Tim Gautreaux

Knopf, $25.95

What parents that suddenly found their child missing would not panic? And what grief would they endure should the child not be found?

This is the situation facing a couple while shopping in New Orleans’ largest department store when their 3-year-old daughter disappears.

Floorwalker Sam Simoneaux is held responsible for failing to execute store policy requiring all doors to be locked when a child is reported missing, and is fired.

Sam, determined to find the child, joins her parents who are working on a Mississippi steamboat, searching for her in every port, certain someone has seen the girl. When he eventually does find her, he makes a dreadful decision – not his to make – which has serious repercussions for all.

Gautreaux flavors the dialogue with snippets of Cajun patois, which cannot be translated here, but the meaning of which may be evident even to non-Cajun readers.

Gautreaux’s wonderful follow-up to his best selling “The Clearing” is a gut-wrenching tale of love and loss sure to hold readers in suspense to the end.

America America

By Ethan Canin

Random House, $27

A wonderfully nostalgic story of growing up in the Seventies, narrated by Corey Sifter, the publisher of the local daily paper in a small town near Buffalo.

Corey, who hails from a middle class family, recalls working as a lawn boy as a teenager for the wealthy Metarey family, where he is taken under the wing of the father who sends him to expensive schools, much to his family’s dismay. Eventually, Metarey entrusts Corey with more responsibilities, including being the driver for Gov. Henry Bonwiller, a presidential hopeful backed financially by Metarey.

Polls have Bonwiller ahead of Humphrey, Muskie and other candidates as the man to beat for the nomination to face President Nixon, when an unexpected incident derails his campaign. A young girl working for him, and with whom he is having an affair, is

found dead in a frozen field (think Chappaquiddick.)

When the press connects the governor with her death, his chances come crashing down.

The fortunes of the Metarey family turn sour, but Corey moves on and lives to tell the tale.

Breakneck

By Erica Spindler

St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

Someone is killing young teenage boys seemingly without any motive. But Spindler’s popular team of Rockford, Ill., detectives M.C. (Mary Catherine) Riggio and Kitt Lundgren, assigned to the Violent Crime Bureau, find a connection leading to Cyber Universe larceny.

When the murders begin to come too close to M.C. and her family, she becomes a loner, threatening her longtime friendship with Kitt and her position in the department.

As usual, Spindler’s plot moves at breakneck speed (pun intended), so pay close attention if you wish to solve the case before they do.

Bones of Betrayal

By Jefferson Bass

William Morrow, $24.99

In this, the fourth in the “body farm” novels, we are taken back in time to the site of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tenn., home of the atom bomb. The body of an elderly man is found frozen face down in a swimming pool and Dr. Bill Brockton is called to investigate.

The body is identified as Dr. Leonard Novak, designer of a plutonium reactor essential to the creation of the bomb. Brockton, his aide, and others involved in the investigation, are shaken when the autopsy reveals the cause of death as acute radiation sickness, and that the source is still in his body, which they have all handled.

Fact and fiction combine to create suspense as we await the solution to the murder and the fate of the team exposed to the radiation.

Crawfishes of Louisiana

By Jerry G. Walls

LSU Press, $27.50 (Paperback)

We crave ’em, boil ’em, eat their tails and (maybe) suck their heads, something the author won’t do by the way.

But how much do you know about crawfish?

Did you know, for instance, that there are about 39 different Louisiana species, each one described in detail as to size, shape and habitat. That, and a lot more about this crustacean we love so much is offered in multiple photos and diagrams by Walls, a biology teacher at Louisiana State University at Alexandria.

Walls knows his crawfish and enthusiastically shares his knowledge in this informative and surprisingly entertaining book.

Neophytes especially will welcome his recipe for boiling crawfish and visual instructions on how to eat them.