The Emperor of Ocean Park

What a lovely book - sent to me by my Aussie pal, this is a family saga and a mystery combined together. Also, it is an insightful look into the tone of the lives of middle-class African Americans, a topic I seldom run across in popular fiction. But Stephen L. Carter has written an intriguing book.

Talcott Garland, the younger son of conservative judge Oliver Garland, has felt strain between himself and all of his surviving family members (brother Addison, sister Mariah) since the Judge went before the Senate as a nominee to the Supreme Court - and was humiliated publicly, and ultimately forced to withdraw his name. The humiliation centered around the Judge's friendship with a man suspected of having mob connections, who makes his living (everyone believes) by murder.

The book opens as the Judge has died under circumstances that Mariah feels are suspicious. Involved in this are the many questions Tal has always had - including questions about his youngest sister Abby's death in a hit-and-run accident many years past and why the Judge didn't disavow his mobster friend who also happened to be Abby's godfather.

Additionally, Tal has other concerns. His wife, Kimmer, is under consideration for an appointment to the federal court of appeals. Of course, he also suspects she is having an affair, but that should not surprise him since she had an affair with him when married to her first husband.

A very interesting book with a good twist at the end.

Outlander

- and other books in the series by Diana Gabaldon. (The Drums of Autumn, Voyager, Dragonfly in Amber, The Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes).

My Aussie friend sent me Outlander, the first book in the series. Claire Randall is an Englishwoman who worked as a nurse during WWII, and whose husband, Frank Randall, is an historian but otherwise a bit of a dull fellow. As Claire had actually felt useful for a bit during the war, she's casting about for a more useful role for herself.

While in Scotland, where Frank is doing research, Claire stumbles upon a stone circle, a mini-Stonehenge, and is surprised to find that, for some people, these circles are portals into time. When Claire recovers from her trip through time, she finds she is in 1743. Scotland is rumbling with the rebellion that will lead to the massacre at Culloden, and Claire's medical skills make people think she is a witch.

In Outlander, she meets (and is forced by circumstances to marry) a young Scot warrior named Jamie Fraser. But in this marriage, she finds both the passion and the partnership that was lacking with her "first" husband. The series leads us through the first early years of their marriage, their separation as Jamie goes to face his death on the Culloden battlefield, while Claire returns to the present to birth and raise their child. Later, after Frank's death, Claire connives to return to 1700s Scotland and her Jamie.

Excellent series, with a modern woman coping with the customs of two hundred years past, and the history of Scotland, and later, the American Revolution, wrapped about a romance that is solidly constructed.