Contributing Editor<\/span><\/h1>\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/poeppel%2c%20limelight_cover%20ts.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span>LITERARY FICTION<\/span>Amy Poeppel<\/span><\/span>Limelight: A Novel<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\nAtria\/Emily Bestler Books<\/span>Hardcover, 978-1-5011-7637-1 (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 416 pgs., $26.00<\/span>May 1, 2018<\/span>Allison Brinkley\u2019s family is discombobulated. <\/span>They\u2019ve just moved from suburban Dallas to the heart of Manhattan. Husband and father Michael is nervous about his new job. The substitute teaching position Allison had lined up falls through. Seventeen-year-old Charlotte had to change schools for senior year, leaving behind her first boyfriend. Fourteen-year-old Megan\u2019s grades are dropping and she\u2019s acting out, dealing with hormones. Speaking of hormones, eight-year-old Jack discovers one of those your-body-is-changing-in-new-and-confusing-ways books, which ended up in one of his moving boxes by mistake, and he\u2019s got questions.<\/span>When Allison sideswipes a mirror off the door of a BMW, she meets Carter Reid, a Justin Bieber sort, once a charming, dimpled child crooner turned churlish, out-of-control, pop-singing bad boy. Allison accidentally becomes Carter\u2019s personal assistant after discovering him in the ugly aftermath of a drug-infused bender with his entourage, and it\u2019s her job to ensure Carter is ready for his Broadway debut, an adaptation of the Charles Chaplin 1952 classic film Limelight. <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/span>MYSTERY\/ SUSPENSE<\/span>Spencer Kope<\/span><\/span>Whispers of the Dead: A Special Tracking Unit Novel<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\nMinotaur Books<\/span>Hardcover, 978-1-2500-7288-7, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 336 pgs., $26.99; April 17, 2018<\/span>A pair of human feet are found in a Styrofoam cooler<\/span> in the middle of a judge\u2019s living room in El Paso, Texas. Another pair are found in a defense attorney\u2019s living room in Tucson. FBI Operations Specialist Magnus Craig and his partner, FBI Special Agent James Donovan, along with intelligence research specialist Diane Parker, form the FBI\u2019s Special Tracking Unit. They have a serial killer on their hands, apparently meting out vigilante justice.<\/span>Whispers of the Dead: A Special Tracking Unit Novel<\/span> is the second in a mystery-suspense series by Spencer Kope<\/span>, a crime analyst for the Whatcom County Sheriff\u2019s Office in Washington State. Collecting the Dead<\/span> (Minotaur, 2016) is the first installment in Kope\u2019s series, and while not necessary to understand follow the action in Whispers of the Dead,<\/span> it provides some references to prior events, including in the epilogue, which also tees up the third book.\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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<\/span><\/span>SCIENCE AND HISTORY<\/p>\nRobert Kurson<\/span><\/p>\nRocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man\u2019s First Journey to the Moon<\/span><\/p>\nRandom House<\/p>\n
Hardcover, 978-0812988703, 384 pages, $28.00; April 3, 2018<\/p>\n
Reviewed by Chris Manno<\/p>\n
If you could pick only one book to read that would place you at the epicenter of the daring Apollo moon landing program,<\/span> the Cold War and the legendary Space Race, this would be it.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man\u2019s First Journey to the Moon,<\/span> Kurson has achieved a fascinating and readable blend of both the history and context that comprised the world stage upon which man\u2019s greatest journey played out in the latter years of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 mission itself was the crucial leap forward that boldly catapulted NASA and the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the race both nations undertook to validate competing political ideologies with technical superiority.\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/holmes%2c%20searching%20for%20pilar_cover%20ts.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span>FICTION<\/p>\nPatricia Hunt Holmes<\/span><\/p>\nSearching for Pilar<\/span><\/p>\nRiver Grove Books<\/p>\n
Paperback, 978-1-63299-153-9 (also available as ebook); 320 pages, $16.95; April 10, 2018<\/p>\n
In stark, disturbing detail, <\/span>Searching for Pilar <\/span>confronts the grim crime of sex trafficking in Mexico and the United States and shows how difficult it can be for law-enforcement authorities to take actions to stop it.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This first novel by Houston writer Patricia Hunt Holmes<\/span> is \u201cinspired by real events and informed by experts.\u201d It takes the reader into the darkest heart of an inhumane underworld business.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Na\u00efve and economically desperate young women from small towns in Mexico, many of them teenagers, are lured to Mexico City with the promise that they will be interviewed for good-paying jobs. Instead, once they show up, they are drugged, secretly thrown into windowless vans, and taken by cartel members out into the countryside to secret compounds protected by heavily armed guards.\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nFICTION<\/p>\n
Glen Larum<\/span><\/p>\nWaltz Against the Sky<\/span><\/p>\nWalking Three Bar T Publishing<\/p>\n
Hardcover, 978-0-9966865-0-1, 400 pages; $28.95; 2016<\/p>\n
As you open Austin and Midland writer Glen Larum\u2019s debut novel, <\/span>get ready for a dance with characters who are caught in swirls of life\u2019s randomness, its chance convergences, and their own spur-of-the-moment decisions.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waltz Against the Sky<\/span> has echoes of mysteries by such writers as Tony Hillerman<\/span> and Elmore Leonard.<\/span>\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/dromgoole%2c%20glenn_headshot2b.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span><\/span>Texas Reads<\/span>Glenn Dromgoole<\/span><\/h1>\n>> archive<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\nLisa Wingate novel a best seller for six months<\/h1>\n
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/wingate%2c%20before%20we%20were%20yours_cover%20sm.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Texas author Lisa Wingate\u2019s novel<\/span> Before We Were Yours<\/span><\/a><\/span> (Ballantine, $26, hardcover) has been on the New York Times<\/span> Bestseller List every week for more than six months, much longer than the latest novels from such authors as John Grisham<\/span> and James Patterson.<\/span> Eventually it will come out in paperback but not anytime soon. Meanwhile, it\u2019s been making the top ten week after week after week.<\/p>\nI\u2019ve known Lisa since her early success with her debut novel, Tending Roses<\/span> (2001),\u00a0 based on stories from her own grandmother. It\u2019s still in print, and it remains one of Lisa\u2019s favorites that she likes to read at book events.<\/p>\nThe first of Lisa\u2019s novels I read was Good Hope Road<\/span> (2003), and I highly recommend it. It involved a tornado that tore through a Missouri community. A young woman rescued a victim, then made it her mission to sort through debris and reunite photographs and letters with the proper families.<\/p>\nLisa and husband Sam lived in Clifton, Texas, near Waco for several years before heading to Arkansas and then back to Texas.<\/p>\n
Before We Were Yours<\/span> \u2014 which I think is Lisa\u2019s best novel, and certainly her most successful \u2014 is based on a true story about a Memphis children\u2019s home in the 1930s that kidnapped poor children and sold them to wealthy families for a huge profit.<\/p>\nThe story is fiction, but the children\u2019s home was not. Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children\u2019s Home Society in Memphis from the 1920s until the scandal was fully investigated in the early 1950s. You can get more information about the home by Googling Tann\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
Lisa\u2019s novels are good PG reads, with strong characters but little or no bad language. I think one of the reasons that Before You Were Yours<\/span> has stayed on the best-seller list for so long is because it\u2019s a tough, compelling story but one you feel comfortable passing along to your\u00a0 mom, grandmother, or friend.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/stowers%2c%20on%20texas%20backroads_cover%20sm.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Texas stories: <\/span>Carlton Stowers\u2019s<\/span> collection of Texas stories, On Texas Backroads<\/span><\/a><\/span> is being featured this week as the 2018 selection for Mansfield Reads.<\/p>\nThe Mansfield Public Library every year encourages all its patrons to read one particular book and brings in the author to talk about it. Stowers will speak at the library at 7 p.m. Friday.<\/p>\n
On Texas Backroads<\/span> ($16.95 paperback) includes more than forty stories, essays, and musings by Stowers, most of them previously published in the last few years in American Way<\/span>, the American Airlines magazine, or other magazines or newspapers.<\/p>\nIncluded are such gems as a piece pursuing the far-fetched possibility that Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth actually escaped and made his way to Texas, a touching story about a special Christmas the author fondly recalls, a tribute to Ballinger\u2019s still-operating Carnegie Library, a debate about the origin of the hamburger with a humorous note about how fried potatoes came to be called French fries, and a tribute to the chicken fried steak at Mary\u2019s Caf\u00e9 in Strawn.<\/p>\n
For more information on Mansfield Reads, go to mansfieldlibraryfriends.org<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n* * * * *<\/p>\n
Glenn Dromgoole<\/span> writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n>> <\/span>Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Lit<\/a><\/span>erary Life<\/span><\/h1>\n* * * * *<\/p>\n
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<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/bookish-destinations-badge-2018-transp-ts.png\")
<\/span><\/span>2018 TEXAS BOOKISH DESTINATIONS<\/h1>\nCan you name this literary place in the Lone Star State?<\/h1>\n
Okay, one last chance at the prize, before National Poetry Month comes to an end April 30!<\/span><\/p>\nAdmit it: bookfans love traveling almost as much as they love reading itself.<\/span> Beginning March 4, 2018, Lone Star Literary Life will roll out #10 through #6 in our annual list of Top Texas Bookish Destinations, for readers who want to visit the settings of their favorite books, the birthplaces and haunts of favorite authors, and hot spots for book buying, readings, and other literary activity.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But throughout Texas\u2019s 268,597 square miles, there are also lots of out-of-the-way points of interest that we don\u2019t always have space to cover in our Top Ten pages.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Watch this space each week for a new bookish place that you\u2019ll want to add to your own travel list. Be the first to email us with the correct identification, and win a prize!<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This week, we continue with a bookish place that\u2019s located in 2017\u2019s #2 Top Bookish Destination. There\u2019s plenty of poetry in this literary-rich city, but there\u2019s a Poet Tree, too. Can you name the city? And extra credit for telling our readers the neighborhood or street where they can find it, too.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/span>LITERARY FICTION<\/span>Amy Poeppel<\/span><\/span>Limelight: A Novel<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span>MYSTERY\/ SUSPENSE<\/span>Spencer Kope<\/span><\/span>Whispers of the Dead: A Special Tracking Unit Novel<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n <\/span><\/span> <\/div>\n Robert Kurson<\/span><\/p>\n Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man\u2019s First Journey to the Moon<\/span><\/p>\n Random House<\/p>\n Hardcover, 978-0812988703, 384 pages, $28.00; April 3, 2018<\/p>\n Reviewed by Chris Manno<\/p>\n If you could pick only one book to read that would place you at the epicenter of the daring Apollo moon landing program,<\/span> the Cold War and the legendary Space Race, this would be it.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man\u2019s First Journey to the Moon,<\/span> Kurson has achieved a fascinating and readable blend of both the history and context that comprised the world stage upon which man\u2019s greatest journey played out in the latter years of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 mission itself was the crucial leap forward that boldly catapulted NASA and the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the race both nations undertook to validate competing political ideologies with technical superiority.\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Patricia Hunt Holmes<\/span><\/p>\n Searching for Pilar<\/span><\/p>\n River Grove Books<\/p>\n Paperback, 978-1-63299-153-9 (also available as ebook); 320 pages, $16.95; April 10, 2018<\/p>\n In stark, disturbing detail, <\/span>Searching for Pilar <\/span>confronts the grim crime of sex trafficking in Mexico and the United States and shows how difficult it can be for law-enforcement authorities to take actions to stop it.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This first novel by Houston writer Patricia Hunt Holmes<\/span> is \u201cinspired by real events and informed by experts.\u201d It takes the reader into the darkest heart of an inhumane underworld business.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Na\u00efve and economically desperate young women from small towns in Mexico, many of them teenagers, are lured to Mexico City with the promise that they will be interviewed for good-paying jobs. Instead, once they show up, they are drugged, secretly thrown into windowless vans, and taken by cartel members out into the countryside to secret compounds protected by heavily armed guards.\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n FICTION<\/p>\n Glen Larum<\/span><\/p>\n Waltz Against the Sky<\/span><\/p>\n Walking Three Bar T Publishing<\/p>\n Hardcover, 978-0-9966865-0-1, 400 pages; $28.95; 2016<\/p>\n As you open Austin and Midland writer Glen Larum\u2019s debut novel, <\/span>get ready for a dance with characters who are caught in swirls of life\u2019s randomness, its chance convergences, and their own spur-of-the-moment decisions.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waltz Against the Sky<\/span> has echoes of mysteries by such writers as Tony Hillerman<\/span> and Elmore Leonard.<\/span>\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Texas author Lisa Wingate\u2019s novel<\/span> Before We Were Yours<\/span><\/a><\/span> (Ballantine, $26, hardcover) has been on the New York Times<\/span> Bestseller List every week for more than six months, much longer than the latest novels from such authors as John Grisham<\/span> and James Patterson.<\/span> Eventually it will come out in paperback but not anytime soon. Meanwhile, it\u2019s been making the top ten week after week after week.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve known Lisa since her early success with her debut novel, Tending Roses<\/span> (2001),\u00a0 based on stories from her own grandmother. It\u2019s still in print, and it remains one of Lisa\u2019s favorites that she likes to read at book events.<\/p>\n The first of Lisa\u2019s novels I read was Good Hope Road<\/span> (2003), and I highly recommend it. It involved a tornado that tore through a Missouri community. A young woman rescued a victim, then made it her mission to sort through debris and reunite photographs and letters with the proper families.<\/p>\n Lisa and husband Sam lived in Clifton, Texas, near Waco for several years before heading to Arkansas and then back to Texas.<\/p>\n Before We Were Yours<\/span> \u2014 which I think is Lisa\u2019s best novel, and certainly her most successful \u2014 is based on a true story about a Memphis children\u2019s home in the 1930s that kidnapped poor children and sold them to wealthy families for a huge profit.<\/p>\n The story is fiction, but the children\u2019s home was not. Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children\u2019s Home Society in Memphis from the 1920s until the scandal was fully investigated in the early 1950s. You can get more information about the home by Googling Tann\u2019s name.<\/p>\n Lisa\u2019s novels are good PG reads, with strong characters but little or no bad language. I think one of the reasons that Before You Were Yours<\/span> has stayed on the best-seller list for so long is because it\u2019s a tough, compelling story but one you feel comfortable passing along to your\u00a0 mom, grandmother, or friend.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Texas stories: <\/span>Carlton Stowers\u2019s<\/span> collection of Texas stories, On Texas Backroads<\/span><\/a><\/span> is being featured this week as the 2018 selection for Mansfield Reads.<\/p>\n The Mansfield Public Library every year encourages all its patrons to read one particular book and brings in the author to talk about it. Stowers will speak at the library at 7 p.m. Friday.<\/p>\n On Texas Backroads<\/span> ($16.95 paperback) includes more than forty stories, essays, and musings by Stowers, most of them previously published in the last few years in American Way<\/span>, the American Airlines magazine, or other magazines or newspapers.<\/p>\n Included are such gems as a piece pursuing the far-fetched possibility that Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth actually escaped and made his way to Texas, a touching story about a special Christmas the author fondly recalls, a tribute to Ballinger\u2019s still-operating Carnegie Library, a debate about the origin of the hamburger with a humorous note about how fried potatoes came to be called French fries, and a tribute to the chicken fried steak at Mary\u2019s Caf\u00e9 in Strawn.<\/p>\n For more information on Mansfield Reads, go to mansfieldlibraryfriends.org<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Glenn Dromgoole<\/span> writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Okay, one last chance at the prize, before National Poetry Month comes to an end April 30!<\/span><\/p>\n Admit it: bookfans love traveling almost as much as they love reading itself.<\/span> Beginning March 4, 2018, Lone Star Literary Life will roll out #10 through #6 in our annual list of Top Texas Bookish Destinations, for readers who want to visit the settings of their favorite books, the birthplaces and haunts of favorite authors, and hot spots for book buying, readings, and other literary activity.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But throughout Texas\u2019s 268,597 square miles, there are also lots of out-of-the-way points of interest that we don\u2019t always have space to cover in our Top Ten pages.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Watch this space each week for a new bookish place that you\u2019ll want to add to your own travel list. Be the first to email us with the correct identification, and win a prize!<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This week, we continue with a bookish place that\u2019s located in 2017\u2019s #2 Top Bookish Destination. There\u2019s plenty of poetry in this literary-rich city, but there\u2019s a Poet Tree, too. Can you name the city? And extra credit for telling our readers the neighborhood or street where they can find it, too.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>SCIENCE AND HISTORY<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>FICTION<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>Texas Reads<\/span>Glenn Dromgoole<\/span><\/h1>\n>> archive<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
Lisa Wingate novel a best seller for six months<\/h1>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n>> <\/span>Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Lit<\/a><\/span>erary Life<\/span><\/h1>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>2018 TEXAS BOOKISH DESTINATIONS<\/h1>\nCan you name this literary place in the Lone Star State?<\/h1>\n
![](\"https:\/\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/sites\/lonestarliterary.etypegoogle10.com\/files\/description\/bookish%20texas%20022518%20sm215x322.jpg\")
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