The Book Show on WAMC

  Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels and was the 2006 recipient of the Ross Macdonald Literary Award.

His latest novel, Suspect, tells the story of Scott and Maggie - an LAPD K9 team nobody trusts--damaged goods who are wounded, scared, and suspect. Who work together to solve a murder and regain trust.

    In 1973 in the offices of The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, a young freelance writer named Tracy Kidder came looking for an assignment. Richard Todd was the editor that encouraged him.

After much success they have written the new book, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, which explores three major non-fiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs.

    Insane City is Pulitzer Prize winning humorist Dave Barry's first novel in more than 10 years, though he has been writing non-fiction best-sellers during that time. In the book, Seth Weinstein is on his way to his destination wedding in Florida.

Little does he know what's in store: Russian gangsters, angry strippers, a desperate Haitian refugee and her two children on the run from some very bad men, and an 11-foot albino Burmese python named Blossom.

1281 - Aired on 2/5 and 2/7

1282 - Aired on 2/12 and 2/14

  After eight commanding works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.

Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville - once famous for producing gloves and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by.

  Caleb Carr is the critically acclaimed author of The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, The Lessons of Terror, and The Italian Secretary. He has taught military history at Bard College, and worked extensively in film, television, and the theater.

    Michael Connelly started his career as a newspaper reporter, eventually working as a police and crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. While there, he covered the 1992 riots – a time and place to which he returns in the book, The Black Box, which stars LAPD detective, Harry Bosch.

At the heart of Rilla Askew’s new novel, Kind of Kin, are social and political issues that continue to rend the fabric of America: illegal immigration, conflicting cultures, the abuse of power, and the tension between faith and government.

Askew has written an investigation of how sweeping, agenda-driven legislation affects real, individual lives.

In the new novel, Love Is a Canoe, partly set in the village of Millerton, NY, Ben Schrank delivers a smart, funny, romantic novel about the fragility of marriage and the difficulty of repairing the damage when well-intentioned people forget how to be good to one another.

Ben Schrank is also the author of the novels Consent and Miracle Man.

Telegraph Avenue is the eighth novel by Michael Chabon who won the Pulitzer in 2001 for  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Martin Amis' latest novel is his 15th work of fiction. Lionel Asbo: State of England centers around a thuggish, yet occasionally endearing antihero, Lionel Asbo, whose last name results from being handed down at age 3 an Anti Social Behavior Order, a civil order issued in Britain against conduct that includes things like begging, graffiti and excessive noise.