What I'm reading right now is Madison Smartt Bell's Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime).

Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place is good, but not great. You get to go inside the head of just about everyone in town, and each brief chapter is a joy--particularly the chapters where you're in cats and labradors and beavers--but the author has an annoying tendency to overuse fragments. Small bursts. Often followed by more. And the quiet lyricism is a little too quiet and a little too lyrical.

All the same, the author is capable of dazzling writing, with passages as good as the one below popping up about every other page:

According to Helen Zebrigge [sp?], the intensive-care unit of the Upper Valley Hospital was situated on the fourth floor because it was closest to heaven. You didn't want the souls of the newly dead drifting through the nursery or, worse, the psychiatric ward. The emergency room was different--it had to be on the ground floor for two reasons. One: the elevator was fatally slow. Two: it was closest to hell.

I also read Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat. It's beautiful, funny, and full of some of the most touching observations on family, travel, and belief I've read all year.

Look up: esker, crucifer, breakfront, vetch, candent, presbyotic, marl, postulant, inhere.