In “A Fatal Booking” (Crooked Lane Books, 2022, 304 pages), Victoria Gilbert’s third novel in her series “Booklovers B&B Mysteries,” we again meet Charlotte Reed, owner of Chapters Bed-and-Breakfast in Beaufort, North Carolina. Charlotte is a former school teacher and 40-something widow who has inherited this inn from her great-aunt Isabella. With a passion for books and reading, Charlotte remodels the old mansion, turning it into a literary lovers paradise. 

“We must unhumanize our view a little, and become confident / As the rock, and ocean that we were made from.” — Robinson Jeffers

Before proceeding to reading and books, a note on circumstances and environment.

I’ve said it before — our local authors are “going to town” these days, and in this case quite literally. 

Daniel Pink’s “The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward” (Riverhead Books, 1922, 256 pages) opens with a brief account of Edith Piaf’s “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” or “I regret nothing,” a song which includes the lines in English “No, not a thing.”

“Eleutheria” is the Greek word for “freedom.” It is also the reference name of an island in the Bahamas (Eleuthera). And it is the title and the setting for Allegra Hyde’s first novel (Vintage Books, 2022). 

To be human is to suffer. In the case of third-grader Michael O’Brien, that meant watching the apparent disintegration of his family: a father who left home and divorced his wife, a series of moves that eventually led to making a home in Utah, and the struggles of his mom as she tried to pay her bills and raise her four children, of whom Michael was the youngest. 

About halfway through “Blue Fire” (Kensington Publishing Corp., 2022, 326 pages,) John Gilstrap’s apocalyptic novel about a worldwide nuclear war, I paused and asked myself a question: “Given the state of the world right now — the sabre rattling of nations like Iran, North Korea, and China, the war in Ukraine, the economic and cultural devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the foolish fiscal policies of our federal government — do you really want to be reading a book about hundreds of millions of people dying while many of the survivors become savages?”

Novels that touch on faith and God have long intrigued me.

Having grown up in these Cherokee hills, I became interested in things native from an early age. This interest, spawned by my boyhood friends over on the Snowbird Reservation, has continued throughout my life and until today.