REQUIRED READING
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Viking)
It’s the Russian Revolution, as seen by the 1 percent. In the latest novel from Towles (“Rules of Civility”), it’s 1922 and Count Alexander Rostov lives under permanent house arrest in Moscow’s luxurious Grand Metropole hotel, where most of the novel takes place. The count doesn’t come out, but a colorful cast of characters comes in, including little Nina, the Soviet answer to the Plaza Hotel’s Eloise. An interesting exploration of social class, primarily the upper kind through the Stalin, and then the Khrushchev, years.
Hidden Figures The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly (William Morrow)
By 1943, many government jobs needed filling because of the number of American men who had gone to fight overseas. That’s when a group of black female mathematicians came to fill in at the Defense Department — which FDR had desegregated just two years earlier. The math whizzes took on challenging aeronautics work and helped win WWII. Afterward, they stayed on to help NASA in the space race. Watch for the movie (with Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe and Octavia Spencer) next year.
The Pigeon Tunnel Stories from My Life by Jon le Carré (Viking)
They say truth is stranger than fiction. And before le Carré (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and many others) was an espionage novelist, he worked for MI5, spending time in Cold War Europe, Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia and with Somali warlords. Le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, also writes about his dashing, fortune-squandering, con-man father. In other touching moments, he tells of a parrot in a Beirut hotel who could imitate gunfire and Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley. From a great writer, perhaps the greatest story of all, his own story.
Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf)
A $200,000 diamond ring hidden in a plate of hummus? That’s just one of the many scams that develops in Hiaasen’s (“Skinny Dip”) latest hilarious South Florida mystery. In other nefarious news, Merry Mansfield, aka Razor Girl, crashes into Lane Coolman’s car while shaving her bikini area — and it’s really a setup for a kidnapping. There’s also a company called “Sedemental Journeys” that’s stealing sand from one beach and selling it to another. It all comes together under the author’s skillful pen.
Lady Cop Makes Trouble by Amy Stewart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
It’s “True Grit,” New York style. Stewart (“Girl Waits With Gun”) delivers the second novel in her series based on the real-life antics of Constance Kopp, one of the few female deputy sheriffs who lived 100 years ago. With encouragement from her two sisters, Constance tracks a German con man through the streets of the Big Apple. The book’s title is inspired by several actual newspaper headlines of the time about the small number of women who worked in law enforcement.