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Hi Donna:

A few possibles . . . I haven't read any of them yet. I picked them up from Annie's Book Stop and they seemed like possible CHAT books.

The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne: This taut psychological drama by Orange Prizewinner Berne (A Crime in the Neighborhood) unfolds as San Francisco freelance writer Cynthia Fiske acquiesces to her maternal older sister, Frances, and attends the Thanksgiving family reunion Frances is hosting at her perfectly restored Colonial home in Concord, Mass. Cynthia believes her father, now 82, murdered their invalid mother with an overdose of pills when Cynthia was 13, and she has no wish to ever see him again. Within months after their mother died, their father packed Frances and Cynthia off to boarding school and married the much younger Ilse, a graduate student who worked as part-time tutor to Frances. But now he's suffered a stroke. Ilse is divorcing him, and the family is placing him in a home. Tension is high by the time the assorted guests, including Frances's complicated teenage daughters, her mysterious husband and the speech-impaired patriarch, are called to Frances's table, and it doesn't take much to fan the first flares of anger into the inevitable conflagration. Berne takes an inherently dramatic conflictone sister's intention to obfuscate the hard truths of the past vs. another's determination to drag them under a spotlight and ratchets up the stakes with astute observation and narrative cunning.

The Lucifer Gospel by Paul Christopher: Evil lives forever. Archaeologist Finn Ryan and pilot Virgil Hilts are scouring the Sahara for the long-lost tomb of an Apostle when they stumble upon signs of a decades-old murder, along with an ancient Roman medallion bearing the infamous name of a fallen archangel. But this relic is only the first piece of an enigmatic puzzle that will take Finn and Virgil across the globe from the sinister ruins of an ancient monastery to the wreck of a sunken ship in the Caribbean, to find a truth that might shake the foundations of history-or see them dead.

A Painted House by John Grisham: As the author is quick to note, this novel includes "not a single lawyer, dead or alive," and readers will search in vain for the kind of lowlife machinations that have been his stock-in-trade. Instead, Grisham has delivered a quieter, more contemplative story, set in rural Arkansas in 1952. It's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and "hill people" to pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But it's backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator, Luke: "I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice."
What's more, tensions begin to simmer between the Mexicans and the hill people, one of whom has a penchant for bare-knuckles brawling. This leads to a brutal murder, which young Luke has the bad luck to witness. At this point--with secrets, lies, and at least one knife fight in the offing--the plot begins to take on that familiar, Grisham-style momentum. Still, such matters ultimately take a back seat in A Painted House to the author's evocation of time and place. This is, after all, the scene of his boyhood, and Grisham waxes nostalgic without ever succumbing to deep-fried sentimentality.

Well since you don't have the book yet, I suggest next Tuesday.

Any other takers?????

Sorry I missed chat yesterday. I had a migraine and just couldn't make it. Let me know what page for next week.