24) Locus Award Winners - various (pub. 2004). Lots of interesting S/F here, from the late 60's up to the publication date.
25) Thyme of Death
26) Witches' Brew by Susan Wittig Albert. Interesting mysteries, but not really my cup of tea.
27) Chapter and Hearse by Catherine Aird. Short mysteries with several sets of recurring characters solving crimes after they're committed, sometimes without leaving one's desk. Very Brit-Scot in tone, long on deduction and necessarily short on character due to the short length of the stories.
28) After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove. A WW2 German combat officer is suddenly and magically transported to an alien world where he has to face his Nazi ethics instead of just blindly adhering to them.
29) Say Goodnight, Gracie by Cheryl Blythe and Susan Sackett. A fond look at the shared careers of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Fun read.
30) The Wrong Reflection by Gillian Bradshaw. The book suffers from a glacial pace and the distracting tendency of the author to hop from head to head inside scenes, but it was an interesting story.
31) The Chocolate Chip Cookie Murders by Joanne Fluke. The copy I read also included the novella "Candy for Christmas," which was both cute and heart-warming. If you can get past the idea that any law enforcement officer would, without any real protest, allow his sister-in-law (whose main qualifications seem to be her ability to run a cookie shop and talk to everyone in town) to trample all over an active murder investigation, the story works. The many included recipes are nice, too.
32) T2: The Future War by J. M. Stirling. Conclusion to a trilogy exploring what might have happened after the movie "Terminator 2" and ignoring the third movie. In my humble opinion, it is superior to the trite and occasionally silly third movie.
33) Good Blood by Aaron Elkins. Part of a series mystery involving a forensic pathologist and, despite its title, having nothing to do with vampires. A little slow, but still interesting.
34) The Big Over Easy
35) The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde. It's got to be hard work putting that many bad jokes and puns and nursery rhyme characters in a novel. And I'll never look at Shrek's Gingerbread Man in quite the same way.
36) Split Image by Robert B. Parker.
37) The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War by Phillip Jennings. A Vietnam vet who attacks the common perception of the US/Vietnam war with facts, figures, and lots of footnotes.
38) The Hotel Dick by Axel Brand. A murder in 1948 Milwaukee committed by a man identified as Spencer Tracy.
39) The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Thursday Next, a LitraTec operative, repairs the damage to "Jane Eyre" and defeats an apparently unstoppable foe. Similar to the Nursery Crimes books but grittier in tone.
40) The Big Book of New American Humor by William Novack and Moshe Waldoks (pub. 1990). A collection of cartoons, jokes, stories, and profiles, most of which are mildly humorous to laugh-out-loud funny.
