I’ve been reading up a storm lately, as many as ten books at a time. I find this an unrewarding way to read; I prefer that something grab me by the neck and insist that I read it until I’m done. Maybe I’m catching my husband’s “disease,” and instead of defaulting to enjoyment, I’m reading with a critical eye at all times. I hope not! I love being devoured by a book, just as I devour it.

None of these books was bad; a few were really quite good. They’re all worth your time. Many would be excellent books to read in the hammock during a nice Indian summer day, or for a quick evening read after a trying day at work.

Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, trade paper reprint, 2009, $15.00): Rendell returns to her series detective, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, in this mystery of two long-dead corpses discovered on the same property, one dead for eleven years, one for eight. It seems unlikely that the deaths are not related in one way or another, but even identifying what is left of the two men, now reduced mostly to bone, is extremely difficult. The theme underlying Rendell’s puzzle seems to be feminism in all its guises: women who expect men to support them, women who refuse to marry because of the expectations they believe go along with marriage, women who put up with abuse because it is better than being alone. This theme breaks out from the unspoken in a subplot involving female genital mutilation, a barbaric – and illegal – practice still honored among some Somali immigrants to England. Rendell works it all out as brilliantly as ever, but the novel lacks passion; it is as if Rendell is simply going through the paces. I’ll read any Wexford novel I come across, but this one is lacking in the heat I like my mysteries to have.

Dark Entries by Ian Rankin (Vertigo Crime, hardcover, 2009, $19.99): My favorite comics series, apart from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, is Hellblazer, starring John Constantine. That means I snap up everything that deals with Constantine, apart from the Keanu Reeves movie (he was so wrong for the role I couldn’t bear to watch it). Now Ian Rankin, the well-respected British crime novelist, has written a stand-alone graphic novel starring my favorite sorcerer. Constantine has been called on by a television producer to join a reality show set in a “haunted” house, because the haunting has become real. It’s Constantine’s job to suss out the source of the strange events that are beyond the show’s control. Halfway through the book there’s a heck of a twist, making the book all the more compelling. If you love the DC Vertigo line, you won’t want to miss this. If you love Ian Rankin, you won’t want to miss this. If you like good stories in graphic form, you won’t want to miss this. Read it.

White Nights by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur Books, trade paper reprint, 2009, $13.95): The second in Cleeves’s Shetland Island quartet, White Nights finds Inspector Jimmy Perez once again confronted with murder on his small bit of turf on a remote island. While Raven Black, the first in the series, took place in the depths of winter when the sun barely rose above the horizon, White Nights takes place in the middle of the summer, when the sun barely dips below the horizon. The white nights seem to make everyone a little crazy, so it isn’t particularly surprising when a stranger at an art exhibition bursts into tears and claims he doesn’t know who he is. The mystery deepens when he is found murdered the next morning. The book follows the lives of a very small community and how they have managed to retain their privacy when they seem to live in one another’s pockets. What connection did this stranger have to them, and who among them killed him? Cleeves writes with both passion and compassion about her insular characters, making this novel as much a character study as an excellent mystery. I’m looking forward to the next Shetland Islands mystery, Red Bones, which just came out earlier this month.

Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France by Michael Steinberger (Bloomsbury USA, hardcover, 2009, $25.00): Michael Steinberger thinks French cuisine has gone seriously downhill in France, and that some of the most famous restaurants among gourmets and gourmands are no longer worth the mid-three figure bill that arrives at the end of a meal for two. His evidence seems compelling: chefs have become celebrities, and no longer spend much time in their kitchens, so that, for instance, Paul Bocuse’s filets de sole aux nouilles Fernand Point has become “a piece of tasteless fish submerged in a cream sauce thicker than plaster of Paris and flanked by a small pile of gummy noodles.” What a critique! Some restaurants remain wonderful – Taillevent, in Paris, continues to thrill even if it has inexplicably lost one of its prized Michelin stars. But raw milk cheeses are disappearing, fast food is becoming the norm, and chefs concentrate on building restaurant empires around the world instead of sending perfect plates out of their kitchens. Steinberger has written an elegy that you can smell and taste if you concentrate hard enough – and makes you wonder if that longed-for trip to Paris is really worth the price of the airline ticket any more.

Bad Things by Michael Marshall (William Morrow, hardcover, 2009, $24.99): Marshall’s latest paranormal thriller is not up to the high standard he set in The Straw Men. The reader certainly wants to know exactly what happened to Scott, the small boy who dies in the prologue, but Marshall takes his sweet time getting to the answer, or even any clues to the answer. In the aftermath of Scott’s death, his parents’ marriage collapses and his father, John, abandons his successful and lucrative career to become a waiter in a small town pizza joint, avoiding life as best he can. But John is lured back into the world when old threats become new again, and his family, such as it is, is once again in danger. Bad Thingss is at least 50 pages too long for the story it tells, and a reader familiar with Marshall’s work cannot help but be disappointed in the lack of tension wrought by this mystery. I recommend the Straw Man trilogy or The Servants (written as Michael Marshall Smith) above this book, and hope that Marshall’s next outing will see him returning to the sort of book that compels you to keep reading.

The Last Book by Zoran Zivkovic (PS Publishing, hardcover, 2008): I’ve been a fan of the Serbian Zoran Zivkovic ever since I read Hidden Camera last year. It’s difficult to get hold of his books, which are rarely published in this country and published in England only in expensive signed and numbered editions. But I read him when I can find him, and I’m rarely disappointed. Unfortunately, The Last Book was one of the disappointments. Much as I enjoy any story set in a bookshop, and admire metafiction, this one simply doesn’t work as well as Zivkovic’s other works. His characters here are types, rather than full-fledged; the deaths in the bookshop are never adequately explained. The ending is more deus ex machina than it is a logical extension of what has gone before. No writer has produced masterpiece after masterpiece without an occasional clunker. Zivkovic has definitely stumbled here.

I’ll have more quickies tomorrow.