Finished: The Widow (Barton) Creepy page-turner about the widow of a man accused of kidnapping and killing a 3 year old girl. :-(  When I read the flap of the book, it just indicated mystery, etc. I didn't realize I'd be getting into the story of a man who started off with pornography and escalated to having to kidnap a youngster. Anyway, the book does keep you guessing and wondering if the guy was really guilty, since he gets off during his trial! Told from many different viewpoints, the widow, the detective, the reporter, the mother of the missing child and the husband himself, the book goes back and forth in time until finally, by the end of the story, you know for certain that he did it. Just when they're about to re-arrest him, though, his wife, pushes him in front of a bus and he dies. It turns out, he had confessed to her a few days before, after four years of insisting he was innocent, and even taken her to wear he had buried the little body. So, the story ends with the detective finally able to give the mother of the child some closure. However, the story material itself was just a bit too creepy and depressing for me!

Finished: Honey in the Horn (Davis) Another Pulitzer Prize winner, but oh my, it's never taken me two weeks to read a 380 page book before! (well, maybe in high school or something, but not since I started this project!) Anyway, it's really not a bad book, just very descriptive, long, prose. The book is about settlers in Oregon, and this is apparently the only book about Oregon that has won the Pulitzer. The story follows a teenage, orphan boy, Clay, who has worked for a man and his family as a ranch hand since he was a young boy. When the father asks Clay to sneak an empty gun into his miscreant son, Wade, in jail, in hopes that Wade will attempt to escape and be killed, thus putting an end to the father's embarrassed misery, Clay does as he's told. Of course, Wade Shively is so feared by the jailers, that all he has to do is wave the gun at them and they let him go!! So, the father's plan doesn't go as hoped and then Clay must go on the run, away from the law, who now knows he helped Wade escape, and away from Wade himself, who goes after Clay for taking his horse and rifle when he goes on the run. As Clay makes his way across the Oregon mountains and down onto the Coos Bay coast, he meets a host of characters, from farmers, to ranchers, to wheat-cutters, to down-on-their luck settlers, to Native Americans trying to make their own way, to a horse-trader and his lovely teenager daughter, Luce. Of course, Clay and Luce fall for each other, but each have secrets they keep from each other: Clay, his part in Wade Shively's escape, and Luce, the fact that SHE is actually the person who killed the man who Wade was finally in jail for killing, not Wade. The underlying story is actually pretty good, but it flows along about as fast as the slow-moving wagontrains ramble through the harsh land. There are really lovely descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna, wild life, coast and mountains and valleys, especially if Oregon holds a dear place in your heart, which is does in mine! However, the book just dragged a bit! Clay and a few of the other settlers he's started traveling with do eventually have a confrontation with Wade which results in the hanging of Wade Shively for making another attempt on someone's life.  Ironically, they are wrong again and Wade only shot into the air, but Western justice is meted out. Poor Wade. Anyway, I'm glad I read the book, though I can't say it was my favorite. I think I'll slowly keep on my path of reading as many Pulitzer Prize winners as I can! Still slowly making my way through the bible too!