Finished: The Lincoln Highway (Towles) A beautifully written book about two brothers in 1954, Emmett, who is 18 and has just been released from a juvenile home for accidentally causing someone's death, and Billy, who is 8, smart as a whip both intellectually and emotionally. Their father has recently died leaving them with nothing but a small bit of cash after their family farm has been repossessed by the bank. Their mother left them years ago, when Billy was just a baby....but she mailed postcards for awhile, which their father kept from them. Having found the postcards now, Billy is determined that they follow their trail, along the Lincoln Highway that will lead them from Nebraska to San Francisco from which the last post card was addressed. Uncovering his Studebaker from the barn, a car he gets to keep because it is his by title, having bought it with his own hard-earned money as a carpenter's assistant, Emmett agrees. Not because he thinks they'll find their mother, but because he wants to get as far away from the small town they grew up in and because he wants them to start over in a bigger city where he believes he can make money working on refurbishing houses. Plans don't go as expected when two of Emmett's friends from the juvenile home show up at the farm, not having completed their time, but having stowed away in the warden's trunk when he brought Emmett home. Woolly, who just wants to make his way back home to New York for reasons we find out later, and Duchess, the far more nefarious of the two, who wants to make his way with Woolly, hoping to come into some money and to exact some revenge along the way on a few people who have done him wrong. When Duchess takes Emmett's car, and the money from his father that was hidden in it, and heads for New York with Woolly, Emmett has no choice but to follow him by hitching rides on boxcar trains until he can catch up with them. He leaves Billy with their kind neighbor, who'd already looked after Billy before, and his headstrong daughter, Sally, who definitely has a thing for Emmett, and heads off. Naturally, Billy finds his way to following Emmett and all involved, Emmett, Billy, Sally, Duchess, Woolly, and a few other characters they meet along the way, end up in a beautifully written story about following your dreams, doing the right thing, being kind to other people, being heroic, reuniting with family, reliving old memories, and, of course, in the case of Duchess, causing problems that they all must overcome. I fell in love with the honorable Emmett, the effervescent Billy, the no-nonsense Sally, and the tragic Woolly. Definitely a book that is going to have to push another from my Top 100 list! :-)  

 Finished: A Slow Fire Burning (Hawkins) Another mystery murder tale from the author of The Girl on the Train. Not as suspenseful as that one, this book is still good with many twists and turns and a few well-developed characters. When, Daniel, a young man in his twenties, is brutally murdered on his house boat, a handful of people become suspects...from the damaged, down-on-her-luck young woman who goes home with him for a one night stand, only to be ridiculed by him for having a limp; to his deceased mother's sister, his Aunt Carla and her ex-husband, Theo, who hold his mother responsible for the death of their three year old son ten years earlier. In the mix of things is Miriam, a fifty year old, socially inept woman who most of the town kids call "the hobbit". She lives on the houseboat right next to Daniel and she has seen every visitor who went in and out of his houseboat on the night he was murdered, including Laura and Carla. However...Miriam is the one who discovers Daniel's body and is also in possession of Laura's bloody house key which she lost in the argument she had with Daniel before leaving the boat. Miriam has brought a lawsuit against Theo, an author, for taking the manuscript she gave him of her kidnapping as a teenager by a sexual predator, and subsequent escape, and turning it into his own successful novel. So, she's got her own reasons for wanting some kind of revenge. Reading from the point of view of all the main characters, exactly what happened to Daniel and why slowly unravels in good fashion. Another good one from Paula Hawkins. :-)