Finished: Nobody's Fool (Coben) I will always read the next new Harlan Coben book, but this one was very slow to get started for me. It's the story of Sami Kierce, an ex-police officer who lost his partner, and lover, Nicole, a fellow police officer at the hands of an evil man who has been behind bars for 20 years. Sami is now happily married to Molly with a baby son, Henry. Sami teaches criminal investigation at a local night school and has quite an array of super-sleuthing characters in his class. When a woman walks into the back of the room during one of his classes, Sami can see immediately that it is Anna, a woman he met in Spain when he was 18 and on "holiday".  After a whirlwind romance, where Sami and Anna fell hard for each other, Sami wakes up one morning to find Anna covered in blood and dead next to him in bed. Sami reports it immediately to the police, who go with him right away to the hotel room, but the room is perfectly clean and there is no sign of Anna. His father advises him to get on an airplane back to the U.S. right away, and he does. Sami has been wracked with guilt all these years not knowing what happened to Anna, and wondering if he may have been responsible for her death. In the time that has passed, he has become a detective on the police force, put away various bad criminals, lost his aforementioned partner in a tragic killing, left the police force, married Molly and become father to Henry. When the woman, who he is certain is Anna, walks into his classroom, and immediately flees when he sees her, Sami starts down the path of tracking her down. This leads to a rather convoluted story about Victoria Bellmont, a local heiress to a fortune, who disappeared after a New Year's Eve party over twenty years before when she was just 17years old. She was never found or heard from again, and her family has been distraught ever since. When Sami finds out that Anna and Victoria are, in fact, the same person, he is determined to find out what happened to Victoria, how she became Anna, and how she could possibly be alive as either Anna or Victoria after all these years. Oh, and the man who killed Nicole has just been release from prison, and vehemently proclaims his innocence, so of course that story has to be thrown into the mix. A pretty good page-turner, once it got going, but just a few too many tangents for me in this Harlan Coben book. He's still my favorite crime author though. :-) 

Finished: My Friends by Fredrik Backman. It took me a bit to warm up to this book, but when I did, I couldn't put it down, and as usual with Fredrik Backman's books, I fell in love with every single imperfect character. He has a way of making you feel exactly what that character must be feeling and rooting for them. They all have their flaws, and do things that are questionable, but never with malice in their hearts and never anything to hurt someone. In this story, the friends are 14 year olds, each with a troubled home life, either physically or mentally. They are often bullied at school and feel like they have only each other to rely on. Every day they meet down on a pier in their fishing town and talk, and joke, and dream and goof around with each other. Ted, Joar, Kimkim and Ali. Every day as it gets to be dusk and time to go home, as they get to the parting point in their neighborhoods, each one shouts "Tomorrow!". It's their way of saying goodbye and their promise to each other that they will always be there the next day. Kimkim is the artist of the group and has a notebook full of drawings. When Joar sees an article for an art contest with prize money in the newspaper, he insists that Kimkim draw something and enter it in the contest. He just knows that he'll win. Kimkim doesn't have the confidence in himself that his friends do, and certainly not the support of his parents at home who just want him to excel and be "normal". As the deadline approaches, Kimkim finally draws a picture of the long pier that is their sanctuary, with the huge ocean all around it. He calls it "The One of the Sea". However, it's really the one about his friends, because if you look very closely, you'll see three tiny figures sitting on the pier. 

Twenty-five years later, the painting has become one of the most famous in the world and Kimkim is a renowned artist. In another city, several train rides away, Louisa is a child who has grown up in the foster care system. She has just turned eighteen, and is an aspiring artist. Of course, her favorite painting is "The One of the Sea". When she sees that it is to be auctioned off at a high end auction, she makes her way there and ends up on a journey she never dreamed she could have. Honestly, the story is heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. Every single person she meets along the way gets her closer to each one of the old friends, whether in the flesh or in spirit, and by the end of her journey she is literally and figuratively one of them. She's finally got a family to belong to. Just such a good, good book!!