For nonfiction, I am reading an excellent book that came out June 2011, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, who also wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats, later made into a movie, and Them, about fringe cults in America. The psychopath test, invented by psychologist John Hare, is a checklist of "attributes that psychopaths possess" although all of us have them to some degree, and psychopaths are excellent at manipulating people, so it's not exactly an infallible tool.  The unvarying condition of all psychopaths though, is lack of empathy;
           
                        "(She) was interviewing a psychopath once. She showed him a picture of a frightened face  and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them."

     Anyway the book is told first-person story style and is funny and interesting.



    Another book that came out about the same time, The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine by Alina Brodsky, is another first person narrative, fiction this time, by one bazinga of an old lady, set in modern day Russia. Actually she's middle-aged, but she keeps things moving, especially with her completely cowed daughter and her grandaughter. This one is pretty funny too, mainly because you can't believe some of the things this old bat does. Reminds me of some of Ruth Rendell's old ladies.

  I just finished a couple of very good new books this week. The first one, The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli, is a small town murder mystery told in the first person by one of the younger members of the Rand clan, famous for being local thieves, but never violent. One of them, however, DOES go on a killing spree, but is framed for an additional murder which someone else committed. Disentangling this is the story line. Needless to say the Rands are all very Damon-Runyonesque and amusing, especially to someone who's never had a break-in at their place of residence. Anyway, it's still an interesting, well paced book.

Next is Syndrome E, by Franck Thilliez, a French writer, very fast paced and interesting. Its starting point is a mysterious old film short that makes people commit suicide after watching it (shades of The Ring!). The assigned detective team is a psychologically-damaged older man and single-mother younger detective combination, fairly common, but they split up often enough to keep things moving. The translator seems to want to make sure he or she doesn't miss a single idiom, but otherwise it's excellent, and unusual.