Reading Recommendations: Very Bad Men, a novel, Harry Dolan.

Antony Lark has drawn up a list of names-Terry Dawtrey, Sutton Bell, Henry Kormoran. To his eyes, the names grow red on the page. They move. They breathe. Dawtrey is in prison; Bell has a wife and daughter and a good job; Kormoran lives alone. They have little in common except that seventeen years ago they were involved in a notorious crime; the robbery of the Great Lakes Bank. Now Anthony Lark is hunting them, and he won't stop until every one of them is dead.

David Loogan is living in Ann Arbor with Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her daughter, Sarah. He's settled into a quiet routine as editor of the mystery magazine Gray Streets, until one day he finds an emvelope outside his office door. The manuscript inside begins with a deadly hook: I Killed Henry Kormoran.

Soon both David and Elizabeth are drawn into Anthony Lark's violent world. As Elizabeth works to track Lark down and uncover his motives, David befriends Lucy Navarro, a tabloid reporter with a crazy theory about the case, a theory that threatens to implicate some very powerful people. When Lucy disappears without a trace, David decides her theory may not be so crazy after all.

This one is hard to put aside.

And, Heart's Aglow

The Vandermarks' have always found their strength in their family, but when racial tensions escalate in their community and the future of their business grows tentative, Deborah soon finds that the bonds that unite them will be tested.

Ever the matchmaker, Deborah discovers she can't ignore the arrival of the spit-fire daughter of the local pastor, nor can her brother. Could this be the woman to claim his heart, or is God calling him in a different direction? Is love in the air for her mother as well?

And, Just one Riot, Episodes of Texas Rangers in the 20th Century, Ben Proctor

The Texas Rangers! Emotions evoked by these words run the gamut, from undying admiration and respect to fear and hatred.

John Salmon "Rip" Ford, an early Ranger captain who fought the Comanches to a stand still, described the Rangers in this manner: "They ride like Mexicans, trail like Indians, shoot like Tennesseans, and fight like the devil."

Ben Proctor, veteran Texas historian, takes up where the late writer Prescott Webb, noted historian of the frontier, including the Texas Rangers, left off. Just one Riot, the famous "one liner" from Ranger Capt. Bill McDonald, chronicles episodes of the Rangers in the twentieth century.

While the book covers the primary actors in the Rangers drama, it does not propose to be a "definitive" history of the Ranger for the past near century. Beginning with Capt. McDonalds handling of the Riot of Black Soldiers in Browns-ville, he includes Red Burton and the Ku Klux Klan, Leo Bishop and the San Augustine crime wave, Clint Peoples, and the "crazy man," and Bob Crowder and the Rusk Hospital Riot.

The last and largest chapter is reserved for the inmate riot at the "The Walls" in Huntsville, led by convicted murderer and drug Kingpin Fred Gomez Carrasco. The author, who interviewed most of the participants, including the hostages, has composed a step-by-step dramatic over view of these days of horror.

From the Texas Bookshelves. See you at Rylander