When the days grow longer and the sun burns hotter, our reading habits change. We look around for a book we can doze over, one we can drop without regret into the sand or the lake, one whose plot we can still follow if we have, perhaps, been sipping a gin and tonic or walking away frequently to flip burgers.

Mysteries, novels and all kinds of paperbacks are ripe for summer reading: This year offers, among others, a fat biography of the Kennedy women, a new Tana French police procedural and a fictionalized account of the scandalous life of Louise Brooks.

Star Tribune readers have recommendations, too, primarily of old reliables; they'll be spending the summer with Anthony Trollope, Nancy Drew and Charles Dickens. Turn inside for three full pages of reviews and suggestions, as well as profiles of two Minnesota fiction writers -- mystery writer Brian Freeman and chick-lit-vampire-humorist (no, really!) MaryJanice Davidson. And hey -- don't let those burgers overcook.

LAURIE HERTZEL , Star Tribune

Read more

I'm not sure why Minnesota, a place known for nice, has so many writers and readers attracted to the dark and the deadly, but I'm happy to encourage the madness with some great summer mysteries.

"Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (Crown, 432 pages, $25)

Gillian Flynn's barbed and brilliant "Gone Girl" has two deceitful, disturbing, irresistible narrators and a plot that twists so many times you'll be dizzy. This "catastrophically romantic" story about Nick and Amy is a "fairy tale reverse transformation" that reminded me of Patricia Highsmith in its psychological suspense and Kate Atkinson in its insanely clever plotting. Unemployed and close to broke, Nick and Amy move from Manhattan to Hannibal, Mo. (birthplace of Mark Twain), where Nick grew up and where Amy, who used to be "overdressed in ... flashy little frocks" eating "food bites" as "decorative and unsubstantial" as she was, is suddenly "complimenting women ... on pickle slices wrapped in cream cheese wrapped in salami." At times our narrators' social commentary evokes Twain in their cynical slagging of everything from Manhattan hipsters to Midwest morality. But it's their decaying marriage, "the endless small surrenders" of it, and Amy's violent abduction that drive the killer plot.

CAROLE E. BARROWMAN , Special to the Star Tribune

Read more

"Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot," by J. Randy Taraborrelli (Grand Central, $16.99)

Bestselling celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli has previously dished the dirt on Madonna, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. Here, he serves up heaping helpings of gossip, family drama, tragedy and triumph by looking at the complicated lives of three legendary women who married into America's political royal family. Exhaustively researched and grippingly dramatized, "Women of Camelot" is the story of three women struggling to manage the impossible: being high-profile wives of three Kennedy men (John F., Bobby and Ted) who blended political idealism with philandering and personal tragedies. Colorful, engaging reading.

"Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Essays," by Simon Schama (Ecco, $16.99)

CHUCK LEDDY , Special to the Star Tribune

Read more

My summer picks for this year are books that reflect the tricky dance of family: "The Year We Left Home," by Jean Thompson, a Land o' Goshen honest Iowa story; "Irma Voth" by Miriam Toews (an award-winning Canadian author) about a plucky Mennonite girl; "Mink River" by Brian Doyle -- an Oregon coastal town full of Irish immigrants and native Americans (Oregon book of the year). The best is "Some Assembly Required" by Annie Lamott -- hilarious story of her grandmotherhood. They all give us course correctives on life's path.

-- Pam Kearney, Edina

I'm going classic this summer. I want to re-read "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens, which I've always thought of as a love story. I want also to finish my edition of stories by Robert Louis Stevenson; I'm reading "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" presently. The juxtaposition of good and evil in people seemed to fascinate Stevenson, as it does me. Some classic poetry is in the works as well. I will process again the intricacies of Shakespeare's sonnets and the relevant works of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In August I hope to go more modern again and read John Grisham and Walter Mosley.

Read more

MaryJanice Davidson might very well be Minnesota's most prolific author.

In 14 years, she has published 75 books -- mostly humorous sexy vampire chick lit (the popular "Undead" series) and a series of comic novels about a neurotic FBI agent with a split personality. Yeah, there are one or two e-books in there (including the how-to guide "Escape the Slush Pile"), but most of her books are hardcover or paperback editions, set in Minneapolis and published by the very respectable St. Martin's Press and Berkley Sensation.

Seventy-five novels in 14 years averages out to more than five books a year. How is that even physically possible?

LAURIE HERTZEL , Star Tribune

Read more

Brian Freeman finds inspiration in winding dirt roads, crumbling buildings, wind-whipped cornfields beaten by rain. He looks at an abandoned school and does not grow nostalgic about children grown and gone; he looks at the school and thinks, "Murder."

Freeman's seven bestselling novels of psychological suspense (his eighth is, oddly, chick lit) are set Up North in Duluth, in Wisconsin's rural Door County and in the Minnesota River Valley of the state's southwest. "I am not interested in urban themes," he said. "My heart is in the rural Midwest. I want to write books that capture that remoteness of the Midwest."

Duluth is the setting for Freeman's popular Jonathan Stride series, the first of which, "Immoral," was an Edgar Award finalist for best first novel, won the Macavity Award, and sold all over the world. (Another in the series is due next year.)

LAURIE HERTZEL , Star Tribune

Read more