What we're reading

Starting this month, the Browser, our round-up of what's making Star Tribune staffers' current reading lists, makes its debut on the Artcetera page. It will run in this space every Monday in a shortened version; other Browser reviews will appear on the Artcetera page throughout the week as space allows, to provide a steady stream of reviews from our avid newsroom readers. In this installment: a suave thriller, a family drama and an engaging mystery with a dose of social commentary.

JUDY ARGINTEANU, Interim books editor

The Lemur

By Benjamin Black (Picador, 144 pages, $13)

Booker Prize-winner John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, has delivered a slim but sophisticated thriller, a dry martini melding the ennui and fear of midlife. John Glass, once a well-respected journalist, has married very well and dulled his reporter's instincts in the process. Where he once covered big events -- the troubles in Ireland, Tiananmen Square -- he's lost his edge. Instead he's accepted a million-dollar commission to write a biography of his wife's father, a communications-industry honcho with a past in the CIA. Trapped between compromising what's left of his standards and displeasing his in-laws, Glass hires a researcher to do the necessary investigative work. Before long, the lanky computer geek he calls the Lemur has been shot dead. Yanked from his fog, Glass must figure out which family secrets the Lemur discovered and who wanted to keep them hidden before he himself becomes the patsy. Like an updated "Maltese Falcon," this crime story is full of intrigue, crisp dialogue and world-weary characters, including a cameo by film legend John Huston. For readers, Glass' predicament is the perfect summer escape.

KATHE CONNAIR, FEATURES COPY AND LAYOUT EDITOR

Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage (Viking, 352 pages, $24.95)

Seems like everyone in this novel, set at an elite private school in the Berkshires, has a secret. The adults have messy lives they want to keep from their children and from one another; the children have sexual and drug-related experiences they want to keep from their parents and teachers. The reader knows all, and senses that a big unraveling of these lives is coming. Unravel they do in an extremely fast-paced ending; unfortunately, it comes after a somewhat plodding beginning and middle. The plot revolves around Willa Golding, whose drug-addicted parents gave her up for adoption as an infant. Years later, her biological father, Nate Gallagher, now sober, gets a job at her school to observe her from afar and find closure. Through a combination of poor choices and lousy circumstances, Willa's life ends up on the line. Will her two fathers be able to set aside their own secrets and jealousy to save her? I was curious about how the story would end, but the book's cast of unlikable characters made it hard to care all that much.

JUDY ROMANOWICH SMITH, NEWS DESIGNER

WHAT WAS LOST

by Catherine O'Flynn (Holt Paperbacks, 256 pages, $14)

In 1984, 10-year-old Kate, accompanied by the book "How to Be a Detective," a meticulously kept notebook and Mickey the toy monkey ("circumspect, as usual"), regularly stakes out the new Green Oaks mall, which rose where factories once stood in the post-industrial town of Birmingham, England. On the day of her entrance exam to a prestigious school, she disappears. Nineteen years later, Lisa, the unhappy "duty manager" at Your Music, finds a dusty stuffed monkey in the mall's back corridors, soon after Kurt the security guard thinks he sees a little girl with a monkey in her bag on the monitor late one night. They team up to rescue the child -- and themselves. O'Flynn weaves a taut, fascinating tale of these people and their surprising relationships to one another. She also offers a scathing critique of the "pointless pursuit" of consumerism in this darkly witty mystery.

MARCI SCHMITT, FEATURES LAYOUT EDITOR