LOSING EVERYTHING
By David Lozell Martin (Simon & Schuster, 201 pages, $24)
What a depressing title, eh? But it's true. In this memoir, fiction writer David Lozell Martin lays out how he lost his audience, his wife, his children, his health, all of his money and then some, his sanity, and his creativity (which he refers to as "the guys in the back row"). What's left? Not much. His life. And he very nearly lost that, too.
Still, this is not a depressing book, but a fascinating one. You watch his life fall apart, piece by piece, and then you watch him recover and put most of it back together again, with the help of his son's magic words ("I need you, Dad"), a bit of medication (but not enough to silence the guys in the back row), some ancient Indian secrets (sounds hokey, but he makes it plausible) and good steady work (not the job of his dreams, but a job).
You've read memoirs that cover this ground before, but Martin is a gifted writer, with a friendly, intimate tone, and you'll rush through the book feeling like he's telling his story to you, and to you alone. He says he hopes you'll learn from it. And you will believe him.
LAURIE HERTZEL, BOOKS EDITOR
Fed Up
By Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant (Berkley Prime Crime, 289 pages, $23.95)
Food-related mysteries are common these days. Most have pretty good recipes and mediocre plots. This novel, the fourth in the Gourmet Girl series, has the opposite problem: The story is enjoyable, but the recipes are not ones I would tackle.
Foodie Chloe Carter finds herself with a mystery to solve when a woman dies after eating food cooked by her chef boyfriend, Josh. Turns out, the food was spiked with a drug, but who spiked it and why?
Meanwhile, Chloe is helping her best friend arrange her wedding, which ends up being a madcap affair featuring a mean-spirited mother of the bride, gun-toting brothers of the groom and a purple-tuxedoed best man. The recipes are grouped at the end of the book, which I thought detached them from the story a bit too much.
Many were created by professional chefs and are way too complicated to entice me to try them. They include Champagne-Poached Figs With Heavy Cream; Butter-Poached Lobster With Yuzu Pesto Tagliatelle, Honshimeji Mushrooms and Shiso; and Mascarpone and Limoncello Dessert.
