The Impersonator by Mary Miley

Vaudeville and Prohibition in the Roaring Twenties form the setting for this murder mystery in a small town in Oregon.  A young vaudeville performer bears a striking resemblance to a missing heiress, and the heiress's devious and unscrupulous uncle plots to use Leah to impersonate Jessie Carr, who reappears on her 21st birthday to claim her inheritance.  Leah has been on stage since her childhood, so becoming Jessie is no great challenge, but what if her secret is uncovered?  She could go to jail or worse, face the same fate as Jessie, who is probably dead.  Leah, as Jessie, has to fool her aunt, cousins and grandmother while exploring the family estate and asking questions to figure out the truth before Jessie's murderer makes her his next victim.

Burn by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

Burn takes up where Scan, the story of a boy's fight to protect his father's invention, the scanner that can tell human from alien, leaves off.  The scanner is now in the hands of the H2 (alien) forces, but the enemy needs Tate to decipher his murdered father's coded files on how to use the technology and save the planet. Burn is a rollercoaster of a book, with Tate, a teenage version of television's MacGyver, struggling to outsmart his foes while evading capture himself.  There are action scenes galore, betrayals at the highest levels in the Fifty (the humans), arson, torture, and discovery of a new, even more lethal threat to earth's survival.  Impossible to put down.  

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

Seventeen-year-old Lauren Woodman stops at a red light one day and sees an old flyer on a telephone pole asking for information about a missing 17-year old girl.  The assumption that Abigail Sinclair, the girl in question, is a runaway starts Lauren thinking about all the missing girls who are forgotten by their communities. Lauren begins to see visions of a former neighbor and babysitter who left home when she was 17 as well as glimpses of Abigail and her activities on the night she disappeared.   Ghostly images of the girls appear in her car, in her home and in her dreams.  Lauren starts to understand that there is something ominous about their individual stories;  clearly they did not all choose to leave home forever.  She knows she needs to do something to make the police and the girls' families more aware--to keep looking!

The suspense builds as Lauren puts herself in some pretty sketchy situations--visiting people related in one way or another to the missing girls and trespassing in a gloomy, isolated summer camp where Abby worked until, abruptly, she didn't.  Increasingly it becomes apparent that Lauren is obsessed and very troubled.  She breaks up with her boyfriend, shuts out her mother, avoids her former best friend, and starts skipping school. Lauren's voice as she tells her story is one of desperation--she knows she is losing the ability to distinguish between her visions and reality, but doesn't believe she can trust anyone to help her find out the truth about the girls who, through her, are crying for help.  As her relationships with her friends and family wither, her communications with the ghosts increase in frequency and power, telling Lauren what to do.  Lauren's struggles,  punctuated by the tragic stories of the missing teens, make this a definite page-turner.

Etiquette & Espionage

The first in a series, Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger is a great summer read, combining mystery and humor with a young ladies' finishing school in a Victorian steampunk setting.  The school in question is Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.  With rare exceptions, acceptance to the school is based on legacy. The  students possess special qualities that with the proper training they will become effective assassins and intelligencers.  Sophronia is one of the exceptions; she is a covert recruit, recommended by a family friend, Mrs. Barnaclegoose, who has observed Sophrina's penchant for getting into trouble--climbing, riding, hanging out in the stable--all decidedly unladylike activities.  The mystery in this book relates to a missing piece of technology that will make telegraph communication through the aethersphere possible.  Sophronia enlists the help of three classmates; a handsome boiler room crewman; the school's vampire, Professor Braithwope; and her mechanimal, Bumbersnoot,  to help her locate the missing prototype. In the course of the book she barely escapes from a werewolf and flywaymen, and must contend with her arch-rival Monique. The book is all plot, running a bit thin on character development and atmosphere.  It's all pretty silly, but fun.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Jacob's eccentric grandfather dies a sudden and violent death.  His last words to Jacob are, "Go to the island . . . Find the bird, in the loop. On the other side of the old man's grave.  September third, 1940"  Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children centers around  Jacob Portman's search for answers to the clues Grandpa Portman has left him. These include the instructions he gave with his dying breaths and the wild stories and odd photographs of children who, like Abe Portman, were confined to an isolated home in Wales during WW II.    Struggling to cope with the loss of his beloved grandfather and experiencing increasingly frightening nightmares about monsters like the one he thought he saw near his grandfather's body,  16-year-old Jacob resolves to travel to Cairnholm, Wales,  to find the home and its headmistress, Miss Peregrine.

Jacob's parents support his quest, largely thanks to the advice from his psychiatrist, Dr. Golen.  Only by following his grandfather's final wishes can he lay to rest his own demons--his grief and the nightmares.  In his narration of what happens on the island, Jacob appears as an ordinary teen possessing just enough curiosity and courage to explore the mystery that confronts him.  Finally locating the home where his grandfather grew up he sees, " . . . no refuge from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger."  Once he begins to explore this menacing structure, he is confronted with the possibility of alternate worlds and looming dangers.

The narrative is punctuated by the pictures of the unusual children from Grandfather Portman's past.  These actual photos add to the suspense as Jacob sinks deeper into experiencing the lives of these special  children of another era.  Miss Peregrine's Home is at once a mystery, a fantasy, and a coming-of-age story of a lonely young man who finds comfort and friendship in another world.  Highly recommended.

Alif the Unseen

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson.  Alif's comfortable existence, living at home with his mother while spending his time coding protective software to keep his many anonymous, freedom or pornography-loving  hacker clients secure, comes to an abrupt end when his beloved Intisar becomes engaged to a wealthy prince.  Unfortunately, the lucky suitor is also the head of state cyber security forces, which are going to breach all of Alif's carefully coded defenses. What's worse, the Hand, as he is known, has also discovered Alif's latest programming triumph--a keystroke logging program, which has the potential to unmask and destroy all of Alif's unconventional clients as well as Alif himself.  As Alif's friend, Dina, puts it, "We live in a city run by an emir from one of the most inbred families on earth, where a few censors can throw someone in jail for writing things on the Internet and falling in love with the wrong person. . . It [Alif's life]went out of control a long time ago."  (122)

When she decided to leave him, Intisar sent Alif a package containing a book,  The Thousand and One Days.  This ancient tome, the secret book of the jinn, is believed to contain the key to creating a quantum-bit-powered supercomputer. With the help of Dina and a deadly jinn named Vikram, Alif struggles to keep the Hand from finding the book while he uses fleeting wifi connections to do some manic programming aimed at destroying the Hand's power.

The book is replete with  fascinating characters who offer different takes on Islam and spirituality, on tensions between the haves and have-nots in an unnamed Arab country, on the differences between Arabs and half-castes (Alif is half-Arab, half-Indian), and on two worlds--of the jinn and of the Internet,  that operate out of sight of ordinary lives.  Fascinating, fast paced and totally satisfying. Don't miss this one!!

City of Veils

The body of a woman, violently murdered and possibly tortured, washes up on a beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The local police initially don't want to bother investigating, as the woman was probably just a non-Arab domestic servant killed by her employer. But forensic scientist Katya Hijazi is determined to find the murderer, and draws in Nayir Sharqi, a desert guide who helped her in a previous case. It turns out that the victim was a free-lance photographer, who pushed the boundaries of the conservative Muslim society while pursuing stories on the status of women and a possible alternate version of the Quran. Leila (the victim) was also connected to an American security guard who has mysteriously disappeared, leaving his wife, Miriam, isolated and fearful in a male-dominated world.

Katya and Nayir first appeared in Ms Ferraris book, Finding Nouf. They are constantly at odds--with mutual attraction vying with society's expectations and obligations regarding communication between the sexes and with the proper role for women in an Orthodix Islamic culture. In this second book the author has added another character, Inspector Osama Ibrahim, who also struggles to balance his progressive views on women with traditional expectations for a wife and family.

The mystery is compelling and the descriptions of life in and Islamic society and moving and insightful. I highly recommend both Finding Nouf and City of Veils.