My brother-in-law has recently become a voracious reader, and when we were visiting last weekend he gave me a couple of books that he’d finished. On of them was John Hart’s “The King of Lies,” which popped up on Publisher Weekly’s Best Books of the Year. They are professionals, so I will spare you my synopsis of the book and give you theirs:

Hart’s stunning debut, an exceptionally deep and complex thriller set in the South, compares favorably to the best of Scott Turow.

Now, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Scott Turow, so I can’t vouch for that comparison. But “The King of Lies” is set in the South, and it is a pretty complex story. I don’t read alot of suspense/thriller stories anymore,* but I there was a time when that was pretty much all I read. Now I mainly read board books about beluga whales, bears and the ABCs. But the allure of the board book isn’t what made me stop reading suspense; it was the similarities between the “thrillers.” They started to seem formulaic, and more often than not the ending didn’t come as a big surprise. “The King of Lies” did surprise me, though. So I liked it. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Oh, except this: There is some gruesomeness. But it’s about a murder, right? So it would have to be a little gruesome. But there’s grossness and violence beyond the murder, too. I could have done without some of it.

*Although I will be if my brother-in-law keeps giving me books because he loves them.

American Life in Poetry: Column 082

By Ted Kooser,
U.S. poet laureate, 2004-2006
The Illinois poet, Lisel Mueller, is one of our country’s finest writers, and the following lines, with their grace and humility, are representative of her poems of quiet celebration.

In November

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Reprinted from “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” Louisiana State University Press, 1996, by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) 1996 by Lisel Mueller. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.