Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay #46 ***

From Amazon: In Lindsay's third novel to feature endearing Miami cop and serial killer Dexter Morgan (after 2005's Darkly Devoted Dexter), the Dark Passenger, the voice inside Dexter's head that from time to time drives him to the Theme Park of the Unthinkable, inexplicably disappears while Morgan is investigating a gruesome double murder on the University of Miami campus. The crime scene, at which two co-eds were ritualistically burned and beheaded, gives even the human vivisection–loving vigilante the creeps. As the burned and beheaded body count continues to mount, Morgan realizes that the force behind the killings is something even more evil than his Dark Passenger. Though the macabre wit that powered the first two installments of this delightfully dark series (also a hit on TV's Showtime) is still evident, this third entry takes a decidedly deep introspective turn as Dexter is forced to contemplate not only life without his enigmatic companion but also who—or what—he truly is.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mill Millington #45 ***

From Amazon: Millington's debut novel is an outgrowth of his Web site of the same name, on which he has been posting, for the last year, comic vignettes about life with his German girlfriend. Predictably, it consists mostly of comic bickering between first-person narrator Pel Dalton and his own German girlfriend, the insouciant Ursula Kretenjeger. The couple lives in a ramshackle, dirt-cheap house in "an area of the northeast of England so dire that the government was applying for a grant from the European Union for it to be placed under martial law" with their two young sons. Pel is something of a slacker ("for me, half-heartedness is a full-quarter too hearted"), the bumbling head of an IT team at the local university library. After their house is broken into, the marginally more conventional Ursula insists they look for something in a better neighborhood. House hunting, like most of the other plot turns in the book-which include Pel taking over for his mysteriously vanished boss and becoming the courier for a Chinese gang-is mostly an opportunity for lots of funny sparring on every subject from whose turn it is to defrost the refrigerator to whether "cock" or "dick" is the better euphemism for penis. Overall, the comic material is uneven; some of it is overwritten and a bit obvious, but at its best, Pel's narration is side-splitting. There are no shattering insights about men and women, but the book never pretends to be more than it is: an entertaining and genuinely funny romp through the trials of coupledom.

To The Power of Three by Laura Lippman #44 ***

The three girls have been inseparable best friends since the third grade -- Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat, the beauty, who also has brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls, one so critically that she is not expected to recover. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart.

What transpired that morning at Glendale High rocks the foundation of an affluent community in Baltimore's distant suburbs, a place that has barely recovered from an earlier, more comprehensible tragedy. For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions -- but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else.

For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge -- and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager's uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than honest. What is she concealing? Is she trying to protect herself or someone else? Even the simplest secrets can kill -- and kill again if no one is willing to confront them.

A Corner of the Universe by Ann M Martin# 43 ***

From Amazon: Hattie Owen had been anticipating a summer as comfortably uneventful as all the others ("I just want things all safe and familiar," she admits), helping her mother run their boarding house, painting alongside her artist father and reading "piles" of books. Then Uncle Adam (whom Hattie never knew existed) makes a surprise entrance, turning everything upside-down. Hattie's mother says that Uncle Adam has "mental problems." Hattie's grandparents act embarrassed whenever he is around, and her peers laugh at him. The author authentically conveys the ripples Adam sends through this small town. The heroine is continually amazed by his outlandish antics, moved by his sudden mood changes and secretly wonders if she and Adam might be kindred spirits. Hattie finds adventure and tragedy as well as enlightenment as she "lifts the corners of [her] universe" in order to better understand Adam. With characteristic tenderness and wisdom, the author portrays the complex relationship between the sympathetic heroine and her uncle ("I feel a little like his baby-sitter, a little like his mother, not at all like his niece, and quite a bit like his friend").

Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward #42 ****

From Amazon: The secret demons of globe-trotting journalist Nadine, 35, form the core of this contrived but earnestly observed third novel from Ward (How to Be Lost). Badly injured by thugs while pursuing a story outside of Mexico City, Nadine wakes up at her estranged father and stepmother-to-be's Cape Cod B&B, under the care of the perhaps too interested Dr. Duarte. The unhappily confined Nadine reads a story about a local couple who are traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings: testifying will be the young, black woman who killed their white son, a visiting American teacher, in 1988. Told to rest by her bureau, Nadine decides to cover the story on her own. On a flight from Nantucket to Cape Town, Nadine finds herself next to the local couple, who furtively give Nadine their son's boyhood journal. It's not Nadine's first trip to Cape Town: she spent years there as a fledgling journalist, and lost her one love, Maxim, there; the soul-wrenching revelations of the murdered man's diary bring Nadine face-to-face with her own personal and professional pasts, and force her to make difficult decisions about her future.