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Fiction Sleazy manners, golden heart THE BOOK ARTIST A Hugo Marston Novel By Mark Pryor 272 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Mark Pryor returns with the eighth entry in his popular Hugo Marston mystery series. (Previous books in the series are also reviewed on this site.) The middle-aged Hugo Marston, head of security at the US embassy in Paris, is not your typical diplomat. Though he's a big, tough, pistol-packing Texan, (the author is an Englishman who lives in Texas) he possesses a formidable intellect, impeccable manners, and a passion for collecting rare books. He speaks fluent French and adores Paris and the French people. Before Hugo took the job at the embassy, he was a criminal profiler for the FBI. Not exactly a social butterfly, he does have a few good friends in Paris. His best friend, Tom Green, is a fat, foulmouthed, ill-mannered, and sleazy semiretired CIA agent with a heart of gold who refers to himself as a “freelance spook....

--> Fiction Secrets in the wilderness LEAVE NO TRACE By Mindy Mejia 337 pp. Atria People disappear. Some, like the Maine hermit of North Pond, Christopher Knight, drive away from society, park their car, and vanish into the woods for 20-plus years. Others, like the Lykov family of Russia, flee persecution and live off their wits and the few seeds they took with them into the Siberian wilds. Or, like Ho Van Thanh with his son, they flee the violence of combat and aren't discovered until years after a war has ended.  Author Mindy Mejia pivots off these and other cases of the disappeared in her page-turner of a novel,  Leave No Trace , told in first-person by her flawed hero, Maya Stark. The story begins at the Congdon Psychiatric Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, where Maya is an assistant speech therapist. A remarkable feat considering she was once a patient there, back in the days after her mother left, her abandonment issues, the acting out, and her ...