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You may have noticed a few weeks ago that Neil Gaiman won the Newbery Award (yes, one R) for his The Graveyard Book. Here's what the committee had to say about it:

A delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing, the tale of Nobody Owens is told in magical, haunting prose. A child marked for death by an ancient league of assassins escapes into an abandoned graveyard, where he is reared and protected by its spirit denizens.

"A child named Nobody, an assassin, a graveyard and the dead are the perfect combination in this deliciously creepy tale, which is sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting and sometimes surprising," said Newbery Committee Chair Rose V. Treviño.

I can't add to what Ms. Treviño said about it, except to say that I read it yesterday and really enjoyed it.

If you're a CSI fan, you'd probably like Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series. He's a quadriplegic forensic scientist and former NYPD criminalist. There are eight books so far, and they're pretty good thrillers. In the ones I've read the killer has to be found by a certain time or even more terrible things than the murders will happen, which of course contributes to the suspense. The science can be pretty dense, and the murders pretty grotesque, but all in all they're entertaining.