Reviews: 'Night School,' by Lee Child, and 'Firewood Happens,' by Mike Lein

Perennial bestselling author Lee Child delivers another timely tour de force with "Night School." The taut thriller is textbook Child: fast-paced and topical with a "ripped from the headlines" feel. And while the book delivers whether you're a longtime reader or new to the English author, for Child's legions of fans, "Night School" offers a special treat.

This novel jumps back to 1996, when Jack Reacher is still working as a military policeman in the Army. The story opens with the powerhouse investigator and two others tasked with tracking a jihadist sleeper cell in Hamburg, Germany. From the opening pages, "Night School" bounces between continents and time zones and delivers classic Lee Child. Highly recommended.

COLLEEN KELLY

For 32 years, Mike Lein worked as an environmental services manager for Carver County, so he's attuned to the natural world around him. After touring the cabin of the late Ely author and Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness champion Sigurd Olson, he wondered if he could put his own observations into words, particularly as he was building a cabin near Nevis, Minn. He can. The result is a series of short essays that cannot help but strike chords with many folks who love to hunt, fish or just sit on a lakeshore with an appropriate beverage.

These essays are sweet, in the best way, bolstered by humor, knowledge and, perhaps most important, a notable absence of ego and the dreaded "deep thoughts."

Lein explains why his love of hunting is difficult to explain, but that it's neither a casual activity nor a passion to kill. In the poignant "Damn Dogs," he gently curses good dogs for their too-short lives. Hearing the first coyotes' hair-raising howls of April is "a reminder of just how alive we are after the long winter."

Lein offers kinship here, the sort of kinship he haplessly seeks from locals who unfailingly suss him out as one of the "cabin people." But that's OK, he writes. He has a cabin, a deck, a dog and an appreciation for small moments. Oh, and firewood.

KIM ODE