Black Friday, Midwives, and Vonnegut

Soft Target by Stephen Hunter
Black Friday. America's largest shopping mall. Suburban Minneapolis. 3:00P.M.
Ten thousand people jam the aisles, the corridors, the elevators, and the escalators of America, the Mall--a giant Rubik's Cube of a structure with its own amusement park located in the spacious center atrium. Of those people, nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight have come to shop. The other twelve have come to kill.

Maria by Eugenia Price
Born in Charles Town, South Carolina, Mary, a skilled midwife, accompanied her first husband, British soldier David Fenwick, when his regiment fought the Spanish in Cuba. When Spain agreed to give all of Florida in exchange for the city of Havana, Mary (who will become known as Maria) and her husband were forced to relocate to the newly British garrison town of St. Augustine, Florida.

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields
Kurt Vonnegut remains one of the most influential, controversial, and popular novelists of the twentieth century. Millions know him as a counterculture guru, antiwar activist, and satirist of American culture. But few outside his family and friends knew the full arc of his extraordinary life.