Shelf Awareness for Readers for Tuesday, December 17, 2013


Poisoned Pen Press: The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

From My Shelf

Glad Tidings

The majority of you reading this are book lovers and supporters of your local independent bookstore. That makes you members of several communities. There's the community of your town or city, of which your store is an important part. Together with other locally owned businesses, your bookstore helps give your community a special character and serve its residents in ways no other businesses can. Because more of the money you spend at locally owned businesses stays in the community than money spent elsewhere, purchases at your local bookstore in a variety of ways support your local economy, schools, government, services, charities and other organizations.

You're also part of the community of readers who share a love of books. Like its counterparts across the country, your bookstore offers a range of entertaining, thought-provoking, instructive titles (as well as book-related items and, now at many stores, e-books and e-readers). Your store also hosts author appearances, sponsors book clubs and classes, and hosts other events and activities that enrich the reading experience and help maintain and expand the culture of books. (There's nothing quite like the opportunity to talk about books with other book lovers!) Your store's booksellers are some of the most knowledgeable book people in the world and can match your interests with books and help you to explore and discover new worlds of all kinds. They can also help find gifts for a range of relatives and friends.

So as you shop this season, remember the value of your local bookstore--and other local businesses. They're easy to support: just shop there regularly and buy many of your holiday gifts there. The staff will happily speak with you in person and help you find the most thoughtful, tangible, personal gift--a book!

Happy holidays! --John Mutter


The Writer's Life

Mary Kay Andrews: Creating Her Own World Order

 

photo: Bill Miles

Mary Kay Andrews started her career as a journalist, covering what would later become known as the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil murder trial. After leaving the newspaper business, she turned to writing cozy mystery novels, including the Callahan Garrity series about a former cop–turned–struggling private eye–turned cleaning lady. After 10 mysteries, Andrews began writing women's fiction.

Christmas Bliss (St. Martin's Press, $16.99) is her latest--her 21st book, and the fourth in the Savannah series--more adventures featuring Eloise "Weezie" Foley and her Southern belle best friend, BeBe Loudermilk. Weezie is an antique dealer who has a cheating ex, an alcoholic mother, a forgetful father and a gay uncle who was a Catholic priest. BeBe is a thrice-married restaurant owner who is now expecting a baby. In Christmas Bliss, Weezie is pulled in many directions as she prepares for the holidays and her impending Christmas Eve nuptials to her long-time love, a chef suddenly being wooed by the New York restaurant scene.

Andrews's novels offer an absurdist, comic slant on serious issues, where quirky characters merge with plots that are always full of surprises, laughs and heartwarming endings.

How did the Savannah books come about? Did you know from the start this was going to be a series?

Savannah, Ga., was where my husband and I started life as newlyweds--way back when. It's truly a place of my heart. Evocative, parochial and dripping with Spanish moss and Southern charm. I had no intention of writing a series because I'd just ended the Callahan Garrity mystery series, with eight installments.

How do you come up with the clever names of your heroines, especially those in the Savannah novels?

Weezie is named after the heroine of the Kay Thompson Eloise children's books, which I've always loved. I heard an Atlanta socialite referring to her youngest child as "bay-bay," which she informed me was French for baby--and I knew I would steal that for a character.

And speaking of names, your Callahan Garrity mysteries (published under the name Kathy Hogan Trocheck) have been re-issued under your name. Will you ever return to writing about Callahan?

I loved writing about Callahan and Edna and the House Mouse "girls," and I do sometimes miss them, so who knows? Maybe someday they'll reappear. After 21 books, I've learned never to say never.

You've delivered, on average, a book a year. How do you remain so prolific?

Fear is a great motivator. If I'm not working on a new novel, I start to worry that my readers will forget me and move on to the next hot thing. This past year was a two-book year, with the release of Ladies' Night and Christmas Bliss within five months of each other. Not a feat I want to repeat. Maybe it's the good Catholic girl syndrome that Nora Roberts talks about. You sign a contract, you deliver the goods. I always tell my agent I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Does your Catholic upbringing and faith informs your work?

I'm sure my faith informs my work--hopefully in subtle ways. I believe in family, in faith, in faithfulness. I want the world to be fair, and I dislike bigotry, gratuitous violence and cruelty. I suppose writing fiction is my way of creating my own world order.

If a character from any one of your books could live off the page, which one would you most like to spend time with and why? Is there any character you would try to avoid?

Mary Bliss McGowan, the protagonist of Little Bitty Lies who faked her husband's death in a boating accident, is somebody I'd like to share a drink with. I admire her gutsiness. Scheming, conniving females like Celia Wakefield, the romantic rival in Spring Fever, give me a rash. I'm always wary of women who distrust other women.

How has your journalism background influenced your career as a novelist?

Being a reporter teaches you to ask the hard questions and pay attention to the answers--not just listening, but watching. It teaches you the importance of story structure--beginning, middle and end. It teaches you there's no such thing as writer's block. And you learn the incredibly important skill of working with a good editor, allowing the give-and-take that can lift a so-so piece of prose into something special--or at least something that doesn't suck.

You're passionate about "extreme junking," the search for antiques at flea markets and estate sales--in real life and in your novels. Do you tend to keep things you find and restore, or has eBay become your best friend?

My mother was a junker, and as an impoverished child bride of 22, I learned that I could make a home with somebody else's cast-offs. I've been junking ever since, keeping what I love or passing it along to my grown children or even selling it in my booth in a gift shop on Tybee Island, outside of Savannah. I'm too impatient to wait on the outcome of an eBay auction.

Why do reinvention and the idea of "home" (literally and figuratively) figure so prominently as themes in most of your books?

Most of my readers are women, but I think all of us, deep down, long for home--for that sense of belonging, of being rooted in something, whether it's a physical place, or just an emotional attachment to someone or something. And reinvention is universal, too. Who doesn't dream of having a do-over in life?

You've had a long, varied and prosperous career. Is there anything else you'd still like to explore in your writing?

I joke about my evil plot for global domination, but sure, I'd like to try my hand at writing a screenplay and seeing my story on a big screen--or even a small screen. I've got a cookbook simmering at the back of my mind, and it would be really cool to write a children's book, too. So many ideas, so few hours....

What can readers expect from you next?

I'm working on next summer's book, set in Savannah, with a protagonist who is a wedding florist. Look for Save the Date in early June! --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines


Book Candy

Gift Ideas for Bibliophiles; Authors' Holiday Recommendations

Wrap it up. Buzzfeed featured a selection of "affordable and clever gifts for your writer and bibliophile friends." And Entertainment Weekly showcased 14 Hunger Games-themed gift ideas.

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Quirk Books imagined "six literary alternatives to the Elf on a Shelf."

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" 'Tis the season, as they say, to stuff your face," Flavorwire noted in suggesting "50 essential novels for foodies."

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What are authors reading this season? The Penguin blog features holiday book recommendations from authors including Charlaine Harris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott, Liane Moriarty and Guillermo del Toro.

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The Independent offered "the novel cure: literary prescriptions for modern ailments."

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"If you have a passion for books, a reading nook is likely a dream feature for your home," the Huffington Post observed in showcasing "our favorite nooks from Houzz."


Book Review

Fiction

A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks


A Permanent Member of the Family is the first story collection from Russell Banks since 2000's The Angel on the Roof. Each of these tales portrays people longing to connect with something, someone, anything--or, as in "Former Marine," to disconnect.

The eponymous story refers to a dog named Sarge, who is not part of the shared custody arrangement worked out between a couple in a divorce. The pair's three girls travel amicably the few blocks between houses; Sarge, however, is supposed to stay with Mom, but travels to Dad's house at will. One day, Dad accidentally runs over Sarge, changing the family's relationships irrevocably.

In "Snowbirds," Isabel prevails upon her husband to spend the winter in Miami Beach. Barely a month later, George drops dead on the tennis court. Isabel is a remarkably merry widow; her first act is to buy a convertible. Her best friend, Jane, flies to be at her side and, watching Isabel's new freedom, begins to question her attachment to her husband.

"Big Dog" starts with the great news that Erik, a writer, has won a MacArthur "genius" grant. The grantors ask him not to mention it to anyone until they have released the news to the press. When he and Ellen join friends for dinner, he tells them. Some of the fallout is predictable; Ellen's reaction is not.

Every story is thematically different; what unites them is Bank's deep insight into people and situations. Just as he masterfully depicts contemporary American life in his novels, especially Continental Drift, Banks's short fiction is relentlessly realistic, never cynical and always attentive to the human condition. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Discover: Twelve stories by Russell Banks, including six never before published, illustrate turning points and critical moments in the lives of ordinary people.

Ecco, $25.99, hardcover, 9780061857652

Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters

by Sam Thompson


Sam Thompson's Communion Town, longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, collects 10 stories loosely linked by their glimpses of urban life and the darkness of their themes. Thompson excels at creating a convincing atmosphere that's different from story to story. A sense of dread looms over several, including the eponymous opener, where the horrifying details of a terrorist attack carried out in an underground station by a group called the Cynics are mostly hinted at. It's clearly not safe to walk the streets of Thompson's imagined city at night, when the serial killer known as the Flâneur of Glory Part is abroad in "The Good Slaughter."

Two standout stories feature distinctive detectives. In "Gallathea," Hal Moody, a hard-boiled P.I., is hired by a woman to search for herself. He tracks her throughout the city, his pursuit impeded at nearly every turn by a pair of thugs known as the Cherub boys. "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass" centers on the Sherlock Holmes-like Peregrine Fetch, whose pursuit of a former detective suspected of murdering other detectives in ingenious ways, isn't quite what it appears to be. But not all is mystery and chills in Thompson's city. The narrator of the elegiac "The Song of Serelight Fair" meets a beautiful woman while working as a rickshaw driver; their love affair inspires him to discover his talent as a songwriter.

There's a veiled quality to most of these stories, and at times their connective tissue feels more elusive than explicit. If you enjoy the work of decoding, there are pleasures awaiting you here. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Discover: Sam Thompson's first novel offers 10 stories linked by their focus on some unusual events in a single town.

Bloomsbury, $25, hardcover, 9781620401651

Mystery & Thriller

The Lost Girls of Rome

by Donato Carrisi


Like a spider spinning a web, Donato Carrisi (The Whisperer) has intricately and stunningly crafted his sophomore thriller. The Lost Girls of Rome is a standalone novel featuring Sandra Vega, a widowed, 29-year-old forensic photographer convinced her husband was murdered after she discovers images he left in an antique camera.

In her search for answers, Vega follows these clues into the midst of a carefully kept, centuries-old Vatican secret: a group of priests, penitenzieri, who investigate the worst confessed sins of humans. One penitenziere has gone rogue, however, and is giving victims opportunities for revenge. Like her husband before her, Vega's discovery could lead straight to her death if the priest is not found and stopped.

"There is a place where the world of light meets the world of darkness," a penitenziere explains to Vega. "It is there that everything happens: in the land of shadows...." This is the atmosphere Carrisi has created for The Lost Girls of Rome, full of hidden terrors, optical illusions and flickers of hope. He expertly weaves various crimes together, making the plot complex but coherent and deceivingly strong. As he connects the various strands of his web, the final product is a striking work of art.

A few potential questions arise from weaker points in the plot, including an early inquiry into a prominent character, but the foundation of the story holds firm. Carrisi's web of words is enticingly beautiful and will seductively trap readers immediately upon entering. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Discover: Donato Carrisi's second psychological thriller proves that a picture can tell multiple stories--and everything isn't always what it seems.

Mulholland Books, $26, hardcover, 9780316246798

Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs


New Orleans homicide detective Cliff St. James and his partner Honey Baybee are back for their third adventure in Ed Kovacs's Burnt Black. The two detectives arrive at a Tulane professor's house to find two naked corpses, presented on an altar in a ritualistic manner. Neither of them is the professor, who's not present--and whose teachings involve occult practices.

More corpses appear in the following days, with victims exhibiting terror at the moment of death but no obvious signs of murder. The case takes on a sinister edge as unexplainable incidents start happening to the detectives. St. James isn't sure if the evil he's fighting is even a sentient being, but he knows it leaves behind very real dead bodies.

The story moves at a brisk pace, and the case keeps readers guessing. Kovacs includes just enough of the supernatural to make it interesting without alienating people who aren't into such elements. There's an X-Files-y, Mulder-and-Scully vibe to St. James and Baybee; he thinks otherworldly forces are possible, while she refuses to believe. Kovacs presents both viewpoints well and leaves some things unexplained so readers can draw their own conclusions. The ending seems rushed, with St. James doing something that seems out of character, but otherwise it's a solid entry in the series. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, crime-fiction editor, The Edit Ninja

Discover: A solid procedural with supernatural elements set in New Orleans.

Minotaur, $25.99, hardcover, 9781250020291

The Gods of Guilt

by Michael Connelly


Mickey Haller is back at work in The Gods of Guilt, the fifth Lincoln Lawyer novel from Michael Connelly (also author of the Harry Bosch series). When Andre La Cosse requests Haller's representation on murder charges, Haller approaches it with weary cynicism about his client's probable guilt. But then he learns who referred La Cosse to him: the victim, a prostitute Haller represented for years, and whom he thought had left the game. It quickly becomes clear this case is bigger than it looks, involving the DEA and organized crime and stretching back nearly a decade, and that La Cosse may be that rare thing: innocent.

At stake for the Lincoln Lawyer: not only his client's freedom, but also his relationship with his daughter, who has stopped speaking to him because of the results of an earlier case. The murdered prostitute, an old friend, plays an important role as well; Haller thought he'd saved her, only to find that he may have contributed to her death.

The Gods of Guilt is a gripping courtroom drama with strengths that Connelly's fans will recognize: fully-wrought, likable characters, absorbing action, sympathetic relationships and the exploration of right and wrong and the gray areas in between. The title refers to Haller's understanding of jury members: that they are gods sitting in judgment of guilt and innocence. These gods of guilt also sit in judgment of Haller's own choices, and The Gods of Guilt reflects Connelly's sensitive handling of morality and consequences. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Discover: The Lincoln Lawyer returns to the courtroom to solve a friend's murder from years past.

Little, Brown, $28, hardcover, 9780316069519

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis


Something More Than Night is a big, bold fantasy novel that mixes medieval cosmology, noir and trippy, complex ideas on memory, death and (the absence of) God into a highly readable whole.

The main character in Ian Tregellis's novel is an angel named Bayliss who's obsessed with noir, particularly Raymond Chander's fictional private eye Phillip Marlowe. There's been a cover-up in the murder of the angel Gabriel, and the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing... which could spell the end of the world. Molly is an innocent human drawn into the plot; some of the book's most poignant scenes concern Molly relinquishing her human identity and memories after her death to assume the role of angel.

Tregillis has an understated, graceful style, weaving grand cosmology, myth and a hardboiled gumshoe plot into a story full of narrative tension, gripping characters and imaginative set pieces that recalls Roger Zelazny or Neil Gaiman. The grandiosity and epic feel to his view of heaven and the angelic choirs is perfectly juxtaposed with the tough guy poses and noir obsessions of Bayliss--and even as the novel tosses out one idea after another, they never muck up the narrative's flow. Tregillis is a wonderful up-and-coming voice in the fantasy field who deserves wide readership. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

Discover: A hardboiled angel searches for Gabriel's real killer in a powerful noir fantasy.

Tor, $25.99, hardcover, 9780765334329

Biography & Memoir

A Story Lately Told: A Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York

by Anjelica Huston


With her dark hair, brooding eyes and exceptional pedigree, Anjelica Huston has always projected a cool yet sharp acting style. Her father, director John Huston, was Hollywood royalty; her mother, more than 20 years her husband's junior, was a model and prima ballerina. A Story Lately Told is an intriguing read that details an unusual upbringing split among her father's country estate in Ireland, New York City and London. While there are no mean-spirited bombshells, she details both the loneliness and perks of having a world-famous father (who sometimes walked around the house naked).

Huston offers a fascinating account of her charmed childhood (peppered with celebrities coming to dinner) and her rebellious stage. But all is not easy. She is devastated when she meets a half-brother she had no idea existed. Although she overhears her parents discuss their fear she "was not a beauty," she goes on to become a successful model. When her mother is killed in a car accident, Huston's anguish is deep--and here she conveys it in a compelling way.

The memoir ends when Huston is in her early 20s--so it doesn't touch on her formidable acting career or her relationship with Jack Nicholson. (A sequel, Watch Me, is in the works.) Like any great actress, Huston knows how to leave her audience yearning for more. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Discover: An offbeat memoir details the early childhood of the star of Prizzi's Honor and The Addams Family.

Scribner, $25, hardcover, 9781451656299

Report from the Interior

by Paul Auster


As we learn from the autobiographical impressions of his first 12 years in Report from the Interior, Paul Auster, best known for the epistemological noir New York Trilogy, grew up in South Orange, N.J., as a pretty normal kid, "obedient and well-behaved... [but] by no means a saintly child." This is not, however, your typical memoir. Auster tells his story in the second person and makes little effort to elaborate historical facts and instead writes from his "interior," focusing on moments that made an impact on his intellectual life: his parents' divorce; recognizing that he was Jewish and what that meant; the extraordinary impressions left by three rather diverse movies: The War of the Worlds, The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Nearly a third of the memoir is devoted to detailed discussion of how these B-movie stories fueled Auster's life-long sense that an individual's identity can be upended by forces beyond his control.

Auster digresses from his adolescent years to when his first wife, the novelist and translator Lydia Davis, sends hundreds of pages of their correspondence for him to vet before she donates her papers to a library. He annotates these letters--his real first preserved writing--with the older, second-person narrator's memories of the same times. To put a final trademark Auster question mark to it all, he brings Report from the Interior to a close with an album of archival photos and cinema stills. This new, somewhat odd Auster memoir adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle of one of our greatest writers. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Discover: One may wonder if we need yet another Auster memoir, but there are wonderful Austerian twists and ruminations here, making for a satisfying addition to his eclectic canon.

Holt, $27, hardcover, 9780805098570

History

A History of the World in Twelve Maps

by Jerry Brotton


Mapping is a basic instinct, argues Jerry Brotton: humans and animals use mapping procedures to locate themselves in space. Map-making, on the other hand--using graphic techniques to share spatial information--is an act of human imagination. It is never objective; the map is not the territory. And maps of the world are more subjective than most, embodying the worldview of the cultures that produce them. In A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Brotton, a British history professor, looks at world maps and the people who created them--and what they tell us about the time and place in which they were made. In the process, he tells the reader a great deal about how we view the world today.

Beginning with Ptolemy's Geography and ending with the virtual maps of Google Earth, Brotton considers maps and geographical theory from Islamic Sicily and 15th-century China as well as the more familiar worlds of medieval England and Renaissance Europe. He looks at different approaches to shared questions: how a map is oriented (north is not the universal answer), what scale to use, where the viewer stands in relation to the map and how to project a round earth on a flat surface. Along the way, he considers politics, religion, cosmology, mathematics, imperialism, scientific knowledge and artistic license. Each map is distinct; all have features in common.

A History of the World in Twelve Maps is global history in the most literal sense: 12 variations on a universal theme. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Discover: The symbiotic relationship between world maps and the cultures that create them.

Viking, $40, hardcover, 9780670023394

Art & Photography

Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton

by Cris Benton


In Saltscapes, Cris Benton, a retired professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, focuses his camera upon the southern end of San Francisco's South Bay--the site of salt evaporation ponds that are being restored to tidal wetlands and marshes after a century of industrial salt production. Intrigued by these landscapes in his backyard, Benton spent a decade researching their history, hiking the salt-pond levees and taking photographs. The earthbound perspective, however, did not do justice to his attempts to capture the confluence of snowy-looking white salt, marsh grass and mudflats. So he began to experiment with attaching his camera to a kite.

Saltscapes is a fascinatingly detailed account of how he refined the various prototypes that led him to master Kite Aerial Photography (KAP). Mounting his camera to a radio-controlled kite, Benton has photographed the region from heights of up to 300 feet. This unusual vantage point produces distinctive images that peer straight down into the water and the land to reveal unexpected, breathtaking color saturations, textures, shapes, details and form beyond what the eye can discern from the ground--images comparable to the abstract expressionism of Rothko (to whom the photographer himself pays tribute).

Benton's striking photographs visually engage our spatial sensibilities and illustrate exciting, fresh perspectives of a largely unexplored American territory in restorative transformation. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Discover: A man with a camera and a kite creates stunning aerial photographs of salt ponds in the process of being transformed back into wetlands and marshes.

Heyday, $50, hardcover, 9781597142472

Children's & Young Adult

Curtsies & Conspiracies: Finishing School #2

by Gail Carriger


Fans will welcome the further adventures of Sophronia Timminnick, which do not disappoint. Those new to the series will need the first chapter to get acclimated but will soon hit their stride in this second entry in Gail Carriger's Finishing School series, the follow-up to Etiquette & Espionage.

Now that Sophronia is ensconced in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy, the plot thickens. The floating school is about to travel to London for the first aether-borne dirigible flight. The other girls--even Sophronia's best friend, Dimity--are thrilled at the prospect, but Sophronia is suspicious (after all, "Sophronia's gift for understatement was almost as good as Dimity's gift for overstatement"). It turns out the heroine's doubts are well founded: there's a power play to control the patent of the valve integral to the dirigible's technology. Meanwhile, Sophronia also attempts to keep Dimity safe (from the likes of Lord Dingleproops) and hone her talents for espionage even as her classmates grow resentful of her skills. Carriger smoothly weaves in fashion vocabulary and eloquent repartee infused with the occasional barb and an abundance of wit. The author's mix of technology, fashion, friendship, romance and intrigue will continue to fascinate readers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: The plot-thickening second installment of Gail Carriger's Finishing School steampunk series.

Little, Brown, $18, hardcover, 310p., ages 12-up, 9780316190114

Paul Meets Bernadette

by Rosy Lamb


The artwork from newcomer Rosy Lamb is the main attraction in this story of a solo fish who finds love.

Saturated oil paintings capture Paul the goldfish's gloom as he goes around in circles in his fish bowl--big and small circles, to the left and to the right, from top to bottom and bottom to top. The dominant colors are gray, and Paul's movements listless. Once Bernadette enters the fish bowl, however, the colors lighten up. Paul and Bernadette make eye contact, and they investigate the sights outside their bowl together. The paintings become a graceful dance between the pair, as breakfast-bright colors and well-synchronized choreography convey Paul and Bernadette's enjoyment of each other.

Children will enjoy knowing more than Bernadette does, as she introduces Paul--in a series of paintings that show the views outside their fishbowl--to a boat (it's a banana), a "forest with trees of every color" (a floral bouquet) and funniest of all, an elephant feeding her babies (a teapot filling teacups). Some connections make more sense than others (a clock mistaken for a cactus may raise readers' eyebrows), but the bond between Paul and Bernadette is never in doubt. This may well be as popular as a Valentine gift between grownups as it will be a guessing game for young readers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A story of romance between two goldfish that doubles as a comical case of "mistaken identity."

Candlewick, $14, hardcover, 40p., ages 4-8, 9780763661304

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